Museum Of UnCut Funk

He won the race. The crowd saw him win it. Then NASCAR announced a different man as the winner, gave him the trophy, and sent the beauty queen to kiss him in victory lane. Wendell Scott drove home with nothing. Jacksonville, Florida, 1 December 1963. A NASCAR Grand National race — the top division, what is now the Cup Series. Wendell Scott was a mechanic from Danville, Virginia. He had learned to drive fast running whiskey, which was how a great many early stock car drivers learned, and he had talked his way into a sport that did not want him. He raced for years with second-hand equipment and a crew of family members, and was refused entry, abused from the stands, and run into deliberately on the track. That afternoon he was flagged around and he finished in front. And NASCAR declared Buck Baker the winner. Baker took the trophy. Baker took victory lane. The post-race ceremony happened without the man who had actually won. Hours later, after the crowd had gone home, the scoring was corrected and Wendell Scott was recorded as the winner. He got the prize money, eventually. He did not get the ceremony, and he did not get the trophy. He has said he understood perfectly well what the problem was. The ceremony in 1963 Jacksonville involved a white woman kissing the winner, and that was not going to be allowed to happen. He kept racing for more than a decade. He finished in the top ten in the championship. He was badly injured in a crash in 1973 and retired. He remained the only Black driver to win a race at NASCAR's top level for more than half a century**, until Bubba Wallace won at Talladega in 2021. Wendell Scott was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015. He had died in 1990. And in 2021 — fifty-eight years after the race — NASCAR presented his family with the trophy. His children and grandchildren stood and collected the thing that should have been handed to him on a Sunday afternoon in Florida, in front of a crowd that had watched him earn it. He won. Everybody there knew he had won. It just took until his grandchildren were grown for anybody to hand him the cup.