[8] By the age of 16, Hazel Scott regularly performed for radio programs for the Mutual Broadcasting System, gaining a reputation as the "hot classicist".

Her early musical theatre appearances in New York included the Cotton Club Revue of 1938, Sing Out the News and The Priorities of 1942.

She appeared in five Hollywood films in all, always insisting on the credit line "Miss Hazel Scott as Herself", and wearing her own clothes and jewelry to protect her image.

On the show, Scott performed with the jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach who were among the members of her supporting band.

[18] Scott's victory helped African Americans challenge racial discrimination in Spokane, as well as inspiring civil rights organizations "to pressure the Washington state legislature to enact the Public Accommodations Act" in 1953.

In an effort to clear her name, Scott voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on September 22, 1950, and insisted on reading a prepared statement.

"[21] She also expressed her frustrations with the mass amount of false accusations of entertainers and offered the suggestion to use "democratic methods to immediately eliminate a good many irresponsible charges."

Scott concluded her statement to the HUAC with a request that entertainers be not already "covered with the mud of slander and the filth of scandal" when proving their loyalty to the United States.

Scott's short-lived television show "provided a glimmer of hope for African American viewers"[19] during a time of continued racial bias in the broadcasting industry and economic hardships for jazz musicians in general.

She made her television acting debut in 1970, performing as Dolly Martin in the NBC drama The Bold Ones: The New Doctors, the "If I Can't Sing, I'll Listen" episode.

In 1973 on the ABC daytime soap opera One Life to Live, she performed a wedding song at the nuptials of her "onscreen cousin" Carla Gray Hall, portrayed by Ellen Holly.

[28] Scott also sang at an October 1970 award dinner in New York – singing "When the World was Young", "A Lonely Christmas", "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" for an International Education Year Award to James L. Olivero, who remembered Louis Gregory, presented by Daniel Jordan of the Bahá'ís on behalf of the US National Spiritual Assembly.

[31] A musicale was held in Kingston, Jamaica, in May 1971, entitled The Sounds of a New World, co-presented by Scott with Dizzy Gillespie, Seals and Crofts, and Linda Marshall and others, as part of a ship-and-shore conference of Bahá'ís.

She is buried at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York, near other musicians including Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, and Dizzy Gillespie (who died in 1993).

She also used her status as one of the best-known African-American entertainers of her generation to shine a spotlight on issues of racial injustice and civil rights.

Her 1955 album Relaxed Piano Moods on the Debut label, with Mingus and Roach, is generally her work most highly regarded by critics today.

In 2020, she was the subject of the BBC World Service programme Hazel Scott: Jazz star and barrier breaker in the series The Forum.