GREGORY, Richard Claxton ("Dick")

(b. 12 October 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri), African-American stand-up comic and political activist who exploited his fame to promote social causes.

Gregory was the second of six children born to Presley Gregory and Lucille Franklin. The Gregory siblings were raised by their mother in dire poverty in an African-American ghetto. A track star at Sumner High School, Gregory graduated as class president in 1952. He enrolled at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale on an athletic scholarship, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1954. He reenrolled at Southern Illinois after his discharge in 1956, but did not earn a degree.

Gregory despised both poverty and racism. He often masked his pain with humorous ad-libs, a talent that would develop into a full-blown comedy career in adulthood. In the mid-1950s he moved to Chicago, where he worked assorted day jobs and performed as a comedian in nightclubs, eventually operating his own club, the Apex, in Robbins, Illinois, in 1958. On 2 February 1959 he married Lillian Smith; they had ten children.

On stage Gregory transcended racial barriers and attracted diverse audiences through sarcasm and ridicule of bigotry. His career as a stand-up comic was in full swing by the mid-1960s, and he had earned a reputation as a civil rights activist even while appearing as a comedian at popular venues nationwide. In 1963 he was involved with a black voter-registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, and during the Christmas holiday that year he took part in a protest to integrate restaurants in Atlanta. His wife, then pregnant with twins, accompanied him and was arrested for sitting at a public eatery; she spent Christmas day in the local jail. Gregory's name recognition was instrumental in bringing the cause to national attention.

In 1964 Gregory threw his influence behind a grassrootscivil rights organization called ACT; he attended a school boycott rally in New York City and worked also to initiate a boycott by 200,000 students in Chicago. At the request of Gloria (Richardson) Dandridge, he made several appearances in Cambridge, Maryland. Also that year he touted the cause of human rights internationally, visiting Europe and the Soviet Union. While in Moscow he learned of the suspicious disappearance of three civil rights workers in Jackson, Mississippi, and hurried back to the United States to assess the situation. Almost immediately he raised $25,000 toward a reward fund for information concerning the perpetrators of the incident.

Gregory's agenda as an entertainer brought him to San Francisco during the Republican National Convention of 1964, where he found no dearth of material for his comedy routine. He made arrangements to appear in the tri-state (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) area the following month for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, then celebrated the Christmas holiday in Jackson, assisting with the delivery and distribution of thousands of turkeys to LeFlore County families who had lost their food subsidies when local officials retaliated against the black voter-registration program.

While working on a feature film in Philadelphia in 1965, Gregory abandoned the movie set and traveled to Selma, Alabama, to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the historic crossing of the Pettus Bridge. He rejoined the film crew in Pennsylvania but returned to the marchers four days later for the triumphant entry into Montgomery, Alabama. When asked whether his political involvements affected his career, Gregory indicated that the reverse was true: his career, he said, hampered his political agenda. When the film Sweet Love, Bitter premiered on 30 January 1966, it received excellent reviews.

In the summer of 1965 Gregory demonstrated again, to halt illegal school segregation in Chicago; he was arrested and beaten in the presence of his family outside the city hall in June. He refused to abandon the protest, and in July, despite a performance engagement in San Francisco, he commuted daily between California and Chicago. A march on Mayor Richard Daley's house in Chicago in August led to his arrest and conviction for provoking violence by his very presence; on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the judgment as unconstitutional.

When Gregory learned of the outbreak of rioting in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965, he flew to the scene, where he received a superficial gunshot wound while attempting to quell rioters. In January 1966 he backed the successful mayoral campaign of John Lindsay in New York City, and in March, while performing in Seattle, Gregory took up the cause of the Nisqually Indians against Washington State over fishing rights. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of illegal fishing during a protest.

On a break from touring the college lecture circuit during the 1966–1967 academic year, Gregory joined Father James Groppi in support of fair housing for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, residents. After campaigning as an independent write-in candidate for mayor of Chicago that fall, he endured a self-imposed forty-day fast, from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day 1968, in protest of the Vietnam War. His facetious run for the U.S. presidency that year lost its thunder in the spring when King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within weeks of each other. The gloom was exacerbated by a Washington State appeals court, which upheld Gregory's earlier conviction for illegal fishing. He began serving a ninety-day sentence at the Thurston County Jail on 7 June, fasting the entire time; after forty days he was released because of health problems. He resumed fasting in Chicago's Cook County Jail in the spring of 1969 after being sentenced to five months on charges stemming back to 1965 for assaulting an officer. After forty-five days of fasting, Gregory's sentence was commuted. He attended the World Assembly for Peace in June and the first Vietnam War moratorium in Washington, D.C., in October of that year.

After a decade of change and upheaval, Gregory resumed his performance career with greater intensity in 1970. According to a report in Variety that year: "Dick Gregory … [took] a break from his civil rights activities and related college speaking dates to play a rare … gig." Newsweek called this resurgence of the comic "Return of the Native Son." Gregory appeared in the Mario Van Peebles film Panther in 1995.

Gregory chronicles his 1960s escapades in Up from Nigger (1976), with James R. McGraw. He recaps his life in the twentieth century in Callus on My Soul: The Autobiography of Dick Gregory (2000), with Shelia P. Moses. For more information on Gregory see Thonnia Lee, "Fasting for Life," Health Quest: The Publication of Black Wellness (31 Mar. 1994); and Juan Williams, "Interview: Author, Activist and Comedian Dick Gregory Discusses His Life and His Views on Social Consciousness," Talk of the Nation (NPR) (25 Dec. 2000).

Gloria Cooksey