Tommy Hawkins, Basketball All-American at Notre Dame, Dies at 80
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Forward Tommy Hawkins of the Los Angeles Lakers shoots over center Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics in a game at Boston Garden in April 1968. Hawkins played 10 years in the N.B.A.CreditAssociated Press
Tommy Hawkins, who was the first black basketball player to earn All-America honors at Notre Dame and who played for the Los Angeles Lakers during a 10-year N.B.A. career, died on Wednesday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 80.
His son Kevin told The Associated Press that Hawkins had died in his sleep, adding that he had been in good health.
Hawkins graduated from Notre Dame in 1959 after playing three years on the basketball team. He had 1,318 career rebounds for the university, the longest-standing record in Fighting Irish history.
He was named to Notre Dame’s All-Century team in 2004 and inducted into its Ring of Honor in 2015. He led the Irish to a 44-13 record over his last two seasons, including an Elite Eight berth in the 1958 N.C.A.A. Tournament.
He was a consensus All-American player in 1958 and 1959.
"He loved Notre Dame with every fiber of his being," said Kevin Hawkins, who followed in his father's footsteps and played basketball for the Irish before graduating in 1981.
Hawkins became close with the Rev. Theodore S. Hesburgh, the university’s president from 1952-87. Kevin Hawkins said Hesburgh had been supportive after Hawkins and a white woman he was dating, from nearby Saint Mary's College, were turned away from a restaurant near the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind. The restaurant had refused to serve an interracial couple.
Father Hesburgh responded by barring Notre Dame students from eating at the restaurant “until my father got a public apology," Kevin Hawkins said by phone from his home in South Bend. The university’s support “meant the world to him," Kevin Hawkins said of his father.
He said that Paul Hornung, his father's basketball teammate and a future National Football League Hall of Famer, led Hawkins back to the restaurant to get the apology.
Hawkins was selected by the Minneapolis Lakers with the third pick in the first round of the 1959 N.B.A. draft. He played one season in Minnesota before moving with the team to Los Angeles. He went on to play six seasons for the Lakers, averaging 9.0 points and 5.7 rebounds in 454 games.
A 6-foot-5 forward, Hawkins also played for the Cincinnati Royals from 1962-66. He recorded 6,672 points and 4,607 rebounds in his pro career.
Hawkins' influence continued beyond his playing days. As a player representative, he had a key role in establishing the first collective bargaining agreement with the players' union and the N.B.A.
Thomas Jerome Hawkins was born on Dec. 22, 1936, in Winston-Salem, N.C. He moved to Chicago with his mother and an aunt as a child. As a schoolboy player he starred at Parker High School, now Robeson High School, in Chicago before being recruited by Notre Dame.
Hawkins formed friendships with Alabama football coach Bear Bryant; U.C.LA basketball coach John Wooden; Southern California football coach John McKay; and the artist LeRoy Neiman.
Hawkins was hired in 1987 by the Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley to be vice president of communications, and he worked for the team until 2004. The Dodgers had a moment of silence for him before their game against the White Sox on Wednesday night.
Before joining the Dodgers, Hawkins worked in radio and television in Southern California, including stints with KNBC-TV and KABC radio.
Besides his son Kevin, from a first marriage that ended in divorce, he is survived by his second wife, Layla; their daughter, Neda; three other children from his first marriage, Karel, Traci and David; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
At his death, Hawkins was writing a memoir about his basketball career, Kevin Hawkins said.
*Tommy Hawkins, the first African American basketball star at the University of Notre Dame, was born in Chicago, Illinois (December 22).
Thomas Jerome Hawkins (b. December 22, 1936, Chicago, Illinois – d. August 16, 2017, Malibu, California) was a 6'5" (1.96 m) forward who starred at Chicago's Parker (now Robeson) High School before playing at the University of Notre Dame, where he became the school's first African American basketball star. He was then selected by the Minneapolis (later Los Angeles) Lakers in the first round of the 1959 NBA draft, and he would have a productive ten-year career in the league, playing for the Lakers as well as the Cincinnati Royals as he registered 6,672 career points and 4,607 career rebounds.
Hawkins later worked in radio and television broadcasting in Los Angeles and served as vice president of communications for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
Hawkins died in his home in Malibu, California, on August 16, 2017.
Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle
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Mr. Gregory, then a candidate for president, before speaking in Norfolk, Va., in October 1968.CreditAssociated Press
Dick Gregory, the pioneering 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.
