W. Scott Wilkinson

William Scott Wilkinson, known as W. Scott Wilkinson (February 5, 1895 – June 19, 1985),^[1] was an attorney in Shreveport, Louisiana, who served a single term as a Democrat from Caddo Parish in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1920 to 1924 during the administration of Governor John M. Parker.^[2]

Red River Parish background

Wilkinson was born in Coushatta, the parish seat of Red River Parish, south of Shreveport, to John Dallas Wilkinson (1867-1929) and the former Alice Mai Scott (died 1956), the daughter of a judge, Nelson Jackson Scott. His younger sister, Alice Mai Wilkinson, died in 1907 at the age of eleven. He had an older brother, John Pugh Wilkinson. The senior Wilkinson was also an attorney, first in Coushatta and later in Shreveport, and a member of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in 1898.^[3]

In 1912, Wilkinson graduated from Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. In 1915, he received a Bachelor of Arts from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he was president of his senior class. He obtained his law degree in 1917 from Louisiana State University Law Center.^[4]

Military, legal, and political career

Wilkinson served in the United States Army in World War I and again in World War II, during which he reached the rank of colonel.^[5]

While engaged in his legal practice, he was also president of the Shreveport Young Men's Christian Association and the Chamber of Commerce as well as chairman of the board of Dodd College, a private junior college for women founded in Shreveport by the pastor Monroe E. Dodd.^[3] He was a member of Rotary International and the LSU Foundation.^[4]

Wilkinson was affiliated with the state, national, and international bar associations. In 1962, he was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers. He was a senior partner in the firm, Wilkinson, Carmody and Gilliam. He was a director and chairman of the board of Lee National Life Insurance Company and the vice president of the Hunter Company. In the late 1950s, he allied with the states rights movement and took a leading role in the court battles regarding tidelands petroleum revenues and opposition to public school desegregation.^[4]

Personal life

On April 9, 1919, Wilkinson married the former Margaret West (1898–1995), the daughter of Charles Stuart West and the former Susan Hardy, then of Corsicana in Navarro County south of Dallas, Texas. She attended St. Mary's College in Dallas, Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, and received a Bachelor of Arts years later in 1937 from Centenary College in Shreveport. Margaret Wilkinson was a director of the Shreveport YWCA and the Shreveport Opera and the president of the Twentieth Century Club and the Louisiana Federation of Women's Clubs for the Fourth District.^[3]

The Wilkinsons had two daughters, Susybelle Wilkinson Lyons and Margaret Wilkinson Wilson, formerly Margaret Butler.^[4] Wilkinson died at the age of ninety in 1985 in Shreveport.

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