Gregory, Dick

October 12, 1932

Comedian, activist, and rights advocate Richard Claxton Gregory was born and raised in a St. Louis slum. Abandoned by his father when he was a child, Gregory worked at odd jobs to help support his family. In high school he distinguished himself as a talented runner and demonstrated the quick wit and gift for satire that would ultimately catapult him toward stardom. With the aid of an athletic scholarship, he attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1951–1954 and 1956), where he became a leading track star and began to dream of becoming a comedian.

Drafted into the army in 1954, Gregory returned briefly to Carbondale after completing his term of service in 1956 and then traveled to Chicago to pursue his goal of becoming a comedian. He admired and was influenced by Timmie Rogers, Slappy White, and Nipsey Russell. In the late 1950s Gregory worked in small black clubs like the Esquire Show Lounge, where he met his future wife, Lillian Smith, and struggled to gain popular recognition. His efforts won him a cameo appearance in Cast the First Stone, a 1959 ABC television documentary.

Gregory's breakthrough occurred in January 1961, when the Playboy Club in Chicago hired him to replace the unexpectedly ill white comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey. Gregory's bold, ironic, cool, and detached humor completely disarmed and converted his audience, which included many white southern conventioneers. After this success, his contract with the Playboy Club was quickly extended from several weeks to three years. Against the backdrop of the intensifying pace of the civil rights movement Gregory's candid, topical humor signaled a new relationship between African-American comedians and white mainstream audiences. By 1962 he had become a national celebrity and the first black comic superstar in the modern era, opening the doors for countless black comedians. He also became an author, publishing From the Back of the Bus (1962) and, with Robert Lipsyte, Nigger: An Autobiography (1964).

His celebrity status secured, Gregory emerged as an outspoken political activist during the 1960s. As an avid supporter of the civil rights movement, he participated in voter registration drives throughout the South, marched in countless parades and demonstrations, and was arrested numerous times. He also began to entertain at prisons and for civil rights organizations, using his biting humor as a powerful tool to highlight racism and inequality in the United States. The assassinations of John. F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others led Gregory to believe in the existence of a large framework of conspiracies to thwart civil rights and liberties in the United States. He took to the lecture circuit, espousing the ideas of Mark Lane, a leading conspiracy theorist.

Gregory found numerous ways to dramatize his chosen causes. He fasted for lengthy periods to demonstrate his commitment to civil rights and to protest the Vietnam War, the abuse of narcotics, and world hunger. In 1967 he campaigned unsuccessfully in a write-in effort to be mayor of Chicago, and in 1968 he was the presidential candidate for the U.S. Freedom and Peace Party, a split-off faction within the Peace and Freedom party, whose candidate for president in 1968 was Eldridge Cleaver. By the late 1960s Gregory was increasingly devoting his attention to the youth of America, lecturing at hundreds of college campuses each year and making fewer and fewer night club appearances; he released his last comedy album, Caught in the Act, in 1973.

During the 1970s Gregory wrote several books, including No More Lies: The Myth and Reality of American History (published as by Richard Claxton Gregory with James R. McGraw, 1971); Code Name Zorro: The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (with Mark Lane, 1971); and Dick Gregory's Political Primer (1972). After moving with his wife and ten children to a farm in Massachusetts in 1973, he became a well-known advocate of vegetarianism. Often limiting himself to a regimen of fruit and juices, he became a nutritional consultant, often appearing on talk shows in his new role, and wrote (with Alvenia Fulton) Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat, Cookin' with Mother Nature (1974). He also wrote Up from Nigger with James R. McGraw, the second installment of his autobiography (1976).

In 1984 Gregory founded Health Enterprises, Inc., successfully marketing various weight-loss products. Three years later he introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix that proved extremely popular, and expanded his financial holdings to hotels and other properties. These economic successes were abruptly reversed after the failure of a financing deal and conflicts with his business partners. Gregory was evicted from his Massachusetts home in 1992. In the same year, he returned to his hometown of St. Louis to organize the Campaign for Human Dignity, whose stated purpose was to reclaim predominantly African-American neighborhoods from drug dealers and prostitutes. In October 1993 Gregory was arrested for illegally camping—along with members of his "Dignity Patrol"—in a crime-ridden park in Washington, D.C. In 1993 he also coauthored, with Mark Lane, Murder in Memphis, another book about the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1995 Gregory staged a hunger strike to protest the Republican welfare reform bills, and in 1998 he joined conservative Republicans to demand an investigation of the "murder" of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. During the mid-1990s, he also returned to performing, notably in a limited run off-Broadway show, Dick Gregory Live, in October 1995.

After Gregory achieved the pinnacle of success in the world of stand-up comedy, he made a decision to place his celebrity status in the service of his fierce and uncompromising commitment to human rights. Throughout the various shifts and turns of his career for more than three decades, he has kept faith with those commitments.

As part of his commitment to human rights, Gregory was arrested in July 2004 as he protested outside the Sudanese Embassy in New York. Gregory, along with other well-known activists, was protesting the Sudanese government's support of its militia, who were killing hundreds of black Africans daily.

See also Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Comedians

Bibliography

Gregory, Dick, with Martin Lipsyte. Nigger: An Autobiography. New York: Dutton, 1964.

Gregory, Dick, with James R. McGraw. Up from Nigger. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Gregory, Dick, with Sheila P. Moses. Callus on my Soul. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 2000.

Hendra, Tony. Going Too Far. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

james a. miller (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005