Scott La Rock

Scott Monroe Sterling was born on the second of March 1962 in the Bronx, New York City. He came of age in a municipal working household — his mother, Carolyn Morant, was a city employee — and his parents separated when he was still a small child. Even so, the young Scott grew into a disciplined and ambitious student, carrying himself with the steadiness that would later draw others to his side.

He graduated from Our Saviour Lutheran High School in 1980 and went on to Castleton State College in Vermont, where he earned a varsity letter in basketball. Returning to the Bronx, he took work as a social worker at the Franklin Avenue Armory Men's Shelter, serving the very neighborhoods that had shaped him. It was there, amid that daily labor of care, that he met a sharp young resident named Kris Parker — KRS-One — and recognized a kindred creative fire.

Together with DJ D-Nice, the two formed Boogie Down Productions. As producer and DJ, Scott La Rock gave the crew its sound, and in 1987 they released Criminal Minded, an album now honored as one of the foundational works of hip-hop. His turntables and instincts helped set a template that generations of artists would build upon.

On the twenty-seventh of August 1987, at only twenty-five, Scott La Rock was fatally shot in the South Bronx while trying to defuse a dispute — an act of the peacemaking that had defined his working life. His loss moved KRS-One to launch the Stop the Violence Movement. A builder, a caretaker, and a founding architect of a new music, Scott La Rock is honored still.