He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a three-button suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror, and to laugh at itself.
Dick Gregory Stand Up early 1960's. Archive film 97974Video by HuntleyFilmArchives
“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” Or: “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.”
Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,” to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
Mr. Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records like “In Living Black and White” and “Dick Gregory Talks Turkey.” He wrote the first of his dozen books. Time magazine, enormously powerful then, ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s “Tonight Show” host, had him on as a guest — after Mr. Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.
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Dick Gregory in 2016. He believed that within a well-delivered joke lies power.CreditBrent N. Clarke/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
Newspapers in those days routinely put Mr. Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.
It was Mr. Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lies power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, achingly poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children in his neighborhood.
“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh withme instead of at me,” he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,” he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.”
He titled that book “nigger,” lowercase N. The word — typically reduced these days to “the N-word” — figured prominently in his routines, even as he shunned the obscenities that casually littered the acts of other comedians.
“I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,” he said in a 2000 interview with NPR. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ ”
In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.
Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, 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.”
In 1965, he was shot in the leg (the wound was not grave) by a rioter as he tried to be a peacemaker during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. Club owners became reluctant to book him: Who knew if he might fly off to Alabama on a moment’s notice? As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.
“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” (2003). Some pillars of the movement, like Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, who died in 1971, believed that Mr. Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Mr. Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.”
In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin mustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.
There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades, he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.
And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.
His fasting led to a keen interest in nutrition. Working in the 1980s with a Swedish health food company, Mr. Gregory developed a weight-reduction powder called Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet. The partners had a falling-out, and the business swooned.
Still, Mr. Gregory remained a fervent health-food advocate. In late 1999, he learned he had lymphoma but rejected chemotherapy, relying instead on vitamins, herbs and exercise. The cancer went into remission.
His activism came at a price, however. For one thing, the cascade of cash that he had once enjoyed turned into a trickle. His family paid, too.
Mr. Gregory moved to Chicago to build a comedy career in the late 1950s. There he met Lillian Smith, a secretary at the University of Chicago, and they were married in 1959. They had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.
In 1973, when cash was still rolling in, they bought a 400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. (Why Plymouth? “I think the white folks is coming back, and I’m going to get a handful of Indians and stop ’em there this time,” Mr. Gregory said.) But by the early 1990s, the strapped Gregorys had lost the farm and moved into an apartment in Plymouth.
Over more than five decades of marriage, Lillian Gregory said, she understood her husband’s need — some called it an obsession — to wander off on behalf of this or that cause, typically earning nothing except attention, and sometimes not even that. But Christian Gregory, a chiropractor in Washington, said to The Washington Post in 2000: “He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family. It was a hard pill to swallow.”
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As the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught Mr. Gregory’s club act came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.CreditReg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images
Father absenteeism was a familiar phenomenon for the man born Richard Claxton Gregory in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He was the second of six children. His father, Presley, disappeared after the birth of each child, and finally left for good. The Gregory children were reared by their mother, Lucille, who scraped by on welfare and a meager income as a maid.
“Kids didn’t eat off the floor,” Mr. Gregory said of their Depression-era poverty. “When I was a kid, you dropped something off the table, it never reached the floor.”
Besides his son Christian, Mr. Gregory is survived by his wife, Lillian; two other sons, Gregory and Yohance Maqubela; seven daughters, Ayanna, Lynne, Michele, Miss, Paula Cenac, Satori and Zenobia Chisholm; two brothers, Ron and Garland; two sisters, Pauline Hariston and Delores Hill; 16 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Mr. Gregory graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, then attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. At both schools, he was a track star and enjoyed local fame.
Not that the acclaim was free of complications. In 1961, by then a national figure, he received the key to the city from the mayor of St. Louis. Yet in his hometown, he was denied a room at a leading hotel. “They gave me the key to the city,” Mr. Gregory said, “and then they changed all the locks.”
He left college in 1954 and joined the Army, where he was able to work on comedy routines while attached to Special Services. He then returned to college, only to give it up again without graduating.
In 1956, he headed to Chicago, where he worked in small-time clubs at night and at odd jobs by day. He even tried running a club of his own, but that venture failed.
In one part-time job, Mr. Gregory sorted mail in a post office. His pattern, he later said, was to toss letters destined for Mississippi into a slot marked “overseas.” That job did not last long.
