Back in the mid sixties, my dad and I attended the performance by what
was then a little known comedian...at least outside the Black
community.
Carl Jarvis
Dick Gregory, satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force
for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for
a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social
causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in
Washington. He was
84.
Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who
announced his death on social media,
said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory
had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier
Facebook post.
Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first
order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white
America treated
Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor
can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure
cancer,” he said.
Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear,
whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records
came away with
a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.
Mr. Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to whites — a
crossover star, in contrast to veteran black comedians like Redd Foxx,
Moms Mabley
and Slappy White, whose earthy, pungent humor was mainly confined to
black clubs on the so-called chitlin circuit.
Though he clearly seethed over the repression of blacks, he resorted
to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms like the
hungry i in
San Francisco or the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won
audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.
