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At 27, Scott stands just under 6 ft., his granite biceps tattooed when he was eleven. He is the oldest of 16 children. A gentle man and a voracious reader, he rarely lets his guard down with his colleagues. He has taken a private oath that he will not allow himself to be goaded into any actions that might jeopardize his position. As a patrolman, he makes $22,500 annually. But his objective goes well beyond police work. "My purpose is to bridge the gap between those who espouse racism and those who are at least liberal enough to understand this is the 20th century."
It has not been easy. "There is not a day that I haven't gone through some kind of hell," says Scott. "Practically every day, someone calls me a nigger." He sits in his modest apartment in a suburb called Justice, about four miles southwest of Cicero, ironing his five-year-old son's jeans for school. On the wall hangs a prayer: "Lord, help me to realize that nothing can happen today that you and I can't handle." Scott's wife D'Andrea tries to comfort him after each racial incident by saying, "Don't worry about it, that person was sick."
An A student before dropping out of high school after his junior year, Scott spent long hours preparing for the statewide police exam. He was sick with chicken pox when he took the test. A few weeks after the exam, he received a letter on official letterhead from deputy superintendent Zalas telling him that he had failed. "I was heartbroken," said Scott. The next day he went to Zalas and asked if he could take the exam again. When Zalas asked why, Scott handed him the letter. Zalas said he never wrote the letter. "Someone was just clowning around with him," says Zalas. A few weeks later, Scott was officially notified that he'd passed the exam.
Scott has problems both in the station and on the streets. One of his superior officers has called him a "stupid nigger" in front of fellow officers. On one occasion the officer asked someone he was arresting, "Do you want this nigger to see you crying?" Sometimes citizens who call for help will rebuff Scott and ask for a white officer -- a request the department denies.
Scott grew up in an integrated neighborhood in southwest Chicago. "I always believed I could go anywhere and mingle with anyone," said Scott. "It just didn't occur to me that Cicero could be so prejudiced." Still, it was impossible not to have heard of Cicero's reputation. Scott recalls how his family was appalled when Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to postpone a march through Cicero in 1966 because of the threat of violence. Scott was five years old at the time. Since then, there have been numerous assaults against blacks who attempted to live in Cicero. "Cicero unfortunately has become synonymous with racism," says U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas. "It is a symbol of standing tall, guarding the borders."
The city of Cicero (pop. 61,000) has given Scott -- and all its municipal employees -- until Sept. 30 to move within the city limits. Scott is afraid for his three young children and his wife. Reluctantly, he has joined other officers in challenging the city's residency requirement. "The people he's afraid of are the people he's here to protect," says Cicero's attorney, Dennis Both. "If he has a fear, it's not founded."