Scott-Heron’s experience at Lincoln University
would also lay the groundwork for the depiction
of a troubled black college that he would later offer
in his novel The Nigger Factory. After leaving Lin-
coln, Scott-Heron attended and received an M.A.
in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.
Following a stint teaching creative writing in Wash-
ington D.C., he committed himself fully to his mu-
sical and literary vocations and quickly achieved
popular and critical success on both fronts. As rec-
ognition of the importance of his contribution to
contemporary African-American popular music
has grown, Scott-Heron’s two published novels
have been accorded renewed attention.
Organized as a murder mystery, his first novel,
The Vulture (1968), offers a portrait of urban drug
culture and of the ways in which the increasing
availability and ease of production of illegal and
unprecedentedly addictive drugs in the late 1960s
and 1970s devastated black urban communities.
Set in lower Manhattan, this complex and surpris-
ingly self-assured novel depicts the lives and evolv-
ing social awareness of a group of young black men
as they respond with varying degrees of satisfac-
tion, self-interestedness, and regret to the question
“Who killed John Lee,” a childhood friend who,
before his mysterious death, had become the most
prominent local drug dealer. In this novel Scott-
Heron suggests that the economy of exploitation
and systematic immiseration that the drug culture
produced existed in ironic counterpoint to the
narratives of upward mobility and “black capital-
ism” that prominent political conservatives of the
time were fashioning.
Despite its provocative title, Scott-Heron’s sec-
ond novel The Nigger Factory (1972) takes a po-
litically evenhanded approach to its depiction of
the power struggle between the students at the
fictional black college Sutton University and the
institution’s conservative president as the stu-
dents attempt to replace the school’s traditional
Eurocentric focus with a “blacker” curriculum
and social mission. By way of its depiction of the
black radical group MJUMBE (Members of Justice
United for Meaningful Black Education) and their
contentious relationship with the more moderate
black student leader Earl Thomas, the novel offers
a surprisingly critical portrait of black radicalism
and Afrocentric pretensions and suggests that these
ideas can have disastrous consequences when they
are not placed in the context of a well-thought-out
plan for social change.
Despite his early success as a poet and novel-
ist, Scott-Heron is still almost exclusively known
by popular audiences as a musical performer. Al-
though unfortunate, this is understandable given
the magnitude of his achievement as a singer and
songwriter and the relative paucity of his literary
output. Over the past 30 years, Scott-Heron has
released more than 15 albums of original mate-
rial. These include the landmark collections Pieces
of a Man (1971), Free Will (1972), and Winter in
America (1974), as well as now-classic songs like
“Johannesburg,” “The Bottle” “Lady Day and John
Coltrane,” “Whitey on the Moon,” and “Home Is
Where the Hatred Is.” With the possible exception
of Nina Simone, no other African-American musi-
cal performer has more consistently deployed the
idioms of black popular music as a means of offer-
ing so thoroughgoing a critique of American and
global social injustices.
As a reflection of the emerging dialogue between
black poetry and popular music then taking place,
the first of Scott-Heron’s albums, Small Talk at
125th and Lenox Avenue (1970), was concurrently
published as a poetry volume of the same name.
The 30 poems in this collection are fully informed
by and reflect the aesthetic that had been developed
by the most significant radical black poets of the pe-
riod—LeRoi Jones (AMIRI BARAKA), Don Lee (HAKI
MADHUBUTI), NIKKI GIOVANNI, and especially JAYNE
CORTEZ, who, like Scott-Heron, would become one
of the most important and adept practitioners of
rap/jazz/poetry. Scott-Heron’s contribution to this
art form has been increasingly acknowledged by
recent critics of rap and hip-hop, whose examina-
tion of his reissued albums from the 1970s repre-
sents a corrective to the pronouncement of early
critics who considered his essentially jazz-based
work to be either irrelevant or lateral to the evo-
lution of hip-hop culture. More and more Scott-
Heron’s music and performing style, like that ofScott-Heron, Gil 453