A fond goodbye to Comic, mentor, activist Dick Gregory

We should all be so lucky as to have lead as full a life as the great Dick Gregory..To my generation Gregory at first was important because in a time when we never saw black people on tv doing anything but being the maid or tap dancing, and sometimes we got to see singers.. Dick Gregory was one of the first along with George Kirby to get to do non-demeaning stand-up comedy outside of just a black audience . The first time I saw Gregory I was a kid ..who went to work one night at the local Atlanta Black nightclub “The Royal Peacock” my dad..a chef at a white restaurant by day worked many nights as a cook at the club..some of my first work experiences was being the “ice boy” ferrying large containers of ice from the kitchen to the bar..and walking behind the stage for each trip..I was just a kid but had heard other comics before ..Gregory worked “blue” a lot but he even then ( about 1959-60 ) was the only one who talked about the movement…probably a lot of people have said today how Dick Gregory got to be the first Black comic who got to sit down with the host of the “Tonite Show” after doing his set…it was not Johnny Carson then …it was Jack Paar..and it seemed the more acceptable Gregory got the more militant and topical his “sets” became. As the civil rights movement got more intense Gregory along with Harry Belafonte were the biggest entertainers who faces were always there…But Gregory presented a much angrier face than Belafonte..and by the mid 1960s he began to “turn off” a lot of the white audience. But my biggest exposure to Dick was when he actually ran for president in 1968..on the “Peace and Freedom Party” ticket..Gregory published his second book “Write me In ” for the campaign…I wore out two copies because I think in 1968 I carried that book everywhere I went. Those were some great times, when many of us were waking up to just what a “devil” America was..as well as how we could be proud of ourselves and our history…and so-called activists today have no idea how it all felt when it was so new …so freeing and still so forbidden…Dick Gregory was one of those people who helped us make the transition from “colored” to Black…I can remember being the first kid in my high school who stopped saying colored and insisted on being called “black” teachers hated me…fellow students made fun of me…and those people who went to High school with me and have re-connected on facebook ..YES in those days you all made fun of me…and I would whip out Dick Gregory’s first book ..it was called simply “Nigger” and wave it in the air as proof that we didn’t have be called “colored” any more…I remember how teachers would gasp in horror…yes this is all true…but Dick Gregory ..more than just a comedian was just that inspiring…later on when the sixties were over Gregory settled in to being one of the go to elders of the struggle and even though most people in the last 20 years have no memory of him as a comic..anybody serious in the movement. knows of his commentary on the issues of the the day and Gregory still never “held his tongue”… His way to age is the way I would like to do it.still..the rebel ..and truth teller until the end.. Rest in Power..Richard Claxton Gregory (October 12, 1932 – August 19, 2017)