Mother Scott’s youth center clothed, fed those in need
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Matthew 25:35-36
The poor, the tattered and the hungry knew they could find comfort at the old pink building in the heart of Milwaukee’s central city.
Clothes stacked on folding tables in front of the building were free for the taking. So was the hot breakfast — and most nights of the week, dinner — served inside.
Everyone was welcomed at Scott’s Christian Youth Fellowship Center in the 2400 block of N. Teutonia Ave. No one was turned away.
And it was all but impossible to come into the center or to go back out into the world without being blessed by the beautiful old woman who liked to sit at one of the round tables near the front door: Naomi Scott.
Herself dressed in clothes gleaned from the tables outside, fed with food donated to the kitchen, she was known to most as Mother Scott.
“When I was a little girl, people predicted I would not live out all my days,” Mother Scott told a Journal Sentinel reporter last December.
“They thought I would die young,” she said. “They were wrong.”
Indeed. Mother Scott was 90 when she died Tuesday.
Mother Scott, the greatgreat-granddaughter of slaves, was born in Fairhope, Ala., and moved to Milwaukee with her husband, Joseph Scott, in 1951.
Joseph worked in foundries and tanneries. Mother Scott cleaned houses, earned a degree in hairdressing and opened a beauty shop. In 1974, the couple bought a building that had housed an appliance store and turned it into a Christian youth outreach center.
In the early 1980s, the center expanded its mission, providing hot meals, clothing, an emergency food pantry, a crisis
hotline for runaways, a nutrition program for babies, shelter for the homeless and Sunday worship services.
“Whatever people needed, she gave,” said Deborah Christopher, who has volunteered at the center for five years.
Mother Scott is survived by two daughters, Gloria Burrell and Annie Wilson, as well as by an entire community of people who loved and cherished her, who, according to Christopher, “have claimed her as their mother, grandmother and auntie.”