His real break came in January 1961, when he was asked to fill in for the comedian Irwin Corey, who had canceled a gig at the flagship Playboy Club in Chicago. On the big night, club managers had misgivings; the house was packed with businessmen from the Deep South. No matter, Mr. Gregory said. He insisted on performing.
“I understand there are a great many Southerners in the room tonight,” he began his act. “I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night.” He so won over the crowd that Playboy’s Hugh Hefner signed him for three more weeks, then extended the contract.
Despite having sworn off nightclubs in 1973, saying he could no longer work in places where liquor was served, Mr. Gregory returned to them on occasion in later years, a thin presence wreathed in white hair and beard. Though his best days were well behind him, his approach never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:
“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.”
Dick Gregory, byname of Richard Claxton Gregory (born October 12, 1932, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died August 19, 2017, Washington, D.C.), African-American comedian, civil rights activist, and spokesman for health issues, who became nationally recognized in the 1960s for a biting brand of comedy that attacked racial prejudice. By addressing his hard-hitting satire to white audiences, he gave a comedic voice to the rising Civil Rights Movement. In the 1980s his nutrition business venture targeted unhealthy diets of black Americans.
Reared in povertyin St. Louis, Gregory began working at an early age to help support his family. He was involved in sports and social causes in high school, and he enteredSouthern Illinois Universityon an athletic scholarship in 1951, excelling as a middle-distance runner. He was named the university’s outstanding student athlete in 1953, the same year he left college to join the U.S. Army, where he hosted and performed comedy routines in military shows.
After a brief return to his alma mater in 1955-56, Gregory sought entrance to the national comedy circuit in Chicago. His breakthrough came in 1961, when a one-nighter at the ChicagoPlayboyClub turned into a six-week stint that earned him a profile inTimemagazine and a television appearance on “TheJack PaarShow.” In his numerous subsequent television, nightclub, and concert routines, he targeted poverty,segregation, and racialdiscrimination. Active in the Civil Rights Movement, he participated in numerous demonstrations and was arrested for civil disobedience several times; in 1963 he was jailed in Birmingham, Ala. His activism spurred him to run for mayor of Chicago in 1966 and for president of theUnited Statesin 1968.
In the early 1970s Gregory abandoned comedy to focus on his political interests, which widened from race relations to include such issues as violence, world hunger, capital punishment, drug abuse, and poor health care. He generated particular attention for his many hunger fasts. At this time he became a vegetarian, a marathon runner, and an expert on nutrition. He soon began a successful business venture with his nutritional product, the “Bahamian Diet,” around which he built Dick Gregory Health Enterprises, Inc. Through his company, he targeted the lower life expectancy of black Americans, which he attributed to poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse.
Gregory wrote many books, includingNigger: An Autobiography(1964) andNo More Lies: The Myth and the Reality of American History(1971). He made a brief return to the comedy circuit in the mid-1990s.
Richard Claxton Gregory (October 12, 1932 – August 19, 2017) was an American civil rights activist, social critic, writer, entrepreneur, comedian, conspiracy theorist, and occasional actor. During the turbulent 1960s, Gregory became a pioneer in stand-up comedy for his "no-holds-barred" sets, in which he mocked bigotry and racism. He performed primarily to black audiences at segregated clubs until 1961, when he became the first black comedian to successfully cross over to white audiences, appearing on television and putting out comedy record albums.[1]
Gregory was at the forefront of political activism in the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam War and racial injustice. He was arrested multiple times and went on many hunger strikes[2]. He later became a motivational speaker and author, primarily promoting spirituality.[1]
Gregory died of heart failure at a Washington, D.C. hospital at age 84 in August 2017.[1]
Gregory was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Lucille and Presley Gregory.[3] At Sumner High School, he was aided by teachers, among them Warren St. James; he also excelled at running. Gregory earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University,[4] where he set school records as a half-miler and miler.[5] He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated. In 1954, his college career was interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the United States Army. At the urging of his commanding officer, Gregory got his start in comedy in the Army, where he entered and won several Army talent shows; the officer had taken notice of Gregory's penchant for joking. In 1956, Gregory briefly returned to SIU after his discharge, but dropped out because he felt that the university "didn't want me to study, they wanted me to run."
