Watching all the once well known names fade from the "Reader board of
life", would not be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I'm on the
short list.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/20/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's an interesting place to be in when one is old, watching all the people
whose names dominated the world one knew, disappear.
Miriam
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Subject: [blind-democracy] dick gregory dead at 84
Back in the mid sixties, my dad and I attended the performance by what was
then a little known comedian...at least outside the Black community.
Carl Jarvis
Dick Gregory, 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.