ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC
Case law moves slowly. That movement requires extraordinary persistence—not only countless hours of effort on the part of advocates but also a refusal to give up in the face of repeated failure. The entertainment business provides excellent training: for performers, persistence is the practice and rejection the norm. Indeed, the need for persistence is perhaps even more the case for stand-up comedians than for legal activists. Bits tend to take shape very slowly. Their refinement occurs through repeated interaction with audiences, who are rich in instruction—their sighs, their contempt, their silence, their adulation, their impatience, their excitement and boorishness. Crowd work is a reciprocal tutelage, which, ideally, holds things in common with the practice of democracy. How to speak as oneself and hold the attention of others? And persuade the group of facts they don’t see? Finding one’s voice, the right moment to pause, or the phrase to elicit a certain quality of laughter can take comedians months, sometimes years.
In 1962, NAACP leader Medgar Evers invited stand-up comedian Dick Gregory to Mississippi to speak at voter registration rallies. Gregory, a well-known performer, was the first black comic to cross over to white audiences. The previous year, a gig at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in Chicago had led to an appearance on The Jack Paar Show and after his performance, Gregory was invited to sit beside the white host for a talk. That particular chair signaled industry anointment, and the TV visibility bumped Gregory’s club rates to Sinatra level. Some in Gregory’s position might have hesitated before accepting an invitation like Evers’s to headline a political rally—but not Gregory. For him, the struggle for justice was imperative, and he admired integrity more than earning power. According to Gregory’s son, Christian, “Medgar Evers was a God to my Dad.” The march on the streets of Mississippi transformed Gregory permanently into an activist.
By the early 1960s, wherever Gregory went, the press (and FBI) usually followed. Not only did his presence bring more attention to the issues, but that press attention potentially decreased the likelihood that bystanders or police would attack the civil rights protesters. In addition, Gregory was eminently quotable, quick to illuminate complex issues with a concise comment and a biting wit.
Soon Gregory was dedicating as much time to the civil rights movement as he was to his comedy career. The press constantly asked him why he risked it. “The answer was as clear then as it is now,” he wrote in a 2001 memoir, Callus on My Soul, one of his twelve books. “Yes, I was losing money, but the stakes were just too high to turn back.” By the summer of 1965, Gregory was commuting from San Francisco’s storied club, the hungry i, where he performed regularly, to downtown Chicago, where he was marching in some of the daily protests to demand improvements in the city’s overcrowded, underfunded black schools. The protests began that June in response to Mayor Richard Daley’s reappointment of Benjamin Willis, whose policies supported de facto segregation, as superintendent of schools. Instead of moving black students into the empty classrooms of new schools in white neighborhoods, or renovating black schools, or building new schools for black children on the South Side, Willis provided aluminum trailers to hold the overflow of black students—many on the grounds of those same decrepit black schools. The trailers became known as Willis Wagons.
The summer of 1965 was a long, hot one. For sixty days, protesters had been demonstrating in downtown Chicago—in front of the office building of the chair of the school committee, in front of Buckingham Fountain, in front of city hall. But Mayor Daley wasn’t showing up at city hall much that summer, so on August 1, a hundred activists took their bodies on the road. They walked the five miles to his house in Bridgeport. The police warned them that they would be arrested for breach of the peace if they were caught singing in this white residential neighborhood. After the march, the Chicago Defender quoted Gregory, who brought a useful sense of comedic timing wherever he went: “As for the singing, when we get ready to get ourselves arrested we’ll let the police know,” he said.
The following afternoon, accompanied by one hundred police officers, Dick Gregory and sixty-four others began the five miles from downtown once again. This time, both the protesters and the police had attorneys advising them. According to police testimony, the protesters were greeted by approximately thirty-five people on a Bridgeport corner, holding signs. The taverns had been closed. Other white residents came out of their homes to jeer as the demonstrators peacefully circled the four blocks of Daley’s neighborhood. Additional officers were stationed at the intersections and along each of the four blocks in their loop. Nevertheless, with each lap, the hostile white crowd grew—to one hundred, then one hundred fifty, then double that.
The court record quoted Gregory preparing his fellow marchers for their own form of heckling. “Don’t stop and don’t answer any one back,” he told them. “Don’t worry about anything that is going to be said to you. Just keep marching. If anyone hits you or anything, try to remember what they look like, but above all means, do not hit them back. Keep the line straight, and keep it tight.” At one point, a group of white bystanders pointed their sprinklers at the demonstrators; others tried to join the march, but the police ushered them back onto their lawns. Gregory told an officer, “They have as much a right to demonstrate as we do.” According to a Sergeant Golden, at 9:00 p.m., new onlookers suddenly seemed to pour in from everywhere, and the streets and sidewalks swelled with more whites. Newspaper accounts estimated between fifteen hundred and two thousand people. Whatever their number, the white mob was angry. Many were shouting. Some held signs supporting the Ku Klux Klan. Some were singing the Alabama Trooper song. Others threw eggs and rocks. People in cars blasted their horns. Police believed the situation was verging on a riot. By 9:30, police asked Gregory to let them escort his group out, explaining that they could not ensure their safety. Three civil rights demonstrators took the escort, but Gregory and the others stayed. The police arrested them for disorderly conduct.
