Dick Gregory

Richard Claxton Gregory was born on October 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Lucille, a house cleaner, and Presley Gregory. At Sumner High School, he won the state cross-country championship in 1950 and attracted the attention of Southern Illinois University, which awarded him a track scholarship. At SIU, Gregory set school records as a half-miler and miler and was named the university's outstanding student athlete of 1953. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1954, a military draft interrupted his studies, and he served at Fort Cavazos in Texas, Fort Lee in Virginia, and Fort Smith in Arkansas. It was during this service that a commanding officer recognized Gregory's comedic instincts and encouraged him to enter talent shows, which he won. After his discharge in 1956, Gregory briefly returned to SIU but left without a degree, later stating that the university seemed more interested in his athletic performance than his education.

Gregory relocated to Chicago with the goal of pursuing comedy professionally. In 1958, he opened the Apex Club nightclub in Illinois, a venture that failed and left him in financial difficulty. The following year he secured a position as master of ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club. During this period he worked daytime hours for the United States Postal Service while performing evenings in small, predominantly Black nightclubs along the Chitlin' Circuit. Gregory joined a generation of Black comedians that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom moved away from the minstrel tradition that had long defined Black performance in mainstream venues. His material drew heavily on racial injustice and current events, delivered with a directness he described as speaking "flat-footed" to audiences.

In 1961, while performing at the Black-owned Roberts Show Bar in Chicago, Gregory was spotted by Hugh Hefner, who hired him as a replacement for comedian Irwin Corey at the Chicago Playboy Club. What was booked as a single night extended to a six-week engagement and earned Gregory coverage in Time magazine as well as a guest appearance on Jack Paar's television program. That same year he made his New York debut at The Blue Angel nightclub, recording a live set there that appeared on his album East & West. By 1961 he had become a fixture in comedy clubs and had begun releasing comedy record albums, building a following particularly among African American communities in the South with material that confronted bigotry and racism directly.

Gregory's Broadway career brought him to the Winter Garden Theatre in 1962, where he appeared in Eddie Fisher at the Winter Garden. His 1964 book Nigger, an autobiography, sold over a million copies and has remained continuously in print since publication. Comedy Central later ranked him number 82 on its list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of all time, and he received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Beyond entertainment, Gregory became a prominent political activist during the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War and racial injustice and advocating for animal rights. He was arrested on multiple occasions and undertook numerous hunger strikes. In 1967, he ran against Richard J. Daley for Mayor of Chicago. The following year he entered the presidential race as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter of the Peace and Freedom Party, ultimately receiving 47,097 votes. His running mates varied by state and included activist Mark Lane in several states, biologist Dr. George Wallace of Plainfield in New Jersey, and pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock in Virginia and Pennsylvania. His campaign activities placed him on the master list of Nixon's political opponents. He documented the campaign in his 1968 book Write Me In. On October 15, 1969, Gregory spoke at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C.

Gregory died of heart failure on August 19, 2017, at a hospital in Washington, D.C., at the age of 84.