A passionate comedian
An invitation to appear on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar was not something any aspiring entertainer could afford to turn down in 1961.
Dick Gregory had dreamt of being a guest on the popular American television talk show, but at first spurned the offer when it came.
Gregory believed that Paar let black people perform, but never invited them for an interview.
When a producer called, he turned down the opportunity on principle and began crying out of disappointment after hanging up.
Paar rang back and said that Gregory was welcome to sit for a chat.
He did the show and became nationally famous as a stand-up comedian with biting observational satire who was popular with white and black audiences.
He was an inspiration to other African-American comedians, including Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Gregory’s was a distinctly American tale of possibility and prejudice.
As he wrote in one of his books: ‘‘Where else would I have to ride on the back of the bus, have a choice of going to the worst schools, eating in the worst restaurants, living in the worst neighbourhoods – and average $5000 a week just talking about it?’’
Paar wanted him because Gregory had become a hot property during a stint at the Playboy Club in Chicago, which started in unpromising circumstances.
Covering for the regular act, Gregory arrived flustered after a difficult journey to find an audience of white frozen-food executives visiting from the South.
Advised not to go on stage for his own safety, he insisted on performing – in part because he had no money for the bus fare home.
Despite some heckling he proved a hit with gags such as, ‘‘I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night’’, and ‘‘A Southern liberal? That’s a guy that’ll lynch you from a low tree’’.
Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder, gave Gregory a contract and the press took notice, viewing his success as a breakthrough.
Gregory honed a style that was provocative without being offensive.
Some of his quips became renowned, including one about the Southern waitress who told him: ‘‘We don’t serve coloured people here.’’
He replied: ‘‘That’s all right, I don’t eat coloured people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’’
Taking part in a voting rights march in Mississippi in 1962 inspired his evolution from wry commentator to committed civil rights campaigner.
His stand-up career became secondary to his activism.
Often arrested and beaten by police at demonstrations against racism, he was shot in the leg while calling for calm during the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965.
He knew Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X and sang backing vocals on Give Peace a Chance after attending the 1969 ‘‘bed-in’’ with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal.
The second of six children, Richard Claxton Gregory was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1932.
He grew up in poverty with Presley, an often-absent father, and his mother, Lucille, who was a maid.
While studying at Southern Illinois University, where he excelled in athletics, but did not graduate, he was drafted into the US army.
After leaving the military in the mid-1950s he launched his comedy career.
He met his future wife, Lillian, a former secretary, in Chicago and they were married in 1959.
He is survived by her and 10 of their 11 children.
Gregory was frequently away, but insisted that his absence did not harm their development.
Christian is a chiropractor; Ayanna is a singer.
Their twin daughters were named Pamela Inte and Paula Gration.
Another daughter was christened Miss so that white people would always sound respectful when they said her name.
He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Chicago and made a quixotic bid for president against Richard Nixon in 1968 as a candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party.
‘‘The first thing I would do is paint the White House black,’’ he said.
He only received about 47,000 votes, but his campaign rattled J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, who saw him as a dangerous radical.
Gregory said that he quit the entertainment industry when he could no longer handle performing in smoky, boozy venues – quite a shift for a man who liked a drink and was rarely seen without a cigarette in his right hand during his routines.
Previously overweight, he went on hunger strikes for social change and specific causes, including in protest against the Vietnam War.
He travelled to Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 and met Ayatollah Khomeini.
Another fast was in support of Michael Jackson, to whom he acted as an adviser before the pop star’s child abuse trial in 2005.
He became a vegetarian and started a nutritional venture, Dick Gregory’s Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, peddling a vegan weight-loss powder.
While the business was initially lucrative, Gregory fell on hard times, then had lymphoma.
His recovery, he believed, was a result of his diet and exercise regimen.
In recent years, trim and with a big white beard, he propagated conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Lennon.
Gregory was on the road until falling ill a few days before his death.
‘‘We have so much work still to be done,’’ he said in a statement from hospital shortly after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Times, London