WaPo | Mr. Gregory ran for mayor against Daley in 1967 and for U.S.
president in 1968 as a write-in candidate with the left-wing Freedom and
Peace Party, campaigning against what he saw as rampant political
corruption in the two major parties.
Mr. Gregory said he was
appalled that the Democratic Party would host its national convention
that year in Chicago, a city where black demonstrators were regularly
brutalized by the police. The convention drew a large contingent of
white anti-Vietnam protesters, and the outbreak of violence that ensued
prompted Mr. Gregory to take mordant glee in the melee.
“I
was at home watching it on TV, and I fell on the floor and laughed,” he
told GQ magazine in 2008. “My wife said, ‘What’s funny?’ And I said,
‘The whole world is gonna change. White folks are gonna see white folks
beating white folks.’ ”
Increasingly inclined to believe conspiracy theories, he was once
arrested for attempting to wrap yellow “crime scene” tape across the
front gates of the CIA, for what he alleged was the spy agency’s
involvement in distributing crack cocaine in inner cities.
Like
Muhammad Ali, “who always thought of himself as more than a boxer, Greg
always considered himself more than a comic,” New York Times sports
columnist and Gregory biographer Robert Lipsyte told the London
Independent in 2004. “Both men suffered enormously for their political
convictions. But unlike Ali, Greg was conscious of his role from the
beginning. He knew that his presence at Southern demonstrations would
save lives, even if it killed his career.”
He caught a break in 1961 when Hugh Hefner requested that the
comedian perform one night at Chicago’s Playboy Club to substitute for
Irwin Corey, who had canceled at the last minute.
As Mr. Gregory
told it, when he arrived at the club that night, he was stopped by the
manager. The man feared an especially hostile audience — a convention of
white Southern frozen-foods executives.
Mr. Gregory strode onto the stage anyway and grabbed the microphone. A heckler quickly stood up and threw out a racial epithet.
The
comic was ready. He calmly explained that he had an arrangement with
the club that he received a $50 bonus each time someone used that word
and invited the audience to keep on saying it.
Another in the
crowd asked Mr. Gregory if he’d consider performing in Mobile, Ala. He
replied: “Mobile? I won’t even work the south of this room.”
He
won over the audience, and an ensuing profile in Time magazine led to
invitations to appear on Paar’s TV show and other career-building stops.
As he rose in the national consciousness, he also relished playing the
provocateur. He often said he titled his 1964 memoir “Nigger: An
Autobiography” — a book co-written with Lipsyte — so that every time the
slur was spoken, it would serve as advertising for the book. It quickly
became a bestseller.
