Dick Gregory

Comedian

• Born: October 12, 1932
• Place of birth: Saint Louis, Missouri
• Died: August 19, 2017
• Place of death: Washington, DC

Activist, entertainer, and writer

A comedian and an activist for civil and human rights, Gregory was at the forefront of the civil rights movement. He also was devoted to feeding the world’s poor and malnourished, often enduring extended fasts to call attention to the plight of the hungry.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment: comedy; Philanthropy; Social issues

Early Life

Richard Claxton Gregory was the second of six children born to Lucille and Presley Gregory in Saint Louis, Missouri. Gregory and his brothers and sisters were raised by their mother; his father, “Big Prez,” visited his family only on rare occasions. Lucille Gregory worked in the homes of local white families and often depended on the charity of the local community and white storekeepers. The Gregory children often fended for themselves and frequently went hungry.

Gregory was an above-average student and popular with his classmates. He learned early on that it was difficult for people to be angry with him if he could make them laugh. His winning personality charmed his fellow students, who elected him class president his senior year in high school. He also was an outstanding athlete who held records in the mile run. At local track meets, Gregory earned the nickname “Flagpole” for his habit of saluting the flag as he came around the final turn before the finish line of the race. He was disappointed to learn that his school records did not appear in the official record books, because the records of black athletes were not recognized unless they were set during competition against white athletes. In his first foray into activism, Gregory led the movement that helped end this practice.

After high school, Gregory won an athletic scholarship to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he continued to be a track star and was named the university’s outstanding athlete in 1953. Despite Gregory’s success, he was not allowed to go into white stores to shop or to sit in the lower section of the local movie theater. After a couple of years in college, Gregory was drafted into the Army in 1954. He found that he and the Army were not a good fit, but he was able to use his wit to get out of kitchen duty. He won a spot in an Army talent show at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1955. Although he did not win first prize, an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Gregory honed his comic timing on the stages of local black bars.

After his discharge from the Army in the spring of 1956, Gregory returned to Carbondale to continue his education. However, he became disillusioned with his prospects for success. He left Carbondale and caught a bus to Chicago to live with his brother Presley.

Life’s Work

Gregory worked odd jobs in Chicago until one night when he wandered into a club, heard a stale comedy routine, and thought he could do better. He paid the master of ceremonies (MC, or emcee) five dollars and took the stage. The next weekend, he did the same thing at a different club, and soon he was offered a job as an emcee himself. Gregory began to seriously study what made people laugh. He tried out jokes on his friends, noting the gags they thought were funniest.

Gregory met Lillian Smith, a small-town girl from Ohio working as a secretary at the University of Chicago. With her financial help, he rented an old, rundown club in Robbins, Illinois, just outside Chicago. The Apex Club, open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, was Gregory’s first attempt at running his own business. Gregory and Lillian married in 1959, while he continued to struggle to make the business a success. The club was a victim of the Chicago weather, as weekend winter storms kept customers away. By the time the club’s attendance started to grow, it was too late; Gregory was behind in his bills. He lost the club in the summer of 1959.

In January 1961, Gregory’s big break finally came. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in Chicago needed a comic to fill in at the last minute. Gregory borrowed a quarter from his landlord, got on the wrong bus, and found himself twenty blocks from the club. After running through the streets of Chicago, he arrived out of breath and perspiring heavily. The club manager told him to forget about the show because the audience was full of southern white men in town for a convention. Gregory took the stage anyway, and he got a standing ovation. Hefner caught the second show that night and signed Gregory to a three-year deal.

Soon Gregory was appearing on Tonight Starring Jack Paar (later The Jack Paar Tonight Show) and The David Susskind Show and signing five-figure deals for comedy albums. He met and shared the stage with legends such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny. As his celebrity grew, Gregory found himself performing at benefits for groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He also performed at prisons.

In late 1962, Gregory received a call from Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers invited Gregory to speak in Jackson to aid the cause of voter registration. Gregory had reservations about speaking in the Deep South, and he admitted to being afraid to make the trip. However, as Gregory got to know Evers, James Meredith, and other civil rights workers in Mississippi, he found himself caught up in their cause. In February 1963, Gregory helped deliver fourteen thousand pounds of food to residents of Greenwood, Mississippi. The project was his first in a long string of efforts to aid the poor and hungry. The next day was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and Gregory and Lillian were invited to the White House by President John F. Kennedy to mark the occasion.

