It's an interesting place to be in when one is old, watching all the people
whose names dominated the world one knew, disappear.
Miriam
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Subject: [blind-democracy] dick gregory dead at 84
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.
