William Scott

William Scott was born free on March 31, 1860, on Church Street in Raleigh, North Carolina. His parents, William and Cynthia Scott, were both free people of color, and his grandfather Elisha Scott was the son of a white woman. His story shows that even free Black families lived under constant threat in the slave South.

Shortly after the Confederate surrender, the man his father worked for gathered a crowd, blindfolded his father, and tried to whip him and keep his pay. His father escaped. William remembered Union troops marching into Raleigh along the Fayetteville Road, looking to him "like blue birds," and his father going to an officer to complain that rations had been stolen. The family lived near the Confederate earthworks outside the city.

After the war the family sharecropped, and at the end of each year they were left with nothing. William was hired out to work as a boy. He was often hungry, and he promised himself that when he was grown he would eat as many biscuits as he wanted.