What made Gregory run?
Comedian, civil rights activist and writer was a man of the people
Dick Gregory was an outright hoot. The comedian and activist, who died Aug. 19 at age 84, couldn’t have been conjured up by any author, though Chester Himes or Langston Hughes might have come close if they had tried. The age of vaudeville would have loved him.
It was in the summer of 2000 when I first met Gregory, having come to Washington from Boston to write about him.
Many thought he was dying. He was down to 130 pounds.
He had been diagnosed with lymphoma. When I entered the house where he was staying, it suddenly seemed as if I was meeting one of those people you imagine you’d never meet, someone who belonged to newsreel footage mostly. But there he stood, quite bony, eyes sparkling. The Abe Lincoln beard looked a little unkempt. You couldn’t help but feel sad for him. He was famous, and infamous. And dying.
He had given me an address, and told me to meet him there at 4:30 — “in the morning.” I thought the comedian was joking. He was not. He also told me to bring a pair of sneakers.
The next morning I found myself inside a house not far from Rock Creek Park. Gregory came bounding down the stairs. “Hey, baby.” That’s how he talked, like a Motown soul singer.
He was crashing at this house. Through the years, people had liked putting him up. After all, he was Dick Gregory, the raconteur of the civil rights movement, the interpreter of modern-day U.S. politics and a one-time presidential candidate. So he slept on sofas, in sleeping bags, on floors.
A driver dropped us off at Rock Creek Park. The morning darkness worried me a bit. Hmm, muggers?
“Dick Gregory!” Some fool had been out running at this ungodly hour. “Hey, baby,” Gregory responded. “How you doin’? OK now. OK.” It was that kind of soulful clipped patter common to black folk. “Mr. Gregory!” “Hi, sweetie.” We kept moving. I wondered if the running had become a recent activity for him. He said he had been running since high school. He had been a cross-country runner. “The great thing about running the long distance,” he said, “is you run at your integrity. Running made me forget I was poor.” “Oh my God, it’s Dick Gregory.” “How y’all doin’?” Before the sun came up in Rock Creek Park, he had me laughing out loud. There were a good many stories about his peripatetic life. Funny stories about white people, black people, southern sheriffs and the CIA, whose agents he described as “spooks.”
His political career was, well, interesting. He ran for mayor of Chicago against the big bad wolves of the Daley machine. He didn’t stand a chance, was crushed and decided he needed to set his goals higher.
When he launched his run for the White House, he got fan mail — though there were also letters suggesting he check himself into Bellevue, a mental hospital. To boost his presidential ambitions, he printed fake U.S. currency with his picture on it. Agents from the Treasury Department didn’t think that was funny at all, and arrested him.
The politically inspired shenanigans of the official government — wiretapping civil rights leaders, for instance — had sparked Gregory’s mind so much he became, as the years rolled by, a champion conspiracy theorist. “I woke up with power,” he said with a straight face, referring to the election in which Richard Nixon won in a landslide.
The stories kept coming once his jog through Rock Creek Park had ended. He once drove a Rolls-Royce. That was when the money from the comedy gigs and his trenchant autobiography was very good. Then the money wasn’t so good and the repo man came knocking on the door. He moved his family to a farm in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1970s. Money woes continued.
But then in the ’90s, he found new respect, a diet plan bonanza, more speaking engagements and new respect from chroniclers of the civil rights movement for the bravery he had shown.
It was sometime last spring when I had my last conversation with Gregory. I hadn’t seen him since the election. “What did I tell you?” he said. “About what?” I said. He was whispering again. “Trump. I told you. It was all in the cards. The FBI, the CIA.”
I couldn’t help but to hug him before leaving his side.