Fieldston prepped poet for untelevised revolution

Legendary political songwriter and poet Gil Scott-Heron, most famous for his spoken word piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” was first discovered by an English teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School, leading him to an unlikely prep-school start in Riverdale. 

Born in Chicago in 1949, Mr. Scott-Heron grew up in Tennessee where he was playing the piano by the time he was 4 and writing detective stories by age 11. At 13, he moved to the Bronx and attended DeWitt Clinton High School and later, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, according to a history of protest songs called Thirty-three Revolutions Per Minute.

In a 2010 New Yorker article, the musician, writer, and activist — who recorded 15 albums and wrote a handful of novels in his lifetime — recounted one of his early writing experiences. He was in English class at Clinton when the teacher asked him a question about John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. 

“I said, ‘Look, can I get out of here? This just sucks.’ I told her – I figured she knew – ‘I can write better than that. I been sitting here writing better than that,’” Mr. Scott-Heron told the magazine.

He handed the teacher a piece of paper from his notebook and the teacher passed it on to somebody at Fieldston, her alma mater. The administrators wanted to meet him and he obliged. 

Mr. Scott-Heron told The New Yorker that during a break in the meeting he called his uncle to check on his mother, who had been hospitalized with diabetes. His uncle told him to come to the hospital, and he did. 

Later on, Mr. Scott-Heron learned that administrators believed that sense of responsibility he demonstrated for his mother showed he could handle a Fieldston education. He was awarded a full scholarship and graduated — one of five black students in his class of 100 — in 1967.

There, Mr. Scott-Heron met Danny Goldberg, who would go on to become a music executive and writer. In his book, Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, Mr. Goldberg credits Mr. Scott-Heron with influencing his taste in rock n’ roll.

“Even in high school, Gil had an uncanny ability to express himself and would come into class with intricate autobiographical short stories that dwarfed anything the rest of us could write, and he played piano seemingly effortlessly while the rest of us were agonizing over our lessons,” Mr. Goldberg wrote in How the Left Lost Teen Spirit.

Fieldston classmate Roderick Harrison told The New Yorker that Mr. Scott-Heron could “hold a classroom or a hallway in thrall.”

While attending Fieldston, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote a paper on Langston Hughes. After he graduated, he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania because it was Langston Hughes’ alma mater. He later received a master’s in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, according to the Johns Hopkins University website.

He reportedly struggled with drug addiction but continued to perform and sporadically release music until his death on May 27 at age 62. Until that time, he lived in an apartment in Harlem.