Emmett J. Scott : Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine

Built upon fifty years of research, Maceo C. Dailey’s Emmett J. Scott offers fascinating detail by describing Scott’s role in promoting the Tuskegee Institute. Before his 2015 death, Dailey had nearly singular access to the Scott papers at Morgan State University, which have been officially closed for decades. Readers will finally be exposed to Scott’s behind-the-scenes contributions to racial uplift and will see his influential role in advancing not only the Tuskegee Institute but also the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Editors Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson Jr. lend their own expertise in bringing Dailey’s lifetime project to fruition. Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, a close friend of Dailey’s, provides a timely foreword. Former Black Panther Party chairwoman Elaine Brown, Scott’s granddaughter, reflects on his impact and her relationship with the Scott family in the afterword.

Taken together, this work of biography is an impressive reference and an essential endeavor of recovery, one that restores to prominence the life and legacy of Emmett J. Scott.

Will Guzmán is Assistant Vice Chancellor of Community Engagement and International Affairs at North Carolina Central University in Durham. He has published The Hill We Climbed: Prairie View A&M University (2026), Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine (2023), Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism (2015), and Landmark & Legacies: A Guide to Tallahassee's African American Heritage (2000).