It's only day three and I'm doing something I didn't want to do, take a short cut and write about someone getting significant national attention. I am making the exception already because this project is about educating myself and I did not really know of Dick Gregory before. I was listening to DemocracyNow!, the best source I've ever found for news that centers voices of activists and people of color and they dedicated their show to this man and I was simply blown away (not unexpectedly, when you see the images of the Civil Rights Movement, we know there are a lot of unsung heroes who put their lives on the lines over and over again who will never get proper credit for their roll in making this country live up to its ideals).
Dick Gregory was comedian and activist. I'm not a huge fan of comedy because it so often takes shortcuts with homophobia, sexism, racism, ablebodism, etc., etc. Listening to him speak, here is a man that mentioned problems of intimate violence multiple times in his interview. Not as a joke, but as a serious commentary on the problems in our world.
Here's one example from the DemocracyNow! transcript
What he did to open doors for Black comedians is incredibly important. But what turns my head was his remarkable lifelong quest for justice. He marched and integrated lunch counters, and schools. He protested the Vietnam War:
Alcohol consumption, right now, as we talk right now is about 34 percent higher than it was before Ground Zero. Now, what do this mean? It mean get ready for battered wives. If, before Ground Zero, every four seconds in America a woman got beat up by her boyfriend or husband — not strangers, people she know — then think about what happens now with the amount of alcohol and drug consumption that’s out here.
No, nonviolence to me means not that I’m not supposed to hit American white man, nonviolence mean to me that death might put me on its payroll, but I’ll never put death on my payroll.And this thought on police brutality:
Let me say this, never before in the history of this planet have anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30 year period, in spite of black folks and white folks — the now — the number one problem we confronted with now is police brutality. Now am I saying police brutality is worse today than it was 50 years ago? No. Then what has has changed? My mindset. There’s things I would have tolerated 50 years ago, that I won’t tolerate.
In addition to DemocracyNow! Tributes to Dick Gregory are available at NPR and the New York Times.
I learned from the NYT he is an author and Goodreads author page lists the following books that he authored - so in the spirit of Signal Boosting, check out his own books.
- From the Back of the Bus - (1962)
Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature by Dick Gregory, Alvenia M. Fulton (Editor), James R. McGraw (Editor) (1973)
Callus On My Soul: A Memoir
Feb 1, 2003 by Dick Gregory and Shelia P. Moses (American history in a conversational memoir.)
As someone not into comedy, it didn't even occur to me there would be audio collections, but there are some- check out this link fro Amazon.
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