Jock Scott - His Last Election Victory

His Last Election Victory

On October 23, 1983, Scott was elected to his last term in the legislature. Still a Democrat, he defeated two intraparty opponents in the nonpartisan blanket primary. Scott polled 6,458 of the 11,076 votes cast in the race, or 58.3 percent. An African American candidate, the Reverend Errol Dorsey, drew 1,780 votes (16.1 percent), and the attorney Christopher J. Roy, Sr., a law partner of the legendary Alexandrian Camille F. Gravel, Jr., and father of future Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy and State Representative Chris Roy, Jr., polled 2,838 votes (25.6 percent).

In 1980, Judge Nauman Scott ordered cross-parish busing, school consolidations, some school closures, and the reassignment of principals to increase the level of desegregation in Rapides Parish schools, contrary to the wishes of many citizens in the outlying Wards 10 and 11, including the area served by Buckeye High School. Years later, referring to his father's desegregation ruling, Scott said that his father's "primary concern was always the children of Rapides Parish or whatever school system he was working with... I know the people who hated him would not believe that. He tried to protect the people who had been discriminated against and to protect the schools." Scott also predicted that his father, had he lived, would have been satisfied with the 2006 decision by Judge Dee D. Drell of Alexandria to end the desegregation lawsuit against the Rapides Parish School Board.

Despite the unpopularity of Judge Scott's orders among the more conservative voters, Jock Scott, as a Democrat, won a third term in the legislature in 1983 even as Edwin Washington Edwards procured a comeback third term as governor by handily unseating Treen. Randolph, however, was defeated for a third term in the state senate. Three years later, Randolph resurrected his political career by winning the first of five consecutive terms as mayor of Alexandria, a position from which he retired on December 4, 2006.

In 1987, Scott was named "National Legislator of the Year" by the National Republican Legislators Association.