Inside Story: Remembering William Alexander Scott III

Editor's note: This story first appeared in the March 2025 issue of Chess Life magazine, and is re-published here along with this collection of William A. Scott, III's games (including 47 additional games).

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When William A. Scott III arrived in Durham, North Carolina, to play in the 1950 Southern Chess Association (SCA) Championship, the man who had invited him — US Chess Federation Vice President Marshall Southern, of Knoxville, Tennessee — met him with some bad news: Some SCA members from Florida and Scott’s home state of Georgia were protesting his appearance after learning Scott was African American.

Southern had extended the invitation after Scott had played in a pair of Tennessee tournaments earlier in the year without incident. But Southern had clearly underestimated a deep vein of racism lodged within the SCA — the strongest chess organization in the segregated South. A segregationist faction, led by SCA Secretary Major John Broadus Holt, threatened to withdraw, and prevailed upon the host hotel to bar Scott from the premises, even though a majority of players, including all the younger ones, voted to let Scott play. Neither Southern nor the host club took a stand for Scott.

Like every African American in the South, Scott knew that his appearance would be controversial, divisive, even potentially violent. Because of Jim Crow, he knew what could happen to Black persons who tried to cross the color line. So Scott withdrew, but his quest to integrate tournaments did not end there.

It is difficult to imagine today how much courage it took Scott to accept the invitation. No one would have blamed him if he had stuck to safer tournament venues, or kept to his all-Black Metropolitan Chess Club, in Atlanta. What led Scott to cross the color line again and again until chess organizations in the South desegregated? We can trace his motivation to an indelible experience in his past, one which has never been related in full.

William Alexander Scott III (1923–1992) was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. His father founded the Atlanta Daily World, the nation’s oldest daily Black newspaper. The son got an early start, working as a newspaper delivery boy, cleaner, sports statistician, and photographer. In January 1943, while a student at Morehouse College, Scott was drafted into the U. S. Army, at first posted to Tuskegee, Alabama.

Scott shortly after his Army induction in 1943 (All photos courtesy of http://georgiajourneys.kennesaw.edu/)

In December, he joined 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, and he was sent to the European Theatre in the summer of 1944. Just before he shipped out, he married his childhood sweetheart.

Scott and Marian Willis Scott on their wedding day in 1944

Scott was deployed to Luxemburg during the Battle of the Bulge as part of General Patton’s 3rd Army. He worked in his battalion’s Intelligence Section as a reconnaissance sergeant, photographer, camoufleur, and part-time historian. They pushed across Germany early in 1945 as the Axis forces retreated.

In an extensive interview with Kathy Solomon at Emory University in 1981, Scott recalled, “I remember the day — clear and sunny — riding in a convoy into Eisenach, Germany, on April 11, 1945, as World War II was ending, and a 3rd Army courier delivering a message to us to continue on to a concentration camp.” That was Buchenwald, and what the 22-year-old Scott saw that day changed him.

Scott (L) and Leon Bass at Camp McCain in 1944

Although the battalion had been warned about conditions, Scott said, “We drove in, and I said, ‘Gosh, it’s not as bad as they say. It looks just like a regular prison.’” As they drove around, he soon realized he was wrong. “As a matter of fact, I ended up saying it was worse [than it had been described.] … And I said, ‘There’s no way you could describe it’.” He began taking photographs as he confronted horror after horror that the silent survivors kept pointing out to him. Eventually, “I put my camera up after a while and I just stopped taking pictures.”

In one of the barracks, he said, “Some of the survivors, with their clothing torn and their body exposed, were kneeling on the ground playing chess out of some makeshift sets, and they were just oblivious, almost, to what was going on around them even. And I said, ‘Well, this is a fantastic game. ... This can keep your mind from going off the deep end, so to speak’.”

Later in the day, Scott and the 183rd moved out. In July, he was shipped to the Pacific Theatre, a deployment that started with 65 days at sea.

Scott’s mind kept going back to the Jewish prisoners he saw, so absorbed in their game they were hardly aware of the horror of the concentration camp. Scott had just learned to play a few months earlier in Luxemburg, and while at sea, “that’s when I really got involved” in the game, to counter tedium and troubled thoughts. Eventually, “I had begun to develop some feeling for it.”

Scott with his certificate from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1981

After a few months in Okinawa, Scott took a ship back to the States. He recounted a conversation he had on board with a fellow Georgian, a white man who told him: “‘Look, Scott ... when we get back to Georgia, do you think you’re going to have your rights? You’re not going to have any rights unless you stand up and act like a man.’” Scott remembered thinking, “Maybe he would kick me around if I let him. And this is what he was trying to tell me — that this has been part of the problem, that people have allowed themselves to be kicked around.”

