Arthur Scott

Arthur Scott is a Brooklyn pharmacist, the proud, self-made patriarch of a respectable Black family and father to Peggy. He has built a comfortable, dignified life through discipline and hard work, and he expects his daughter to protect what he's built rather than risk it. Formal and exacting, he guards the family's standing closely.

John Douglas Thompson plays Arthur with a stiff-backed dignity that could easily read as merely stern, but he lets flickers of fear and love show underneath the propriety. The character gives the show a rare, clear-eyed portrait of Black bourgeois aspiration in the Gilded Age, and Thompson makes Arthur's rigidity feel earned rather than cruel.