In the hopes of becoming a professional comedian, Gregory moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he became part of a new generation of black comedians that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom broke with the minstrel tradition that presented stereotypical black characters. Gregory drew on current events, especially racial issues, for much of his material: "Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"[6]
Gregory began his career as a comedian while serving in the military in the mid-1950s. He served in the Army for a year and a half at Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Lee in Virginia, and Fort Smith in Arkansas. He was drafted in 1954 while attending Southern Illinois University. After being discharged in 1956, he returned to the university but did not receive a degree. He moved to Chicago with a desire to perform comedy professionally.[6]
In 1958, Gregory opened the Apex Club nightclub in Illinois. The club failed and landed Gregory in financial hardship. In 1959, Gregory landed a job as master of ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club.[7]
While working for the United States Postal Service during the daytime, Gregory performed as a comedian in small, primarily black-patronized nightclubs. He was one of the first black comedians to gain widespread acclaim while performing for white audiences. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Gregory described the history of black comics as limited: "Blacks could sing and dance in the white night clubs but weren't allowed to stand flat-footed and talk to white folks, which is what a comic does."[citation needed]
In 1961, Gregory was working at the black-owned Roberts Show Bar in Chicago when he was spotted by Hugh Hefner. Gregory was performing the following material before a largely white audience:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.
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. Bring me a whole fried chicken."
Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, "Line up, boys!"[8]
Gregory attributed the launch of his career to Hefner. Based on his performance at Roberts Show Bar, Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club as a replacement for comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey.[9]
Gregory made his first television appearance on the late night show Tonight Starring Jack Paar.[10] He soon began appearing nationally and on television.
Early in his career, Gregory was offered an engagement on Tonight Starring Jack Paar.[10]Paar's show was known for helping propel entertainers to the next level of their careers. At the time, black comics did perform on the show, but after their performances, they were never asked to stay and sit on the famous couch and talk with the host. Dick Gregory declined several invitations from Jack Paar to perform on the show. Paar finally called him to find out why he refused to perform on his show. In order to have Gregory perform, the producers eventually agreed to allow him to stay after his performance and talk with the host on air. This was a first in the show's history. Gregory's interview on Tonight Starring Jack Paar spurred conversations across America.[10]
He was a co-host with radio personality Cathy Hughes, and was a frequent morning guest, on WOL 1450 AM talk radio's "The Power", the flagship station of Hughes' Radio One.[12] He also appeared regularly on the nationally syndicated Imus in the Morning program.[13]
Gregory appeared as "Mr. Sun" on the television show Wonder Showzen (the third episode, entitled "Ocean", aired in 2005). As Chauncey, a puppet character, imbibes a hallucinogenic substance, Mr. Sun warns, "Don't get hooked on imagination, Chauncey. It can lead to terrible, horrible things." Gregory also provided guest commentary on the Wonder Showzen Season One DVD.[14] Large segments of his commentary were intentionally bleeped out, including the names of several dairy companies, as he made potentially defamatory remarks concerning ill effects that the consumption of cow milk has on human beings.
Gregory gave the keynote Address for Black History Month at Bryn Mawr College on February 28, 2013.[20] His take-away message to the students was to never accept injustice.
Once I accept injustice, I become injustice. For example, paper mills give off a terrible stench. But the people who work there don't smell it. Remember, Dr. King was assassinated when he went to work for garbage collectors. To help them as workers to enforce their rights. They couldn't smell the stench of the garbage all around them anymore. They were used to it. They would eat their lunch out of a brown bag sitting on the garbage truck. One day, a worker was sitting inside the back of the truck on top of the garbage, and got crushed to death because no one knew he was there.[20]
In 2013, Dick Gregory continued to be a ringing voice of the black power movement. Recently, he was featured in a Fantagraphics book by Pat Thomas entitled Listen, Whitey: The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, which uses the political recordings of the Civil Rights era to highlight sociopolitical meanings throughout the movement.[21] Dick Gregory is known for comedic performances that not only made people laugh, but mocked the establishment. According to Thomas, Dick Gregory’s monologues reflect a time when entertainment needed to be political to be relevant, which is why he included his standup in the collection. Dick Gregory is featured along with the likes of Huey P. Newton, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Bill Cosby.[22]
