Dick Gregory


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Dick Gregory
Dick Gregory in 1964
Dick Gregory in 1964
Born October 12, 1932 (1932-10-12) (age 76)
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Medium Stand-up, film, books
Nationality American
Years active 1956 - Present
Genres Satire/Political satire, Observational comedy
Subject(s) American civil rights, American politics, American culture, African-American culture, racism, race relations, vegetarianism, healthy diet
Influences Mort Sahl
Influenced Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Nichols and May, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock
Notable works and roles In Living Black and White
Nigger: An Autobiography
Write Me In!
Website www.dickgregory.com

Dick Gregory (born Richard Claxton Gregory on October 12, 1932) is an American comedian, social activist, writer and entrepreneur.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Dick Gregory is an influential American comic who has used his performance skills to convey to both white and black audiences his political message on civil rights. Influenced to stand up for civil rights by his early surroundings of poverty and violence, Gregory became the first comedian to successfully perform for both black and white audiences.[citation needed]

Contents

Overview

Early life

As a poor student who excelled at running, Gregory was aided by teachers at Sumner High School such as Warren St. James and earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University Carbondale.[1] There he set records as a half-miler and miler. His college career was interrupted by two years in the U.S. Army where he got his start in comedy, entering and winning several Army talent shows at the urging of his commanding officer, who had taken notice of his penchant for joking.

Career

After completing military service, he performed as a comedian in small, primarily black nightclubs while working for the United States Postal Service during the daytime. In 1961, while working at the Black-owned Roberts Show Bar in Chicago, he was hired by Hugh Hefner to work at the Chicago Playboy Club after Hefner heard him wow a largely-white audience with the following routine:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken."
Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin'. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, "Line up, boys!" [1]

Active in the civil rights movement, he came to Selma, Alabama and spoke for two hours on a public platform two days before the voter registration drive known as "Freedom Day" (October 7, 1963) (Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train [Beacon Press, 1994; rev. ed. 2002], p. 58).

Dick Gregory's first TV appearance was on the Jack Paar late night show. He soon began appearing nationally and on television and his 1964 autobiography, Nigger, has sold ten million copies. At the same time, he became more involved in struggles for civil rights, activism against the American War in Vietnam, economic reform, anti-drug issues, conspiracy theories, and others. As a part of his activism, he went on several hunger strikes. Gregory began his political career by running against Richard J. Daley for the mayoralty of Chicago in 1967. Though he did not emerge victorious, this would not prove to be the end of Dick Gregory's dalliances with electoral politics.

Gregory unsuccessfully ran for President of the United States in 1968 as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, which had broken off from the Peace and Freedom Party. He won 47,097 votes (including one from Hunter S. Thompson) with fellow activist Mark Lane as his running mate in some states, David Frost in others, garnering more than the party he had left.[2] The Freedom and Peace Party also ran other candidates, including Beulah Sanders for New York State Senate and Flora Brown for New York State Assembly.[3] His efforts landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.

He then wrote Write Me In about his presidential campaign. One interesting anecdote in the book related the story of a publicity stunt which came out of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago where the campaign had printed $1 bills with Gregory's image on them. Some of these bills made it into circulation in cash transactions causing considerable problems, but priceless publicity.

The majority of these bills were quickly seized by the Federal Govt. A large contributing factor to the seizure came from the bills resembling authentic US currency enough that they worked in many dollar cashing machines of the time. Gregory avoided being charged with a federal crime, later joking that the bills couldn’t really be considered US currency because everyone knows a black man will never be on a US bill.

On July 21, 1979, Gregory appeared at the Amandla Festival where Bob Marley, Patti LaBelle and Eddie Palmieri, amongst others, had performed. Gregory held a speech before Marley's performance, blaming President Carter and the political failures, and showed his support for the international Anti-Apartheid movements. Gregory and Mark Lane did landmark research into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which helped move the U.S. House Assassinations Committee to investigate the murder along with that of John F. Kennedy. Lane was author of conspiracy theory books such as Rush to Judgment. The pair wrote the MLK conspiracy book Code Name Zorro, which postulated that convicted assassin James Earl Ray did not act alone.

