Gil Scott

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Send to friendMade it his mission to educate the mainstream about African Americans

Gil Scott discovered Harlem in 1963. He was a reporter at the time with The Associated Press, working in the New York bureau. Born and raised in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, he had never ventured to Harlem as a kid or even young adult. And here he was covering the area's most exciting times: Riots, the black power movement, Malcolm X's speeches and conferences.

"No day was like the day before," says Scott.

While covering Malcolm X he witnessed the gentle side of the fiery orator who spoke on Harlem street corners. Folks listened with rapt attention, but Scott says many were more interested in his emphasis on black self empowerment than on the Nation of Islam's spiritual teachings.

Malcolm was the first since Marcus Garvey to talk about black self-help, Scott says.

When Malcolm spoke after President Kennedy's assassination, calling it an instance of the "chickens coming home to roost," Scott reported it.

"He knew reporters were there," Scott recalls. "He didn"t gloat about it. He stated it as fact. I understand what he was saying: with all the killings of blacks, now it's coming back, killing their own. That comment changed his life."

The statement was a culmination of incidents that led to Malcolm's ouster from the Nation of Islam. In 1965 he was assassinated in the Audobon Ball Room. Gil Scott, who had been assigned to chronicle Malcolm?¢‚Ǩ¬¢?ɂǨ1?É?°2s every move said it was clear his life was in peril. Scott, however, was vacationing in the Caribbean when Malcolm was killed.

Scott spent seven years at The AP, where he mastered quick turn-arounds, dictating stories and breaking news. It was a long crooked route to this point.

At the age of 10, he had decided reporting was his calling. He read about it in a book on careers. The pay wasn't great, this he knew, but the chance to write and discover intrigued him. His mother read newspapers and magazines voraciously. He remembers reading a piece by muckraker Lincoln Steffens, and deciding then a there, reporting was the profession for him.

He attended Adelphi College on a basketball scholarship and studied English and literature. When he finished, he set out to find a reporting job.

"I was na?ɬØve," he says. "I didn"t think there were any obstacles (to becoming a reporter). I quickly learned this was not going to be easy. Scott broke in through the side, working as a mail clerk at CBS and later as a desk assistant rewriting wire copy. In the middle of his climb up the ladder he was called to a post as an Army reservist. When he returned he got a job a sportswriter with a paper in White Plains, N.Y. Afraid of being pigeonholed as a sports writer, he quit without having a job lined up. He went a couple of years without a reporting job. In the meantime he took a few courses at Columbia University.

He covered the suburbs for a year or so at the Newark News and in 1963 went to The AP. But he tired of the grind and the lack of opportunity to write stylistically.

He got an opportunity to work in the New York bureau of the Christian Science Monitor. The pay wasn't hot, but he cherished the chance to write for a global audience ?¢‚Ǩ' the Christian Science Monitor had 250,000 world-wide circulation. Many of its readers were policy makers and national leaders.

"At the monitor I wrote about what I wanted to," he says. "I wrote for the front page. I wrote essays."

He stayed at the Christian Science Monitor for three years, and went on to taught at the university level, sat on the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and freelanced for such magazines as Black Enterprise.

Like other black reporters of his time, Scott made it his mission to educate the mainstream about African American lifestyles, culture and their varied social-political ideas.

"We were not only there to report the news that was going on, but to give people a chance to see how other people (blacks) live," he says. "They were doing the same kinds of things: That we had bright, articulate, smart people, talented people."

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