ABSTRACT
A set of complex and compelling forces prompted me to select Emmett Jay Scott, Booker T. Washington’s legendary private secretary, as my dissertation biography topic at Howard University in 1975. Malcolm X’s statement “that of all our research history is best suited to reward all endeavors” was the reason I indeed remained at Howard University to struggle with the biography on Scott, enduring even arrest after my one-person protest demonstration in the president’s office. A student of the remarkable 1960s, caught in the vortex of change and continuity of the 1970s, I had turned Malcolm’s statement into a preoccupation with biography to shake the tree of history for intellectual, developmental, and personal fruit.1
