U.S. activist fought prejudice with humour
Entertainment trailblazer lent his immense talents to the fight for social justice
Dick Gregory, the pioneering Black satirist who transformed cool humour into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to assorted social causes, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.
Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.
Early in his career, Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change white America. “Humour can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,” he said.
Nonetheless, white people who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the United States’ shameful racial history.
Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to white people — a crossover star, in contrast to veteran Black comedians such as Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley and Slappy White, whose earthy humour was mainly confined to Black clubs.
Though he clearly seethed over the repression of Black people, he resorted to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms such as the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.
He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a threebutton suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror and to laugh at itself.
“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.”
Some lines became classics, such as the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve coloured people here,” to which Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat coloured people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records such as In Living Black and White and Dick Gregory Talks Turkey. He wrote the first of his dozen books in 1964 and Time magazine ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s Tonight Show host, had him as a guest — after Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, Black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.
Newspapers in those days routinely put Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of Black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.
It was Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lay power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children.
“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,” he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,” he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.”
In 1962, Gregory joined a demonstration for Black voting rights in Mississippi. He then threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.
Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.
“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,” Gerald Nachman wrote in Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s published in 2003.
Some pillars of the movement, such as Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, who died in1971, believed that Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.”
In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin moustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.
There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.
In later years, with his best days behind him, he never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:
“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a coloured funny man, not a funny coloured man.”
Richard Claxton Gregory was born in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He married Lillian Smith in 1959 and had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.
“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a coloured funny man, not a funny coloured man.” DICK GREGORY