COMEDIAN, ACTIVIST GREGORY DEAD AT 84
Dick Gregory, who became the first black stand-up comic to break the color barrier in major nightclubs in the early 1960s, a decade in which he satirized segregation and race relations in his act and launched his lifetime commitment to civil rights and other social justice issues, died Sunday. He was 84.
His death was confirmed on his official social media accounts by his family.
“It is with enormous sadness that the Gregory family confirms that their father, comedic legend and civil rights activist Mr. Dick Gregory departed this earth tonight in Washington, D.C.,” his son Christian Gregory wrote.
Even before the confirmation from the family, Rev. Jesse Jackson, a longtime friend of Gregory’s, had memorialized him in a tweet:
“He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight. He taught us how to live. Dick Gregory was committed to justice. I miss him already.”
In a life that began in poverty in St. Louis during the Depression, the former Southern Illinois University track star became known as an author, lecturer, nutrition guru and self-described agitator who marched, ran and fasted to call attention to issues ranging from police brutality to world famine.
An invitation from civil rights leader Medgar Evers to speak at voter registration rallies in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 launched Gregory into what he called “the civil rights fight.”
He was frequently arrested for his activities in the ’60s, and once spent five days in jail in Birmingham, Ala.., after joining demonstrators in 1963 at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Gregory, who was shot in the leg while trying to help defuse the Watts riots in 1965, made a failed run for mayor of Chicago as a write-in candidate in 1967. A year later, he ran for president as a write-in candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter group of the Peace and Freedom Party. Hunter S. Thompson was one of his most vocal supporters. In the late ’60s, he began going on 40-day fasts to protest the Vietnam War.
But before Dick Gregory the activist, there was Dick Gregory the comedian.
He was a struggling 28-year-old stand-up comic in Chicago who had launched his career in small black clubs when he received a lifechanging, last-minute phone call from his agent in January 1961: The prestigious Playboy Club in Chicago needed someone to fill in.
What was supposed to be a 55-minute show, Gregory later recalled, went on for about 1 hour and 40 minutes. And by the time he walked off stage, the audience gave him a thundering ovation.
From his success at the Playboy Club, which a Newsweek writer later observed marked the death of Jim Crow “in the joke world,” Gregory’s career quickly snowballed.