Dick Gregory
Black satirist who stood up to the Ku Klux Klan and once stood for President of the United States
DICK GREGORY, who has died aged 84, was the first, and greatest, black American satirist of the modern age, and an inspiration to younger comedians such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock. Gregory’s crucial break came when he was booked to appear at Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Club in Chicago in December 1961. When he arrived at the venue, Heffner’s manager, Victor Lownes, who had learned that the room had been rented to an allsouthern, all-male, all-white gathering of frozen-food entrepreneurs, was blocking his way. “He told me I’d be paid but that I mustn’t perform, for my own safety,” Gregory recalled. “I pushed him aside and walked on, still in my street clothes.”
The comedian had barely reached the microphone when a refrigerator salesman from Alabama stood up and shouted, “Nigger”. Gregory told the heckler that he received a $50 bonus every time this happened, and urged the entire audience to get to their feet and call him by that name. He added that he had recently opened an eponymous restaurant nearby. “So just remember – any time you use that word, you’ll be advertising my place.”
Invited by another heckler to travel down and see how warm a reception he would receive in [the KKK stronghold of ] Mobile, Alabama, Gregory responded: “Mobile? I won’t even work the south of this room.”
He left to an ovation. “From that moment on,” a Newsweek reporter declared, “the Jim Crow school of humour was dead.”
Within two years Gregory was a major star. He banked a $200,000 advance for his first autobiography in 1963. “The publishers wanted something light,” he said. I called the book, Nigger. It has never been out of print.”
As well as being a gifted stand-up performer, Gregory was an outstanding track athlete who in later life served as dietitian to Mohammed Ali. John Lennon said that it was a prayer book given to him by Gregory that inspired him to write Imagine.
Most significant of all was Gregory’s contribution to the Civil Rights movement. A close friend of Martin Luther King, Gregory became the first black man in history to stand in the final round of a US presidential election, in 1968. At the height of the riots in Watts, Los Angeles, in December 1965, he had famously walked out into the vacant area between rioters and the police line. He had advanced only a few yards when he was shot in the leg, apparently by a black civilian. “I was hit,” he recalled, “but I kept on walking. I yelled out: “Alright, goddammit, you shot me. Now go home.”
When the possibility of a black astronaut was first mooted, he told a Boston audience: “We made it from the back of the bus to the Moon. Now the hard part – getting him [down through the Southern states] to Cape Canaveral.”
The second of six children, Dick Gregory was born in St Louis on October 12 1932. His father was mostly absent and, when home, drunk and abusive. As a boy Dick shined shoes in a whites-only bar. “One day,” he recalled, “I was cleaning this lady’s shoes. I heard this man say: ‘Take your hand off that white woman’s leg, boy.’ Then he kicked me in the mouth and broke my front teeth. He told me never to come back. I was nine.”
He won an athletics scholarship to southern Illinois University as a mile runner. After graduation he moved to Chicago where he began working in comedy clubs, supplementing his income with menial jobs.
His genial manner belied a certain steel. Before he gave up smoking, drinking and eating meat in the late 1960s, Gregory was known as somebody it was unwise to provoke, and the enthusiastic reception he had received from the liberal press at the start of his career cooled as he became increasingly galvanised by civil rights abuses in the Southern states.
He became a central figure in the protests dedicated to ending segregation in schools and enforcing black citizens’ right to vote, and he and his wife Lil – the mother of their 10 surviving children – were jailed on more than 50 occasions in Washington DC alone.
Shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King, he led marches aimed at encouraging the registration of black voters for the 1964 elections, during which participants were beaten, murdered and framed. He suffered “the worst whipping of my life” in May 1963 after King’s march against school segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, during which young children were beaten and locked up. “Ten feet from me I saw this five-year-old girl with her head busted open by a brick,” he recalled. “You ain’t never seen nothing in your life until you see a five-year kid get hit by a grown man with a brick.”
By 1964 Gregory’s comedy career was foundering as promoters became too frightened to hire him, but by the late Sixties he had established a thriving parallel career as a dietitian.
His first meeting with John Lennon occurred after the singer asked him to devise a diet to help him withdraw from drugs and alcohol. “He called me,” Gregory recalled, “and told me to come to Holland, where he said he was ‘living in a cave’. To me, a cave was a dark place where bats hang out. John’s cave looked like Buckingham Palace.”
By the 1970s, Gregory was acting as personal diet coach to Muhammad Ali, and can be seen in Leon Gast’s 1996 film When We Were Kings, which documents the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle”. Ali’s victory over George Foreman in that fight is rendered no less remarkable by the fact that he had embraced the Dick Gregory Diet, an alarming regime involving litres of vegetable juice, powdered kelp, raw broccoli and thrice-weekly enemas.
Gregory regularly fasted for 40 days at a time to publicise world famine. For two-and- a-half years he ate no solid food as a protest against the Vietnam War. He was still following this regime when he completed several longdistance “protest runs”,.
In his later years, despite increasing problems from memory loss, Gregory continued to appear on stage, often accompanied by his daughter Ayanna.
Dick Gregory, born October 12 1932, died August 19 2017