Dick Gregory is often described, more correctly than not, as the first African American stand-up comedian to succeed in venues previously unavailable to predecessors such as Nipsey Russell and Moms Mabley. Thanks to his frequent appearances on television, Gregory was famous when he sought the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party in the 1968 presidential election. After that nomination went to Eldridge Cleaver—who was too young to be president, under a legal cloud involving his return to prison, and too militant for some in the party—a group broke away from the Peace and Freedom Party and formed the Freedom and Peace Party. And (what journalist could resist?) the ridicule commenced.
“It should be noted that the Peace and Freedom Party is not the same as the Freedom and Peace party,” the Albuquerque Journal informed its readers before snapping off a series of one-liners. “It’s still not too late for other groups to stake a claim to peace and freedom, or vice-versa. There could be the Peace with Freedom party, the Freedom or Peace party, and to widen the appeal even further, the Peace, Freedom and Motherhood Party.”1
Being a comedian Gregory risked further ridicule by running as a serious candidate. Some reports sought to glom onto his famed humor with headlines such as “Low Comedy.” In that particle article, ridicule was heaped on Gregory out of resentment that a comedian would run as a serious candidate for president—resentment possibly augmented by the racist position that an African American comedian should know his place. “Dick used to be a great comedian,” it opined. “From a talent for making others look ridiculous he has switched to a facility for making himself look ridiculous.”2
Through Gregory’s candidacy we can also see that the political landscape among African Americans was as nuanced even in that era of intense racial turmoil as it was when George Edwin Walker ran for president in 1904. The pseudonymous African American columnist Diggs Datrooth characterized Gregory as a “comedian-turned-crusader” who was “never one to let an opportunity pass to state his position on a national issue.” Similarly a columnist for the African American–owned New York Amsterdam News told her readers, “Comedian Dick Gregory . . . really can’t be a serious candidate for the presidency.” On the other hand, such major voices among African Americans as James Farmer, Roy Innis, and Dr. Alvin Poussaint applauded Gregory’s candidacy, even knowing his chances were nil and despite their intentions to vote for the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey—while other leading voices, such as Whitney Young, thought Gregory’s candidacy wrong-headed.3
Ridicule also resided in headlines such as “Dick Gregory Is Not So Funny Now.” It emanated from Gregory’s involvement in equal rights protests that, as early as 1963, led Americans to associate him less with appearances as a comedian and more with news reports such as “Police Seize 48 in Protest at Chicago: Dick Gregory Is among Group Arrested at Building Site” and “Gregory on Hunger Strike.”4 Indeed by 1968 Gregory had virtually suspended his show business career. But despite the way many Americans now perceived him, he never suspended his humor. As for example on the campaign trail:
I have no doubt that [if elected] I would have the most trouble with colored folks. One of my first programs would be to wipe out the poverty program and set up a fifty-five billion dollar a year White Folks Rest Program. I’d take all those white folks off their good jobs and put them on my Rest Program. And I’d give my black brother a good job for the first time in his life. I guarantee that after six months of doing this, colored folks would be marching on me at the White House, saying, “What’s wrong with you? Lettin’ these white folks lay around not working, getting relief checks, havin’ all them babies.”5
However, Gregory’s campaign was not conducted for laughs. His speeches and campaign book, Write Me In!, were primarily devoted to exposing racism but also included his views on the Vietnam War, tax loopholes, foreign aid, gun control, and the environment.6 Like Cleaver’s campaign, it progressed along the cusp of fringe and third party.
In some instances, spotting belittlement of Gregory was tricky (as also with Cleaver) due to the offender’s efforts not to be appear racist. Thus belittlement often resided in absences. The African American–owned newspaper Chicago Daily Defender cited one such instance when it called out the white-owned Chicago American for not including Gregory in an article profiling that year’s presidential candidates. “Gregory’s absence,” it declared, “was an indication of the paper’s lack of belief that the comedian-philosopher is sincerely determined to be President of the United States.”7
Ridicule via absence also resided in the discrepancy between “Dick Gregory Is Not So Funny Now” and the actual content in that New York Times Sunday Magazine feature. Written by Eliot Asinof, a highly regarded author of fiction and nonfiction, it presented not only the serious aspects of Gregory’s campaign but also a remarkably vivid depiction of Gregory’s strategic use of humor. Describing a speech Gregory gave to a packed auditorium at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Asinof wrote of its opening:
He stands there for a long moment in the anticipatory silence, looking them over. Finally, he walks to the front of the huge stage and takes an even closer look. “Why, you’re normal. You’re just a bunch of cats like anywhere else. . . . Man, it’s M.I.T. and I expected robots!” They roar with laughter and he is off and running. Like Bob Hope at a Vietnam airbase, he unravels a string of jokes. . . . Then suddenly . . . he regards them all again, his entire style changing like an actor playing a whole new role. Even before he says a word, the audience senses the difference.
Not only was Dick Gregory still funny; he was more Dick Gregory funny than ever. Two milestones in his life accounted for his more individual comedy. Indeed these two milestones led him to run for president.
