Dick Gregory

[wlu_lax6]

deserves a post
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts ... ml?mcubz=3

[Pruitt]

deserves a post
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts ... ml?mcubz=3

He does.

I remember reading his autobiography, the title of which I really don;'t feel comfortable typing, when I was 13 or 14. It was an eye opener and helped set some things in my mind.

I also have a memory of a scene in (I think) "House Party" where one of the characters (the fat one) was on "the Dick Gregory."

[sancarlos]

I also read his autobiography when I was in school. The title was (small n) nigger, so I took care not to let anybody see the cover and misunderstand what type of book I was reading. It was fascinating and opened my eyes to worlds I only suspected existed.

RIP. (Frankly, I didn't know he was still alive.)

[howard]

As far as leading/cutting edge and ahead of his time, he was Richard Pryor ten years before Rich, but in very different ways. I read nigger in middle school (took every opportunity to show off the cover, oh how I would've loved if a teacher or admin had said something (this is nearly all white Davis) not realizing my mom probably would've taken their side.) I internalized his view on the word way back then and agreed for most of the time successively:

https://twitter.com/SwamperHoward/statu ... 1663255552

Good Times obit linked above, says all the rest of things I would say (and better than I would) and more.

eta: Pruitt, I would presume he would prefer you go ahead and type it out. I concur, but understand, and if you decline, I'll drop one for ya.

[Joe K]

His death was the lead news story in St. Louis as he grew up here and did a lot of community activism locally. There's a street named after him and his former office was just a few blocks from my apartment. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a very good account of his life yesterday.

[Steve of phpBB]

I am so embarrassed and ashamed that I had never heard of him until he died.

[Shirley]

Wasn't there controversy a while back about his weight loss methods?

[Joe K]

Wasn't there controversy a while back about his weight loss methods?

Yes. The Post-Dispatch article went into that controversy and some other business/legal issues he had. I think it was some type of "Bahamian Diet" he was marketing.

[howard]

I am so embarrassed and ashamed that I had never heard of him until he died.

Shame and embarrassment not warranted. Just funny, the nature of some fame. He was huge when I was a little kid, early-mid 60s practically a household name (and of the small number of non-athlete black celebs of that time near the top of the list). My dad was a huge fan, I remember how hard he laughed when Gregory was on TV but I was too young to understand the jokes.

When I was a teenager in the early 70s, he was known and on TV every now and then, but barely famous. By the 90s he was hardly known, and then as a dude with a freak diet book, he helped some 600 pound guy too obese to fit through the door of his house lose half his body weight or something. By then I bet no more than 10% of Americans would've known his name, and only as that weird diet guy. He was pretty obscure by the time you (Steve) were a teenager. nigger came out in 1964, I read it around my senior year HS, 1974, when at least some school libraries banned few (if any) books.

He may have had more staying power as a 2nd tier Civil Rights leader, for a time he was in the front line of marches and was arrested many times. While Dr. King was writing the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" Gregory was in an adjacent cell, recovering from a severe beating. He wrote that he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”

He got shot once, in the leg, caught in crossfire during the Watts riot (I remember that, I was 8 but it occurred not too far from our house.). The NAACP leaders suggested he could do more good on stage than marching/getting arrested/getting beaten down, and he took their advice. He may have had more enduring fame had he continued to march, especially if he had been killed. More good stuff in that Times obit above.

[DaveInSeattle]

There's a nice op-ed in todays NY Times by comedian Roy Wood Jr.

Dick Gregory Was a Sledgehammer of Truth

I wanted to know why a man of his stature still felt the need to go up onstage night after night in comedy clubs in front of 300 strangers. Why the banquets? Why the media appearances? Why the protests? Why did he still maintain the tour schedule of a man half his age? And he simply said:

“They always ask me why I travel so much and I tell ’em, the fight for freedom is out there — it ain’t at my house.”

[Pruitt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWWzWH6kNPU

Okay, this is an amazing clip, but how cool was Merv Griffin to book this man in the mid 60s and to give him this platform?