As a First Amendment case, Gregory v. Chicago is cut-and-dried. As to the question of how much a hostile audience influences the exercise of a constitutional right, the Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous: the government had no right to restrict the speech of the demonstrators due to the anticipated potential violence of the mob. The canonical significance of Gregory v. Chicago resides in Justice Black’s concurrence elaborating on the heckler’s veto, which draws not from the lay meaning of heckler but from the silencing power of counterprotesters. Some of the related issues would be taken up a decade later in Skokie, refining the assertion that the government cannot allow opponents to stop the speech of those they oppose, even in anticipation of violence this may incite, whether they are Nazis, or civil rights activists, or Klansmen—as Justice Black had once been himself. Today the heckler’s veto remains relevant including in cases of demonstrations against speeches by, for example, Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos.
But whatever advances Gregory v. Chicago signified for First Amendment case law, it was a footnote in the unstoppable life of Dick Gregory. There aren’t many other people who could have easily been lead plaintiffs in any number of civil rights cases, and fewer still who were famous show business talents who turned their gifts full time toward activism. Gregory went on to protest the Vietnam War, apartheid, world hunger, on behalf of Native American fishing rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and for the rights of black people on numerous fronts. He ran for mayor of Chicago and for the presidency, and launched a successful health food business after working as a nutritionist for Muhammad Ali. There were years during which Gregory spoke at three hundred colleges. “He evolved into an incredibly honed person who really used himself to live his cause,” said Gretchen Law, a playwright who wrote Turn Me Loose, a 2018 play about him. “And his cause really was combating racism in all of its psychoses and all of its horror. He became so clear about that.”
John Bracey Jr., the recently retired chair of the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, met Dick Gregory that summer of 1965 in Chicago. Bracey was a young activist working for Lawrence Landry, who was by then the head of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, which organized the protests. “When we see the movies, we see the high points. We don’t see the postraumatic stress. A lotta people in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] had breakdowns,” Bracey told me. “Dick Gregory managed to sustain himself at the front of what he wanted to do. That’s remarkable. Every ten years you look up, Dick’s still out there! He hasn’t taken a break!”
Bracey ran into Gregory at Landry’s memorial and recognized the spirit of the young fighter in the old man who stood before him. Gregory was “warm and friendly, insightful, and kept you calm,” he said. “I don’t think it was practiced,” he added. “It was his way of relating to the world.”
“It feels like he lived five lives, and was just a comedian at the beginning and the end,” Neal Brennan, the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, observed.
Today, Gregory’s name is no longer well known. For years, Edward Schmitt, Gregory’s biographer, has been pondering this troubling disappearance from mainstream consciousness. “He was a household name, and the press certainly did cover him through the sixties,” he told me. The FBI has a file on Gregory that runs over eight hundred pages. We have as much to learn from the life of Dick Gregory as Gregory did from every audience.
Was the focus of Gregory’s persistence the problem? Jack Healey, a former priest who went on to be the head of Amnesty International in the United States, once told Schmitt about a conversation he had with journalist Dan Rather on an airplane. “I’m kind of tired of Dick Gregory,” Rather had said. Of course, injustice isn’t quickly addressed, and continued activism can seem tiresome, especially to those who remain unaffected by those inequities.
Perhaps the mainstream press lost interest in Dick Gregory because he continued to show up in places where the need was as persistent as he was—in black communities where so many of the promises of civil rights, enshrined in law, have yet to be honored. The Chicago public schools remain segregated and underfunded, a majority of their students living in poverty.
Ten days after his arrest in Chicago for that demonstration in front of Mayor Daley’s house, Gregory flew to California, where the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles was imploding. Thirty-four people would die in the riots, a level of civil unrest Los Angeles wouldn’t experience again until Rodney King in 1991. Gregory was shot in the leg there while attempting to stop a fight. Soon afterward, he appeared on the Merv Griffin Show.
That day’s panel included a young, ebullient Richard Pryor and an angry, young Phil Spector. After arrogantly deflecting Merv’s friendly questions, Spector turned his misogyny onto Eartha Kitt, a famous black entertainer. Today this would likely be the story whose regurgitated anecdotal meaning would trend on the Internet. But talk shows allowed for substantive conversation then and Kitt easily took care of Spector herself. The segment ended with an eager Merv Griffin engaging with Gregory about the activity on some American streets. Gregory pointed out that police violence had ignited every riot to date. He listed the factors that often lead to the expression of despair and rage that had just occurred in Watts—unemployment, overcrowding, underserved schools, and police brutality. Griffin noted the improvements in legislation that resulted from the Movement, but expressed skepticism about the way in which activists seemed to insist that “the only way to get things done is to disobey the law.”
Dick Gregory’s reply that day holds as much weight as any Supreme Court case: “Read the Constitution,” he suggested, “and see how many times it mentions law and obeying the law. The one thing the Constitution talks about, which the Negro do not have, and when we get that we will have no more problem with the law, is justice. Until you give me justice, you can’t talk to me about disobeying the law. Once you have proper justice, the law takes care of itself.”