Gregory spoke of the first in a 1965 interview titled (mistakenly and belittlingly) “Dick Gregory Not Feeling Too Funny.” In it he told of growing up “the skinniest kid on the block” who “learned to quip when the other children picked on him.” In his teens he realized that with this device, “once you get a man to laugh with you, it’s hard for him to laugh at you.”8 In humor Gregory had found an antidote to ridicule. Hence the opening sequence in his remarks at MIT.
That racism resided in mistakenly viewing Gregory as no longer funny was revealed by Gregory himself when he spoke of things that made Americans (in the parlance of the day) uptight. In campaign speeches aimed at whites, he frequently declared:
America is the number one racist country on the face of the earth, bar none. Now, a lot of times when a black man says that, white folks get uptight. Well, if anybody got uptight just now, that’s the racism in your own head. I did not say American white folks were the number one racists on the face of the earth, I said America; and one day when we realize that black and white folks in this country are Americans, then maybe when you hear that statement you will realize that means black folks and white folks.9
Further evidence that racism resides deep in the psyche, often filtering perceptions without our even realizing it, are the numerous headlines belittling the full extent of Gregory’s abilities by declaring he was no longer funny.
Similarly, deep in the psyche was the second milestone, this one in Gregory’s professional growth. It occurred following his initial success as a stand-up comic in the latter half of the 1950s. Much of his material back then dealt with nonracial topics or turned on noncontroversial aspects of race. He would then slip in a zinger: “Every time a delegation of Negroes flies to Washington to discuss civil rights, Eisenhower flies to Augusta, Georgia. ‘Come see me at the golf club,’ he says—‘if you can get in.’”10
As with many successful comedians, Gregory did not write all of his material. Among the top comedy writers he approached back then was Robert Orben, who told him, “You need material that is especially suited for you. Before that can happen, you’ve got to find your voice. . . . At that point where you can tell me who Dick Gregory is, then I’ll write for you. Otherwise, I’ll be floundering along with you.”11 It was by participating in the civil rights movement, both witnessing and being a victim of the mass arrests and the violent attacks upon those protesting segregation and other racial injustices, that he found his voice. That voice did not, however, lose its humor. Rather it acquired an additional dimension.
Ever the professional, Gregory saved his biggest punch line, as it were, for his campaign’s finale. In October his party began distributing campaign literature that mimicked the one dollar bill. In lieu of the image of George Washington was a picture of Dick Gregory, bearded and bemused with his hat tipped back, beneath which it declared itself to be a “One Vote” bill. On the reverse side a dove of peace and the scales of justice replaced the images on actual dollar bills, with text inserted at the bottom, where no comparable text appeared on the actual one dollar bill:
TAKE THIS
ONE OPPORTUNITY
TO EXPRESS YOUR FREE CHOICE. THIS COUNTRY
IS REDEEMABLE. TAKE THIS TO THE POLL WITH YOU AND VOTE FOR
DICK GREGORY PRESIDENT DAVID FROST VICE PRESIDENT
Among Gregory’s reasons for issuing his dollar bill: “I wanted some campaign literature that if you threw it down, somebody would pick it up.”12
And picked up it was—by the federal government. “The Secret Service has seized Dick Gregory-for-president campaign pamphlets on grounds they look too much like dollar bills,” United Press International reported, along with all the wire services, in articles that appeared in newspapers nationwide. According to some owners of laundromats and similar self-service sites, the One Vote bill was turning up in machines that gave change for genuine dollar bills.13
The seizure and news reports that followed were manna from heaven for Gregory. “What kind of machine can’t tell a nigger from George Washington?” he asked. While most white-owned newspapers left out that statement, they did include his comment that the literature was seized “because it is definitely dangerous to the political machines.”14 The incident was even reported on The CBS Evening News, with Walter Cronkite, the nation’s preeminent news anchor, ending the report by noting that they had tried using one in the company cafeteria’s dollar bill changer, which rejected it. Clearly Gregory had the last laugh, as all this publicity far exceeded that which the One Vote bill would have otherwise gotten.
Yet even that laugh went largely unheard. More than any of the other fringe candidates in 1968, Gregory’s candidacy demonstrates how the turbulence of the era included a vast inability among Americans to hear each other. Think about Gregory’s statement regarding America as the most racist nation in the world; think about his One Vote bill declaring, “THIS COUNTRY IS REDEEMABLE”; then think about this, from a review of his campaign book Write Me In!: “In his sly way, Gregory has made a devil out of the white man and a saint out of the colored man. . . . He never misses an opportunity to downgrade the white man. . . . If what Gregory says is true, then the world has truly gone insane and there is no hope left—and the chance of any man, white or black, changing it doesn’t exist.”15
More than forty-seven thousand Americans registered their disagreement with that assessment by voting for Gregory.16 Countless others (literally, as no measure is available) also disagreed but did not vote for him. Still, while a considerable number of Americans did hear his message—not just its warnings but its moral plea and abiding humor—as many or more did not. In the realm of presidential candidacies, it would take the continued efforts of twenty-one subsequent African Americans seeking the presidency via major parties, third parties, or as noted fringe candidates before the stage was set for Barack Obama to take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2009.17