Gregory was an outspoken activist during the US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Iran. In 1980 he traveled to Tehran to attempt to negotiate the hostages' release and engaged in a public hunger strike there, weighing less than 100 pounds (45 kg) when he returned to the United States. In 1998 Gregory spoke at the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Clinton were in attendance. Not long after that, the President told Gregory’s long-time friend and PR. Consultant, Steve Jaffe, “I love Dick Gregory, he is one of the funniest people on the planet.” They spoke of how Gregory had made a comment on Dr. King’s birthday that broke everyone into laughter, when he noted that the President made Speaker Newt Gingrich ride “in the back of the plane,” on an Air Force One trip overseas. In 2001, Gregory announced to the world that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of Cancer. He refused traditional medical treatment – chemotherapy –and with the assistance of some of the finest minds in alternative medicine, put together a regimen of a variety of diet, vitamins, exercise, and modern devices not even known to the public, which ultimately resulted in his reversing the trend of the Cancer to the point where today he is nearly 85% free of it, and getting better every day.

In recent years, Gregory has been a figure in the health food industry, becoming better known as a nutrition guru during the 1980s, advocating for a raw fruit and vegetable diet. Gregory first became a vegetarian in the 1960s, and has lost a considerable amount of weight by going on extreme fasts, some lasting upwards of 50 days. He developed a diet drink called "Bahamian Diet Nutritional Drink" and went on TV shows advocating for his diet and to help the morbidly obese. He is probably best remembered for his attempts, chronicled in the media on daytime talk shows in early 1988, at helping 1,200 pound (540 kg) Long Island man Walter Hudson drop nearly 600 pounds (270 kg) in only a few months on a liquid diet. Mr. Hudson shortly gained the weight back and later died from complications from his extreme obesity. Nonetheless, Gregory claims his diet has kept him in good health and continues to advocate for a natural diet lifestyle.

Gregory married his wife Lillian in the 1960s, and they now have ten children. One of his sons, Dr. Christian Gregory, is a private Chiropractor at Advance Family Chiropractic. As of 2008, he resides in Washington, DC.

At a Civil Rights rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Gregory criticized the United States, calling it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs", Gregory said. [4]

Post career and personal life

He is number 81 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Standups of all time and has his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. There is a grassroots effort afoot to get him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, spearheaded by Radio One host Joe Madison.

Gregory is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.

Gregory was a former co-host with radio magnate Cathy Hughes, and is still a frequent morning guest, on WOL 1450 AM talk radio's "The Power", the flagship station of Hughes' Radio One. Gregory appears as "Mr. Sun" in the television show Wonder Showzen (the third episode, titled "Ocean", aired in 2005). As Chauncey, a puppet character, imbibes a hallucinogenic substance, Mr. Sun warns, "Don't get hooked on imagination, Chauncey. It can lead to terrible, horrible things." Gregory also provides guest commentary on the Wonder Showzen Season One DVD. Large segments of his commentary were intentionally bleeped out, including the names of several dairy companies, as he makes possibly slanderous remarks concerning the ill effects that consumption of cow milk has on human beings.

Gregory attended and spoke at the funeral of James Brown on December 30, 2006, in Augusta, Georgia.

Albums

  • In Living Black and White (1961)
  • East & West (1961)
  • Dick Gregory Talks Turkey (1962)
  • The Two Sides of Dick Gregory (1963)
  • Dick Gregory Running for President (1964)
  • So You See... We All Have Problems
  • Dick Gregory On: (1969)
  • The Light Side: The Dark Side (1969)
  • Dick Gregory's Frankenstein (1970)
  • Live at the Village Gate (1970)
  • At Kent State (1971)
  • Caught in the Act (1974)
  • The Best of Dick Gregory (1997)

Books

  • Nigger: an autobiography, by Dick Gregory with Robert Lipsyte, Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), 1964. (one account says 1963) ISBN 0-671-62611-6
  • Write me in!, Bantam, 1968.
  • From the Back of the Bus
  • What's Happening?
  • The Shadow that Scares Me
  • Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, with Commentary, a book of Bible-based humor. ISBN 0-8128-6194-9
  • Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature!
  • (with Shelia P. Moses), Callus on My Soul : A Memoir ISBN 0-7582-0202-4
  • Up from Nigger
  • No More Lies; The Myth and the Reality of American History
  • Dick Gregory's political primer
  • (with Mark Lane), Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King
  • (with Mel Watkins), African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (Library of Black America)
  • Robert Lee Green, Dick Gregory, daring Black leader
  • African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (editor) ISBN 1-55652-430-7

Filmography

  • "One Bright Shining Moment" (2006)
  • The Hot Chick (2002)
  • Children of the Struggle (1999)
  • Panther (1995)
  • Sweet Love, Bitter (1967)

Source: IMDb

References

  1. ^ Dick Gregory , AEI Speakers Bureau. Accessed December 11, 2007. " A track star at Sumner High School, Gregory earned an athletic scholarship in 1951 to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and became the first member of his family to attend college."

See also

External links

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