Gregory met his future wife Lillian Smith[24] at an African-American club; they married in 1959. They had 11 children (including one son, Richard Jr., who died two months after birth): Michele, Lynne, Pamela, Paula, Stephanie (a.k.a. Xenobia), Gregory, Christian, Miss, Ayanna, and Yohance.[6] He was criticized for being an absent father. In a 2000 interview with The Boston Globe, Gregory was quoted as saying, "People ask me about being a father and not being there. I say, 'Jack the Ripper had a father. Hitler had a father. Don't talk to me about family.'"[12]
Gregory was active in the Civil Rights Movement. On October 7, 1963, he came to Selma, Alabama, and spoke for two hours on a public platform two days before the voter registration drive known as "Freedom Day" (October 7, 1963).[25]
In 1964, Gregory became more involved in civil rights activities, activism against the Vietnam War, economic reform, and anti-drug issues. As a part of his activism, he went on several hunger strikes and campaigns in America and overseas. In the early 1970s, he was banned from Australia, where government officials feared he was planning "stir up demonstrations."[26]
Gregory began his political career by running against Richard J. Daley for Mayor of Chicago in 1967. Though he did not win, this would not prove to be the end of his participation in electoral politics.[27]
Gregory then wrote the book Write Me In about his presidential campaign. One anecdote in the book relates the story of a publicity stunt that came out of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The campaign had printed dollar bills with Gregory's image on them, some of which made it into circulation, causing considerable problems, but priceless publicity. The majority of these bills were quickly seized by the federal government.[5] A large contributing factor to the seizure came from the bills resembling authentic United States currency enough that they worked in many dollar-cashing machines of the time. Gregory avoided being charged with a federal crime, later joking that the bills could not really be considered United States currency, because "everyone knows a black man will never be on a U.S. bill." For modest prices, the bills are still readily available from online auction sites.
Shortly after this time, Gregory became an outspoken critic of the findings of the Warren Commission concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. On March 6, 1975, Gregory and assassination researcher Robert J. Groden appeared on Geraldo Rivera's late night ABC talk show Goodnight America. An important historical event happened that night when the famous Zapruder film of JFK's assassination was shown to the public on TV for the first time.[33] The public's response and outrage to its showing led to the forming of the Hart-Schweiker investigation, which contributed to the Church Committee Investigation on Intelligence Activities by the United States, which resulted in the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation.
Gregory was an outspoken feminist, and in 1978 joined Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Margaret Heckler, Barbara Mikulski, and other suffragists to lead the National ERA March for Ratification and Extension, a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States Capitol of over 100,000 on Women's Equality Day (August 26), 1978, to demonstrate for a ratification deadline extension for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, and for the ratification of the ERA.[34] The march was ultimately successful in extending the deadline to June 30, 1982, and Gregory joined other activists to the Senate for celebration and victory speeches by pro-ERA Senators, Members of Congress, and activists. The ERA narrowly failed to be ratified by the extended ratification date.
On July 21, 1979, Gregory appeared at the Amandla Festival where Bob Marley, Patti LaBelle, and Eddie Palmieri, amongst others, had performed.[35] Gregory gave a speech before Marley's performance, blaming President Carter, and showing his support for the international Anti-Apartheid Movement. Gregory and Mark Lane conducted landmark research into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helping move the U.S. House Select Assassinations Committee to investigate the murder, along with that of John F. Kennedy. Lane was author of conspiracy theory books such as Rush to Judgment. The pair wrote the King conspiracy book Code Name Zorro, which postulated that convicted assassin James Earl Ray did not act alone. Gregory also argued that the moon landing was faked and the commonly accepted account of the 9/11 attacks is incorrect, among other conspiracy theories.[36][37]
Gregory was an outspoken activist during the US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Iran. In 1980 he traveled to Tehran to attempt to negotiate the hostages' release and engaged in a public hunger strike there, weighing less than 100 pounds (45 kg) when he returned to the United States.[38]
In 1998 Gregory spoke at the celebration of the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., with President Bill Clinton in attendance. Not long after, the President told Gregory's long-time friend and public relations consultant Steve Jaffe, "I love Dick Gregory; he is one of the funniest people on the planet." They spoke of how Gregory had made a comment on Dr. King's birthday that broke everyone into laughter, when he noted that the President made Speaker Newt Gingrich ride "in the back of the plane," on an Air Force One trip overseas.[39]
Gregory was diagnosed with lymphoma in late 1999. He said he was treating the cancer with herbs, vitamins, and exercise, which he believed kept the cancer in remission.[40]