In May 1963, Gregory joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s marchers in Birmingham, Alabama. He spent five days in the Birmingham jail as a result of the protest. He began to alternate his activist commitments with his comedy engagements. Gregory preferred gigs at clubs such as the Hungy I in San Francisco, where sympathetic managers would allow him to fly to Memphis, Atlanta, Jackson, or wherever he was needed. It was during this period that Gregory and Lillian lost their first son, Richard Jr. The child’s death was a shock to the couple, but they immersed themselves in the civil rights movement.

Evers was shot dead outside his Mississippi home in July 1963, in the first of a series of assassinations that rocked the country during the 1960s. Only a few months later, Kennedy was killed in Dallas. The shootings of King, Malcolm X, Meredith, and Robert F. Kennedy followed within the next five years. Gregory saw men with whom he had worked closely and developed personal relationships gunned down. The movement’s leaders were not the only ones to suffer, however. In Birmingham in September 1963, four young girls were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed. Gregory attended their funeral services.

Gregory was present for the March on Washington in August 1963, and he heard King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in person. In Selma, Alabama; Watts, California; Chicago; and numerous marches on Washington, Gregory and Lillian and their children walked the picket lines, went to jail, and lived to see great changes. As Gregory wrote in his memoir Callus on My Soul (2000), “We have gone from ‘n——’ to ‘colored,’ from ‘colored’ to ‘Negro,’ from ‘Negro’ to ‘black,’ and ‘black’ to ‘African American.’”

Becoming more nutritionally conscious in his later career, Gregory also attempted to get into the diet and nutrition industry to promote vegetarian and raw-food diets, partnering with a Swedish health food company in the 1980s to create a weight-loss powder. Returning to performing stand-up comedy to some extent in the 1990s, he also continued to voice his opinions regarding US policies and events, staging several more fasting periods, such as the one he declared in 2010 to protest the official accounts of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as false. In 2016, he released the well-received studio comedy album You Don't Know Dick, and the following year, his last book, Defining Moments in Black History: Reading between the Lies, was published to critical acclaim.

After several hospitalizations due to an undisclosed illness, Gregory died on August 19, 2017, in Washington, DC, at the age of eighty-four. He was survived by his wife, three sons, and seven daughters.

Significance

The author of numerous books, including three volumes of memoirs, Gregory wrote firsthand accounts of America’s great protest marches of the 1960s and beyond. Few people have achieved so much in so many diverse fields. A gifted athlete, Gregory fought against discrimination and segregation in his school and community. Possessed of a gift for making people laugh, he became a popular nightclub entertainer and lecturer on college campuses. His battles on behalf of the poor, disenfranchised, hungry, and mistreated took him from the stage to the streets. Gregory’s fasting and nonviolent means of protest showed that change can be achieved through gentle persistence and humor.

Bibliography

Burroughs, Todd Steven. “Dick Gregory, to the Left.” New York Amsterdam News, 12–18 Apr. 2001, pp. 18+. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=4362230&site=ehost-live. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

"Dick Gregory: 50 Years after the Watts Riots." MSNBC, NBC Universal, 13 Aug. 2015, www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/dick-gregory-50-years-after-the-watts-riots-504407619521. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016

Gregory, Dick. Callus on My Soul: A Memoir. With Sheila P. Moses, Longstreet Press, 2000.

Gregory, Dick. N——: An Autobiography. With Robert Lipsyte, E. P. Dutton, 1964.

Gregory, Dick. Up from N——. With James R. McGraw, Stein & Day, 1976.

Haberman, Clyde. "Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle." The New York Times, 19 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts/dick-gregory-dies-at-84.html. Accessed 7 Sept. 2017.

Haygood, Wil. "The Pain and Passion of Dick Gregory." The Boston Globe, 24 Aug. 2000. Common Dreams, www.commondreams.org/views/2000/08/24/pain-and-passion-dick-gregory. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016.

Salaam, Yusef. “Politically Correct: Dick Gregory.” New York Amsterdam News, 18–24 Oct. 2001, pp. 21+.

Williams, Brennan. "Dick Gregory Talks the N-Word, Impact of Empire vs. The Cosby Show." HuffPost, 23 Mar. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/23/dick-gregory-n-word-empire-the-cosby-show‗n‗6924628.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.