GREGORY, DICK (12 October 1932–19 August 2017), stand-up comedian and Civil Rights activist who became known in the 1960s for his witty satirical routines that took on racism and segregation. One of six children raised by a single mother in St. Louis, Gregory attended Southern Illinois University on an athletic scholarship but left early to join the army. He began performing in military comedy shows and in the late 1950s became part of the comedy circuit in Chicago.
In 1961 he was asked to fill in at the last minute at the Chicago Playboy Club. Performing to an all-White audience, Gregory told jokes like “Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this White waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people.’” His set went so well that Hugh Hefner booked him for six more weeks, and Gregory’s star rose quickly. He was profiled in Time magazine and landed an appearance on The Jack Paar Show, for which he insisted he be invited to sit on the couch and be interviewed, contrary to the normal routine for Black performers at the time.
Gregory became deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, demonstrating for voting rights in the South and agitating to force the FBI to investigate the murder of three activists in Mississippi. He participated in rallies with Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., was arrested numerous times for civil disobedience, and was severely beaten by police at a protest in Birmingham, Alabama. He used his comedy shows to raise money for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. As he would later say of this time: “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
Gregory gradually put his comedy career on hold to focus on politics and activism. He ran for mayor of Chicago in 1967 and for president in 1968 as part of the Peace and Freedom Party, receiving over forty thousand votes as a write-in candidate. He would become an advocate of many causes, participating in the movements against apartheid, the Vietnam War, and police brutality and promoting the Equal Rights Amendment, Native American rights, and animal welfare. Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, Gregory became an avid conspiracy theorist and lobbied for deeper investigations into their deaths.
Gregory’s use of fasting as a protest tactic led to an interest in nutrition, health, and fitness. He was a committed vegetarian and refused to perform in venues that served alcohol. In the 1980s he started a nutrition business promoting a weight-loss supplement called the “Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet,” through which he aimed to promote longevity and nutritional health for African Americans. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 but treated his disease with vitamins, herbs, and exercise, and his cancer eventually went into remission. Though he had eleven children with his wife, Lillian Smith, Gregory acknowledged that he was a somewhat absent father, having always put his dedication to the movement before his family. A documentary about his life and career, The One and Only Dick Gregory, was released in 2021.