Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
Back on campus I hung out with a lot of guys who were into the jazz heavies, the ones you didn’t hear too often on the radio. We spent a lot of our time supposedly doing our homework, but
really in each other’s rooms checking out the jams—Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock.
I also met Brian Jackson that Fall semester. He was a freshman with classical music training. I was playing keyboards one day and having awful trouble with the sheet music for “God Bless
the Child.” Brian could play that stuff like it was easy. We hooked up in the music room; he showed me some music of his own and I started writing lyrics for it. He and I started writing
songs for a group called Black & Blues, and worked together for quite a while doing songs for this group.
I’d been writing short stories since I was a boy, but it took until I was nineteen or twenty before I got my thoughts together to do a novel; in the same way, I was writing songs all along
but they weren’t very good. But I continued to work on them. By the time I met Brian I was getting more of an idea of what I was going to do.
I managed at least one trip per month to New York City. The Last Poets had their East Wind thing going on, and a couple of guys I knew—the percussionists Charlie Saunders and Isaiah
Washington—went with me to see that whenever I visited. I got to know all the Last Poets, too, because Abiodun Oyewole’s cousin went to Lincoln with me. I thought that they were
bringing a new sound to poetry and to the community, and I enjoyed it. I was a piano player and played with different groups still, and the songs and poems that I had written had a musical tilt to
them because they were compositions as opposed to just poems over rhythms. Their things were a cappella without music. I always had a band, so it was a different sort of thing. But we were trying
to go in the same direction.
One Sunday night in November 1969, as I pulled in through the arch to campus after a weekend in New York, I was met by three guys before I’d even gotten near my dorm. It was Brian along
with two guys from his jazz combo, Carl Cornwell, who played sax, and Leon Clark, the bassist. They were visibly upset and wanted to talk to me.
It turned out the drummer for the band, Ron Colburn, had died Friday night. They’d had a rehearsal that lasted until about midnight, and Ron, who was asthmatic, started having trouble
breathing at the end. His inhaler gave him no relief, so the guys walked him to the infirmary. It was closed. Someone went to the security guard’s office and explained the problem and the
guard let them into the infirmary. There was no oxygen. That meant they had to call the fire department in Oxford, three miles away. Though the ambulance hurried to Lincoln, there was no oxygen
aboard the vehicle, and on the way to the hospital in Avon Grove, Pennsylvania, Ron died.
Brian and the other members of the band saw his death as unnecessary and felt something needed to be done.
So I did it. I closed the school down.
In all honesty, I could never have closed Lincoln by myself. But with equal honesty, I will confess that had the school closing ended in disaster, the blame would have been laid squarely on me.
And I would have accepted it. Not for the sake of heroism or martyrdom, but because it was my idea, and because without the benefit of any elected campus position the pressure brought to bear on
the university administration came from my direction and without any more formal constituency than the one I threw together that Sunday night.
On every campus there are key groups and special people that don’t necessarily hold offices in student government or any organizations but that command respect from the student body. On
Lincoln’s campus at that time, there was one such group I wanted with me and felt I could not move without: the vets.
Lincoln had a group of brothers who were vets on two fronts. These brothers straddled the two Lincolns—they’d begun their quest for a degree under the old-school, all-male system,
gone away to the armed services, and returned to a coed, state-related system that most of them agreed had diminished the tradition of their school. Most of them had chosen to return for
sentimental reasons and because a degree from Lincoln still meant something to them. A lot of them had obligations and responsibilities placed on hold while they closed out the unfinished business
of a degree. In short, they were folks with a lot at stake during this particular school year.
I went to see them first.
Having withdrawn from Lincoln for a year and returned with two books on my résumé gave me a veteran’s image, if not the military service the term implied. I was at least
looked at like something of a Lincoln veteran.
Along with the respect afforded the vets, there was one other tangible advantage to “old head” status. You got to live in Vet Ville, a cluster of barrack-like buildings at the far
west end of the school grounds, behind the old gymnasium, often lost in evening fog.
Meetings were not commonly held in the Vet Ville bunkhouses, but news of Ron’s death and my visit got an interested majority to gather. The wardrobe varied, with some men in pajamas and
bathrobes and others in jeans and the familiar green jackets.
I described as best I could the events that preceded Ron’s death. I also reminded them that during my first year, my next-door neighbor in the freshman dorm had died from an aneurism, and
that another student had died after an accident. I reminded them of “Beaucoup,” an upperclassman who’d had a hernia misdiagnosed, and “Bird” Evans, whose badly broken
ankle was treated as a sprain. My main point was that Lincoln was twice as large as it had been when the current facilities and medical provisions had been deemed adequate. They no longer were.
“So what are you after, Spiderman?” asked a brother standing near the door, using a nickname that had accompanied me from Chelsea.
I passed around a few copies of a list of what I labeled “requests.” There were seven items on the list:
1. | We request that the on-campus medical facility be available twenty-four hours a day. |
2. | That the infirmary undergo a thorough examination by competent medical personnel and security representatives who can quickly assess its status. |
3. | That the recommendations of the person(s) conducting the inventory be accepted ASAP and that a schedule be adopted for bringing our facility supplies up to current community population requirements. |
4. | That Dr. Davies, current on-campus physician, be dismissed. |
5. | That a schedule be organized among all the available medical supplementary personnel to cover the campus responsibilities until a permanent replacement can be found. |
6. | That a fully equipped ambulance be purchased and placed under the jurisdiction of campus security, with a competent driver always on duty with an appropriate license. |
7. | That a new on-campus physician be aggressively sought and hired, whose primary responsibility will be the entire Lincoln community and who therefore will also be aware of coed treatment and sensitive to our new diversity. |
“Hell, you ain’t gonna get all a this,” somebody said quietly and passed the sheet on. “Numbers five, six, and seven.”
