Hazel Dorothy Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981) was an American jazz and classical pianist and singer. An outspoken critic of racial discrimination and segregation, she used her influence to improve the representation of Black Americans in film.
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Scott moved to New York City with her mother at the age of four. Scott was a musical child prodigy, receiving scholarships to study at the Juilliard School when she was eight. In her teens, she performed at Café Society while still at school. She also performed on the radio.
She was active as a jazz singer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, she became the first black American to host her own TV series, The Hazel Scott Show. Scott’s career in the United States faltered after she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 during the era of McCarthyism.
Scott subsequently moved to Paris, France, in 1957 and began performing in Europe. She did not return to the United States for ten years, until 1967.
Hazel Dorothy Scott was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on June 11, 1920. She was the only child of R. Thomas Scott, a West African scholar from Liverpool, England, and Alma Long Scott, a classically trained pianist and music teacher. In 1924, the family moved to the United States and settled in Harlem, New York City. Scott's parents had separated by this time, and she lived with her mother and grandmother.
By then, Scott could play anything she heard on the piano. With her mother's guidance and training, she mastered advanced piano techniques and was labeled a child prodigy. When Scott was eight years old, she began studying with Professor Oscar Wagner of the Juilliard School of Music. In 1933, her mother organized her own Alma Long Scott's All-Girl Jazz Band, where Scott played the piano and trumpet.
By the age of 16, Hazel Scott regularly performed for radio programs for the Mutual Broadcasting System, gaining a reputation as the "hot classicist". In the mid-1930s, she also performed at the Roseland Dance Hall with the Count Basie Orchestra. Her early musical theatre appearances in New York included the Cotton Club Revue of 1938, Sing Out the News alongside Will Geer, June Allyson and Maude Simmons; and The Priorities of 1942.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Scott performed jazz, blues, ballads, Broadway and boogie-woogie songs, and classical music in various nightclubs. Barney Josephson, the owner of the black and tan club Café Society, hired her and, from 1939 to 1943, she was a leading attraction at both the downtown and uptown branches of Café Society. Her performances created national prestige for the practice of "swinging the classics". By 1945, Scott was earning $75,000 ($1,341,266 today) a year.
Along with Lena Horne, Scott was one of the first black women to gain respectable roles in major Hollywood pictures. She refused to take roles in Hollywood playing a "singing maid", and she turned down the first four roles she was offered for this reason. When she began performing in Hollywood films, she insisted on having final cut privileges when it came to her appearance. She performed as herself in the films I Dood It (MGM, 1943), Broadway Rhythm (MGM, 1944) with Lena Horne, in the otherwise all-white cast of The Heat's On (Columbia, 1943), Something to Shout About (Columbia, 1943), and Rhapsody in Blue (Warner Bros, 1945). She appeared in five Hollywood films in all, always insisting on the credit line "Miss Hazel Scott as Herself", and wearing her own clothes and jewelry to protect her image. Her final break with Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn involved "a costume which she felt stereotyped blacks". In the 1940s, in addition to her film appearances, she was featured in Café Society's From Bach to Boogie-Woogie concerts in 1941 and 1943 at Carnegie Hall.
She was the first person of African descent to have her own television show in the U.S., The Hazel Scott Show, which premiered on the DuMont Television Network on July 3, 1950. Variety reported that "Hazel Scott has a neat little show in this modest package," its "most engaging element" being Scott herself. The show became so popular, it soon ran three times a week. On the show, Scott performed with the jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach who were among the members of her supporting band.
Scott had long been committed to civil rights. Scott refused to perform in segregated venues when she was on tour. She was once escorted from the city of Austin, Texas by Texas Rangers because she refused to perform when she discovered that black and white patrons were seated separately. "Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro," she told Time magazine, "and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?"
In 1949, Scott brought a suit against the owners of a Pasco, Washington restaurant when a waitress refused to serve Scott and her traveling companion, Mrs. Eunice Wolfe, because "they were Negroes". Scott's victory helped African Americans challenge racial discrimination in Spokane, as well as inspiring civil rights organizations "to pressure the Washington state legislature to enact the Public Accommodations Act" in 1953.
With the advent of the Red Scare in the television industry, Scott's name appeared in Red Channels: A Report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television in June 1950. In an effort to clear her name, Scott voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on September 22, 1950, and insisted on reading a prepared statement. She denied that she was "ever knowingly connected with the Communist Party or any of its front organizations." However, she stated that she had supported Communist Party member Benjamin J. Davis Jr.'s campaign for the New York City Council, arguing that Davis was supported by socialists, a group that "has hated Communists longer and more fiercely than any other." She also expressed her frustrations with the mass amount of false accusations of entertainers and offered the suggestion to use "democratic methods to immediately eliminate a good many irresponsible charges." Scott concluded her statement to the HUAC with a request that entertainers be not already "covered with the mud of slander and the filth of scandal" when proving their loyalty to the United States.
Her television variety program, The Hazel Scott Show, was cancelled a week after Scott appeared before HUAC, on September 29, 1950. (Her program predated Nat King Cole's show by six years.) Scott suffered a nervous breakdown in 1951. On returning to full health, Scott continued to perform in the United States and Europe, even getting sporadic bookings on television variety shows like Cavalcade of Stars and guest starring in an episode of CBS Television's Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town musical series. Scott's short-lived television show "provided a glimmer of hope for African American viewers" during a time of continued racial bias in the broadcasting industry and economic hardships for jazz musicians in general. Scott remained publicly opposed to McCarthyism and racial segregation throughout her career.
To evade political fallout in the United States, Scott moved to Paris in 1957. She appeared in the French Gilles Grangier crime film Le désordre et la nuit (1958). In 1963, she marched with a number of other African-American expatriates, including James Baldwin, to the US Embassy in Paris to demonstrate support of the upcoming March on Washington.
Scott did not return to the US until 1967. By this time, the Civil Rights Movement had led to federal legislation making racial segregation in housing and public accommodations illegal and enforcing the protection of voting rights of all citizens in addition to other social advances.
Scott continued to perform occasionally in nightclubs, while also appearing on daytime television, until the year of her death. She made her television acting debut in 1970, performing as Dolly Martin in the NBC drama The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (season 1, episode 8: "If I Can't Sing, I'll Listen"). In 1973 on the ABC daytime soap opera One Life to Live, she performed a wedding song at the nuptials of her onscreen "cousin" Carla Gray Hall, portrayed by Ellen Holly.