Dick Gregory shattered the mold on stage and off
Satirist and ‘ freedom fighter’ was a pioneer in comedy, civil rights and social activism
No barrier went unbusted by Dick Gregory.
The comic trailblazer and civil rights activist, who died Saturday at age 84, became one of the first black comedians to find mainstream success with white audiences in the early 1960s. And he refused to take a back seat to anyone.
“He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight. He taught us how to live,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote on Twitter when he heard the news. “Dick Gregory was committed to justice. Imiss him already.”
Gregory worked until the end, interrupting an East Coast tour when he was admitted a week ago to Washington’s Sibley Memorial Hospital with symptoms of heart failure. He died there surrounded by his family, including his wife of 58 years, Lillian.
His longtime publicist, Steve Jaffe, noted that Gregory worked 300 dates a year “and was still going strong right up to the end.”
While comics such as Bill Cosby gave praise on Twitter (“He was FEARLESS,” Cosby wrote), the Rev. Al Sharpton weighed in on Gregory’s social importance, calling him “a true, committed, and consistent freedom fighter.”
Gregory rose from an impoverished childhood in St. Louis to become a celebrated satirist who deftly commented on racial divisions at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
He began performing comedy while in the Army but got his first big break in 1961 with a 15- minute tryout at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in Chicago.
“I pushed this white boy out of the way and ran up there and got on stage,” he told CBS’ 48 Hours in 2017. “Two hours later, they called Hefner. And Hefner came by and they went out of their mind. Out of their mind!” The big comedy show in that era was Tonight Starring Jack Paar, where “white comics could sit on the couch; a black comic couldn’t,” Gregory told CBS.
So when Paar’s producer called a few months later with an invitation to appear on his show, renamed The Jack
Paar Program, Gregory hung up. “And then the phone rang again. It’s Jack Paar,” he said. “‘ Dick Gregory, this is Mr. Paar. How come you don’t wanna work my show?’ I said, ‘’ Cause the Negroes never sit down.’ ‘ Well, come on in, I’ll let you sit down.’ And that’s how it happened. I came in, did my act, went to sit on the couch. It was sitting on the couch that made my salary grow in three weeks — from $ 250 working seven days a week to $ 5,000 a night.”
He ran for president in 1968 as the Peace and Freedom party candidate after Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an avowed segregationist, entered the race. Richard Nixon won the election, but Gregory received 50,000 write- in votes.
“I chose to be an agitator,” Gregory told 60 Minutes in 1989. “The next time you put your underwear in the washing machine, take the agitator out, and all you’re going to end up with are some dirty, wet drawers.”