“We need them,” I said.
Brian and Carl agreed.
“So what do you want from us,” said another vet.
“I want you guys on the doors to the classroom buildings after breakfast,” I said. “I want you to tell folks there are no classes in the morning and that there’s going to
be a campus meeting in the chapel at ten o’clock. It’s for everybody: teachers, day student commuters, administration folks, everybody.”
I finished with, “I can’t get started without support from down here.”
“And what about after the meeting?”
“There will be no classes until these requests are met.”
“You may get the first.”
“Is it agreed that we need these things?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, but you know what they gon’ say about money.”
“Fees are up, enrollment is doubled. We’re supposed to be state-related,” I cut in.
“All right, Spiderman,” came a baritone from the back of the room, “we’ll work with you in the morning.”
It was one in the morning when I left Vet Ville and headed slowly back to the main campus. I had to consider whether the issues I had numbered were as succinct and well-stated as they needed to
be. It was all kinds of ironic that after a five-hour emotional roller-coaster ride, everything boiled down to my ability as a writer.
As I walked back, I heard the vets chorus of comments ringing in my ears: “You can probably get them first four, maybe, but you can forget them last two or three.”
Well, we’d see. Because none of them were expendable. I knew that good negotiators always included points they could afford to concede. But I wasn’t putting together a package to
negotiate. The whole thing was shaky. There were only thirty students or so out of more than six hundred who knew anything was going on. And only thirty who recognized me as in charge. This was a
hell of a thing, no doubt.
I tried to put together a list of things to do in order of priority. I started to realize what I hadn’t done since I arrived back on campus. I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t had
anything to drink. I hadn’t cracked a book—but that was okay because classes were cancelled at least for tomorrow. Hell, I just plain old hadn’t shaved, showered, smiled, or sat
down to really consider what I was going to do tomorrow. And now, at 1 a.m., it was already tomorrow.
Arriving at the regular dorms, I took the stairs up to Eddie’s room two at a time. There was a whisper of marijuana squeezing its way down the hall, mixing with the dampness of two
thousand rainy nights that had soaked into the floor and the walls of the old dorm like that forgotten first coat of paint, now inseparable from the wood. I heard something by Miles on the box,
something slow and thoughtful and lonely. Something Miles could do without trying, maybe because he was that way.
I knocked, entered, flipped out a cigarette, and passed Eddie my list on my way to a chair in the corner. The room was full, like on the nights when the NBA was playing or a Monday night
football game was on. Eddie’s room, with a larger than usual common room, had become the meeting place. Eddie passed the paper on and nodded at me.
“We need to organize how this chapel thing is going to go,” I finally said.
Everybody shifted in their seats. I could see tired and serious and thoughtful and sad on brothers’ faces. I could feel it in the room.
“We need to get in touch with Ron’s folks, too. See what we can do. Anybody talk to them yet?”
Carl said yes. That was good. I’d rather have fought the vets than do that.
There are so many divisions and subdivisions on a college campus that it is probably a social miracle when the whole community is pulling in the same direction, everybody wanting the same thing.
The next morning, when I walked to the podium at the chapel, it was way over its capacity of two hundred. It was standing room only, with people jammed all along the back and in the aisles.
I was as brief and devoid of drama as possible. This was not an occasion to try to whip up waves of emotion. The truth was dramatic enough. The third brother to die in two years at Lincoln was
being buried in a couple of days. These deaths served to highlight the fact that the facilities at the isolated old school had not kept pace with its growth.
I reviewed the incidents that had magnified the shortcomings of Lincoln’s health services. I described the three young men, two classmates and a fellow musician. I took care not to attach
blame for the tragedies. But then I listed the specific mistakes made in diagnoses and treatment, and said this pattern was no longer acceptable. I then suggested that a complete boycott of classes
would minimize the potential for injury or illness while allowing the administration to concentrate on our requests. I announced that this boycott would remain in effect until further notice. In
conclusion, I read the seven requests, told the assembly that they could collect a copy on their way out, and assured them that everyone would be kept abreast of progress made in these areas. Then
I expressed a confidence—that I did not feel—that these adjustments would be made quickly and that we would all be back on our regular schedules soon. Then I asked them all to leave the
chapel slowly—repeating the need to avoid anyone getting hurt.
Obviously I could not and would not even try to handle the responsibility for the entire campus. The more positions I delegated to other people, the more folks would participate. Let me note
that there was no formal student government, and if there had been I’m sure folks would have been more focused on what would have been seen as my coup d’état than on my list of
requests. As it was, I had to admit that I had no mandate, and that there had only been the vets standing at the doors of the classroom buildings and my standing on the chapel stage to suggest I
was in charge.
Finally, however, it was the reaction of the powers that be that cemented my precarious perch as the voice, if not the head, of the student body. A schedule was posted that afternoon listing the
nurses who would be in the infirmary from midnight until the regular 8 a.m. opening. On Tuesday morning Dr. Warren Smith, the school psychiatrist, arrived and let it be known that he would be
conducting a review of the infirmary inventory and making recommendations for upgrading the supplies. One, two, and three.
I resisted the opportunity to ring the chapel bell and announce that we were almost halfway home. I went to dinner instead and then back to Eddie’s room. After all, the vets had conceded
the first three points would be met. The rest would be more difficult.
I went to talk to Dr. Smith as he moved around the supply room in the infirmary, opening first one cabinet and then another, noting what he found. He was a large, friendly bear of a man with a
bald spot and graying hair. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, since he had approved my request to take the year off. I wanted to ask him what he thought of what was going on; I wanted to
ask him for suggestions on how best to approach the top people, the university president and the dean. He would also know where the money was and who had it. In the end, this was always going to be
about money.