Since the mid-1980s, Gregory was a figure in the health food industry by advocating for a raw fruit and vegetable diet. He wrote the introduction to Viktoras Kulvinskas' book Survival into the 21st Century. Gregory first became a vegetarian in the 1960s and lost a considerable amount of weight by going on extreme fasts, some lasting upwards of 50 days. He developed a diet drink called "Bahamian Diet Nutritional Drink" and went on TV shows advocating his diet and to help the morbidly obese.[27]
At a civil rights rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Gregory criticized the United States, calling it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs".[42]
In 2008, Gregory stated he believed that air pollution and intentional water contamination with heavy metals such as lead and possibly manganese may be being used against black Americans, especially in urban neighborhoods, and that such factors could be contributing to high levels of violence in black communities.[43]
On September 10, 2010, Gregory announced that he was going on a hunger strike. In a commentary that was published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation Web site in Montreal, he said that he doubted the official U.S. report about the attacks on September 11, 2001. "One thing I know is that the official government story of those events, as well as what took place that day at the Pentagon, is just that, a story. This story is not the truth, but far from it. I was born on October 12, 1932. I am announcing today that I will be consuming only liquids beginning Sunday until my eightieth birthday in 2012 and until the real truth of what truly happened on that day emerges and is publicly known."[44]
In 1984, he founded Health Enterprises, Inc., a company that distributed weight-loss products. With this company, Gregory made efforts to improve the life expectancy of African Americans, which he believed was being hindered by poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse.[45] In 1985, Gregory introduced the "Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet", a powdered-diet mix.[46] He launched the weight-loss powder at the Whole Life Expo in Boston under the slogan "It's cool to be healthy". The diet mix, drunk three times a day, was said to provide rapid weight loss. Gregory received a multimillion-dollar distribution contract to retail the diet.[47]
In 2014, Dick Gregory updated his original 4X formula, which was the basis for the Bahamian Diet and created his new and improved "Caribbean Diet for Optimal Health".[48] In 1985, the Ethiopian government adopted Gregory's forumula to combat malnutrition during a period of famine in the country to reported success. [49]
A week prior to his death, Gregory was hospitalized in Washington, D.C. with a bacterial infection.[50] He later died at the hospital in Washington, D.C., on August 19, 2017, at the age of 84.[38] The cause was heart failure.[51]
Dick Gregory, byname of Richard Claxton Gregory (b. October 12, 1932, St. Louis, Missouri — d. August 19, 2017, Washington, D.C.), African-American comedian, civil rights activist, and spokesman for health issues, who became nationally recognized in the 1960s for a biting brand of comedy that attacked racial prejudice. By addressing his hard-hitting satire to white audiences, he gave a comedic voice to the rising Civil Rights Movement. In the 1980s, his nutrition business venture targeted the unhealthy diets of black Americans.
Reared in poverty in St. Louis, Gregory began working at an early age to help support his family. He was involved in sports and social causes in high school, and he entered Southern Illinois University on an athletic scholarship in 1951, excelling as a middle-distance runner. He was named the university’s outstanding student athlete in 1953, the same year he left college to join the U.S. Army, where he hosted and performed comedy routines in military shows.
After a brief return to his alma mater in 1955-56, Gregory sought entrance to the national comedy circuit in Chicago. His breakthrough came in 1961, when a one-nighter at the Chicago Playboy Club turned into a six-week stint that earned him a profile inTimemagazine and a television appearance on “The Jack PaarShow.” In his numerous subsequent television, nightclub, and concert routines, he targeted poverty, segregation,and racial discrimination. Active in the Civil Rights Movement, he participated in numerous demonstrations and was arrested for civil disobedience several times. In 1963, he was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. His activism spurred him to run for mayor of Chicago in 1966 and for president of the United Statesin 1968.
In the early 1970s Gregory abandoned comedy to focus on his political interests, which widened from race relations to include such issues as violence, world hunger, capital punishment, drug abuse, and poor health care. He generated particular attention for his many hunger fasts. At this time he became a vegetarian, a marathon runner, and an expert on nutrition. He soon began a successful business venture with his nutritional product, the “Bahamian Diet,” around which he built Dick Gregory Health Enterprises, Inc. Through his company, he targeted the lower life expectancy of black Americans, which he attributed to poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse.
Gregory wrote many books, includingNigger: An Autobiography(1964) andNo More Lies: The Myth and the Reality of American History(1971). He made a brief return to the comedy circuit in the mid-1990s.
