Leo Scott, Sr.

Lake Providence

He was raised in Lake Providence, up in East Carroll Parish, through the 1920s and 1930s. That was cotton country in the Depression, and it held very little future for a young Black man with ambition. He came down to New Orleans looking for better work and did not find it.

West

So he got on a train and rode it all the way to Washington State. When he got there he told them he was older than he was — old enough to hire — and they put him to work driving crews of men back and forth across the job sites.

He lived in Seattle in the years when its music scene was one of the best in the country. His neighborhood turned out musicians, a young Quincy Jones among them, and Leo made a point of seeing everybody who came through town.

Then he was injured on the job. The injury did not disqualify him in the eyes of the United States military, which took him anyway and sent him into the Second World War. That same injury cut his term short. He was honorably discharged.

The Sea

Years later he was offered a way to see the world again, this time as a cook aboard a merchant vessel. He took it, and it rearranged how he understood the world. He was in Cape Town in the 1960s, riding past a prison, when they told him Nelson Mandela was being held inside. He carried that one for the rest of his life.

The Refinery

He came home to New Orleans and went to work at the Domino Sugar refinery, where he stayed for decades. He rose through the union to its presidency, and he used the office. He pushed to desegregate the plant at a time when doing so put a man's safety and his paycheck genuinely at risk. When the effort stalled locally, he went over every head in the building and appealed directly to the company's owners in New York — and persuaded them to come down to New Orleans and answer for it themselves.

He understood that pay follows training, so he fought for Black workers to get the technical instruction that qualified a man for the better jobs. And he helped build and run the refinery's credit union, which is how a great many families around that plant bought homes, fixed roofs, and covered what had to be covered. Most of that work was unpaid, done on nights and weekends at his own kitchen table.

Mr. Leo

He never finished high school. He taught himself instead, including a correspondence course in radio and television repair that made him the man the whole neighborhood brought a broken set to. They called him Mr. Leo. He sponsored a men's softball team and put the shop's name across the jerseys: Leo TVs.

The Family

He was a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, and a great-great-grandfather, and he spent his retirement in the middle of all of them. He took the grandchildren traveling, showing them the world and how much of it had changed since he first went out looking at it. He kept the great-grandchildren entertained and was, depending on the day and what was called for, the chef or Santa Claus.

He had a warm heart and a hard eye for getting things done. Faith and perseverance kept him upright. He was handed a great many difficult days, and if you asked him about a single one of them, he would tell you the same thing.

“I never had a hard day.”

— Leo Scott, Sr.