When Scott took the risk of playing in the 1950 SCA Championship, he chose not to be kicked around. When he saw the controversy his presence created, he voluntarily withdrew. This was a gracious action, but also strategic. The majority of the players were already on his side, and in fact said they would not have the next tournament in any city that would not accept Black participants. He realized that he had a winning position; there was no need to force it. He chose the path of patient nonviolence that would become the hallmark of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights activity.

And his stance worked. News of Scott’s treatment traveled nationwide and chess clubs as far away as Los Angeles sent petitions in protest to US Chess. By the summer of 1951, the Southern Chess Association had split into two factions over the integration question. An integrated SCA championship tournament was held in Asheville, North Carolina; Scott finished 11th out of 22, scoring 4½/6, and tied for first in the rapid transit division with 6/8. While a minority of members held a segregated tournament in Tampa, Florida, members at the Asheville tournament passed a resolution approving Scott’s participation and decrying racism in chess. Because the integrationists were the larger group, younger, and included the best players, the segregationist faction soon died out.

Scott continued to play in the South, scoring a string of positive results that stands as testament to his strength of spirit. He improved his play over the decade through correspondence chess as well as various regional tournaments, including the 1958 Florida Open, which he won. And all through it, he wrote chess articles and press releases for the Atlanta Daily World, making it possible to get some sense of how much chess activity was going on in Black Atlanta during the era of segregation — history that has been neglected by other periodicals.

At the same time, Scott, still a class player, also played in national tournaments. He attended the first of his many U.S. Opens, in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1951. The only Black person among 98 players, he finished with 6½/12. He also played in the National Amateur Open in 1961, finishing 25 out of 140, and again in 1962, finishing sixth on tiebreaks out of 143.

In his own state, however, organizers of the Georgia Open declared it would continue to be “limited to white Georgia citizens only,” even though integrated tournaments were beginning to be held in other southern cities.

It wasn’t until March 1961 that Scott played in his first tournament in Georgia — the Atlanta Open, sponsored by the Atlanta Chess Club. The Atlanta Daily World reported that the club “in a meeting just before the start of the tournament last Friday voted better than 2 to 1 [to] open the competition to everyone regardless of race.” Scott scored 4½/6.

In 1963, the fully integrated Atlanta Chess Association elected Scott vice president. He went on to serve two terms as president, 1965–1967.

Scott was indisputably one of the strongest players in the state, but racism in Georgia chess still dogged him. Scott and other Black chess players were barred from participating in the 1962 Georgia Closed Championship. “The failure of the Georgia Chess Association to accept us as participants is not understandable,” Scott wrote in the Atlanta Daily World, “in light of the opening of tournaments to all for such sports as tennis, roller skating, baseball and bowling in the Greater Atlanta area.” Scott contrasted this treatment with a Tennessee Chess Association invitational in Nashville, which he turned down so that he might play in the Georgia championship.

The following year, Georgia members voted to make the championship rated, which required them to follow the US Chess Federation’s non-discrimination policy. Perhaps as a commentary on his treatment, however, there is no record of Scott playing in a Georgia Closed Championship.

In 1963, Scott was the top Georgia finisher in the Georgia Open, in Columbus. The April 1963 Georgia Chess Association newsletter, however, failed to mention his name in their tournament report, only mentioning the overall tournament winner, Milan Momic, of Alabama.

In 1967, Scott was both the Atlanta Chess Club Champion and Speed Champion. In that year he also chaired the host committee for the 68th Annual U. S. Open Chess Championship tournament in Atlanta (where he placed 26th out of 168).

Scott passed away in 1992 after flourishing in many roles: businessman, film critic, radio show host, photographer, coach, and historian for the Atlanta Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen. In 1987, Mayor Andrew Young asked Scott to serve on the planning committee for the city’s 150th anniversary. Governor Joe Frank Harris appointed Scott a charter member of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust in 1981, and President George H. W. Bush appointed him to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1991.

Chess and Civil Rights are only two facets of who W. A. Scott III was. And yet, chess is at the heart of what formed him and who he became.

In addition to Kathy Solomon’s interview with William A. Scott III (26 Nov 1981. Emory University, Atlanta, GA), information for this article was primarily drawn from periodicals: Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, and Georgia Chess Letter.

Editor’s note: the following five games were annotated by Rick Massimo for the print version of this story. An archive with 47 additional games can be found here.