Frank Jackman comment:
One of the enduring
wishes in my life has been that the first time that I was eligible to vote in
1968, in the presidential elections of that year I had voted for the late Dick
Gregory for President. Not so much because he was a stand-up black civil rights
activist but because I might have broken from my straight up bourgeois
political career dreams which might have made me stronger to be able resist
being drafted later that same year (and inducted into the Army in the winter of
the following year).
I cannot use as an
excuse that I did not know either who Dick Gregory was or that he was running for
President on the California-based (and I believe still standing) Peace and Freedom
Party ticket. Certainly any rising neophyte politician needed to know all the players
from George Wallace on the right to Gregory on the left. I lived to discover
and analyze the impact on such outsider organizations. (Such groupings to the
left, the socialist groups like the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party
and the red-scare growing up haunted Communist Party were beyond the pale then
although I actually voted for the Socialist Workers Party candidate in 1972 but
that was after the aforementioned induction into the Army. In hindsight the
actual program of the Peace and Freedom Party that Gregory ran on with its strong
opposition to the raging Vietnam War and for social justice were much closer to
my own political views even then than those of the two major parties.
Instead I got caught up
in, beside that career business, in the never-ending trap of voting for a
candidate because I hated another candidate even worse than what was offered on
the “left.” Yes, I supported, even worked on the campaign for, Hubert H.
Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President and chief flak once beloved Robert
Kennedy was assassinated the previous June. Reason; evil incarnate Richard
Milhous Nixon (evil incarnate for the times this Trump presidency is beginning
to make Nixon’s time seem like a “golden age,” hell make cellar dwelling 15th President
James Buchanan’s time seem like a utopian dream). Well, I did finally learn a
few political lessons the hard way but that is a story already told or to be
told another day. Thanks Dick Gregory for your humor and your civils rights
activities. RIP, Brother, RIP.
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black 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.
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