NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Hall Will Feature Unique Photos
Not everything in NASCAR's history is pretty and polished...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted January 28, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Clifford Morrison, a resident of Elkin, N.C., was a photographer, pilot, woodcarver, and teacher among other things. He died in 1992. (Photo: NASCAR Hall Of Fame)
The history of racial discrimination in stock car racing is ugly.

It is personified by the experience of black driver Wendell Scott, a struggling racer who traveled with the NASCAR circus from 1961 to 1973. Scott is the only black driver to win a major NASCAR event. He finished first in a 100-mile race at Jacksonville (Fla.) Speedway in December 1963 but was initially denied the victory, in part (according to drivers and others who were on the scene) because track officials were afraid of repercussions if Scott kissed the white race queen in victory lane.

Although Scott finally came to be accepted as a NASCAR regular and earned a certain amount of respect among many fans as a perpetual underdog, he and other black drivers were subjected to taunts and threats at and around speedways, and their wanderings along NASCAR backroads were complicated in the 1950s and early 1960s by the fact that many hotels and restaurants would not serve them. “He died (in 1990) relatively happy but with unfulfilled dreams,” said Wendell Scott Jr. of his father.

Black fans – the relative handful who braved discrimination and uneasiness to attend races in the early days – often were directed to broken-down grandstands and were told to use restrooms marked “Colored Only”.

With those experiences as a messy backdrop, one of the major exhibits in the NASCAR Hall of Fame, scheduled to open in May in Charlotte, N.C., will carry an ironic significance.

Museum officials recently acquired rare black-and-white photographs shot during one of the most historic events in NASCAR history – the June 19, 1949 inaugural race in what would become today’s internationally known Sprint Cup Series. The race was held at the now-defunct Charlotte Speedway, a three-quarter-mile dirt track on the outskirts of Charlotte, N.C.

Rarer than the photographs of a signal NASCAR event is the man who shot them. His name was Clifford Morrison, and he was a black man wielding a Speed Graphic camera to shoot photographs of a very dangerous, primitive sport that mixed black and white only in its checkered flag.

A resident of Elkin, N.C., Morrison, who died in 1992, was a photographer, pilot, woodcarver, teacher and an all-around handyman. He and his brother, Tom, owned a photography studio in Elkin, and, in the late 1940s, they became interested in the rudimentary, ragtag racing events being held at area dirt tracks like Elkin Speedway and North Wilkesboro Speedway. It was natural that they would bring along their bulky Speed Graphics when they attended, and that eventually resulted in them crossing paths with Bill France Sr., who was promoting stock car races in the Southeast and was only a year or so from organizing an umbrella motorsports sanctioning body that would be named NASCAR.

“The story as I’ve heard it,” said long-time racing radio announcer Barney Hall, also an Elkin resident and a friend of the Morrisons, “is that they tried to sell Bill France some of their photographs. Bill told them to bring the photographs and let him look at them and he’d pay 50 cents apiece for the ones he wanted. They always laughed about that – said the photo would have to be a really great one for Bill to pay 50 cents for it.”

At least some of the photographs met France’s approval, for he and Clifford Morrison developed a business relationship that found Morrison occasionally shooting races that featured a bunch of wild white men – and the occasional woman – bumping and thumping around woebegone dirt tracks in the middle of nowhere.

When France took his biggest gamble – starting a series for new American-built cars fresh off the showroom floor – in 1949, he asked Morrison to travel to Charlotte that June day to photograph the landmark first race. Drivers who participated remember the afternoon as one overwhelmed by unusual amounts of both dust and uncertainty.


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