He's the first popularly elected black mayor of race-plagued Little Rock.
His election was buoyed by near-unanimous heavy voting from long-neglected blacks living in economically disadvantaged sectors of the city. Those voters were inspired by his candidacy.
His election was aided by a creditable number of votes citywide from whites moved by his message of unity.
A minister and banker and city native who'd become a popular student body leader at Memphis University and a policy aide to the thoroughly moderate former Gov. Mike Beebe, Frank Scott came into office last year with a gift of preacher's gab.
He used pulpit-trained themes and intonations to promise bold new leadership and change that would bring those long left out into Little Rock's united march to greatness as a Southern city.
So, on Monday night, 17 months into his term, Scott's late-spring evening of uncommon political accountability and attempted leadership, even courage, ended with his security detail whisking him away from danger arising from rage.
Destructively angry young blacks--and apparently some whites of uncertain purpose--had befouled his hand-holding Black Lives Matter march eastward from the state Capitol.
They'd commenced paying no attention to his curfew or his pleading.
They were breaking windows in a bank and other buildings, trying to loot an ATM and striking and breaking the nose of a young male newspaper reporter while threatening a young female television reporter.
Scott deserved better, not to mention the brave reporters.
The mayor had spent the day meeting with Black Lives Matter activists and mostly listening, talking only to explain an occasional detail or complication, such as that a residency requirement for all the city policeman who live out of town or out of the county, while a desirable goal, would ill-serve the short-term interest of public safety.
Therein rested a microcosm of Scott's challenge. Black people had a valid complaint and request. He couldn't oblige it. Instead he had to explain why he couldn't.
Maybe not all police officers going home to Saline County were racists wanting to get away from black people. Maybe it was the unsettled school situation.
Whatever it was, Little Rock had endured a difficult time staffing up its police department. This was not the right time to tell officers to move to the city or lose their jobs.
Scott was in the position of being utterly correct but quintessentially institutional, of being the spokesman for the system.
A candidate can promise and inspire. A mayor has to explain and disappoint. A candidate can come from the outside. Victory puts him on the inside.
During the day, federal authorities advised Scott of intelligence that unspecified outside agitators were planning to come to Little Rock for the evening's Capitol protest to commit acts of violence.
So, Scott issued a 10 p.m. curfew. He also mentioned the rise of coronavirus cases. You remember those.
Then he attended the thousand-person protest on the state Capitol grounds. He walked among the crowd, declining to make a general address but only an announcement or advisory, such as to pay no attention to that guy over there trying to make trouble.
It was political leadership, undeniably, which is not to say it won pervasive followship.
Near 10 p.m., Scott encouraged organizers to shut things down. Then he found himself joined by some of those organizers carrying a Black Lives Matter banner and marching eastward toward downtown.
It was a good moment, though one right-wingers would deplore. Scott says he got caught up in it a bit. He is, after all, a black man from southwest Little Rock who was a young adult on the governor's staff before he ventured for the first time to the portion of his city north of Park Plaza.
Then, on or about State Street, Scott announced that the march needed to end under the curfew and that everyone should go home.
He and Little Rock were within moments of modified triumph--modified in that the curfew was being stretched a little.
Most left. But some didn't. And the mayor was whisked away from what was clearly beginning to happen, which was trouble.
The next morning, he told me he'd been awake, "wound up," until 3 a.m., and that he'd slept uncommonly late, to past 6.
As ever, he was trying to balance the competing stresses of his job. He admitted to frustration that an evening that he said had been "beautiful" on the Capitol grounds blew up on the periphery--among 50 to a hundred people, he said--but in a way that negatively defined the entire exercise.
He explained that he understood the rage--that he shared it--but that some of the behavior simply could not be tolerated.
He said he was going to meet with his team and try to figure out how best to confront the reality of another day in 2020 Little Rock.
I thanked him for calling back and wished him luck.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/04/2020