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.”
STREET V. NEW YORK (1969)
After the shooting of civil rights icon James Meredith, Sidney Street, a fifty-one-year-old African American New York City bus driver with no previous criminal record, set his American flag on fire on a public street. A crowd gathered, and a police officer demanded that Street explain what was going on. Street replied, “If they let that happen to Meredith, we don’t need an American flag.” Street was arrested and eventually convicted of violating a state statute making it a crime to publicly “cast contempt upon [the US flag] either by words or act.”
After New York’s appellate and high courts affirmed his conviction, the US Supreme Court overturned it in a 5–4 decision, ruling that the part of the law prohibiting contemptuous “words” against the flag violated the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Court wrote, “Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”
Because the part of the law against words was unconstitutional and because it was not possible to know from the general verdict at trial whether Street’s words had played a role in his conviction, the Court overturned the guilty verdict. It would take the Supreme Court another twenty years to return to the question of whether the First Amendment protected even the act of burning the flag.
The Right to Offend
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
In the days of the mighty King Nimrod, there lived a young man named Abraham, son of Azar, an idol maker. Out of wood, Azar sculpted beautiful gods that the people loved and worshipped.Azar would send his son to market with the idols, but Abraham never sold any. He called out, “Who’ll buy my idols? They’re cheap and worthless. Will you buy one? It won’t hurt you.” When a passerby stopped to look at the beauty of the craftsmanship, Abraham slapped the idol. “Talk,” he said. “Tell this honest man to buy you. Do something.” There would be no sale.
Of course, his father was upset. He was losing money and had a nonbeliever for a son. He told Abraham to believe in the gods or leave the house. Abraham left.
Abraham walked into a temple while all the townsfolk were in their homes preparing for an evening of worshipping their beloved gods. Abraham held out food for the gods. “Eat. Aren’t you hungry? Why don’t you talk to me?” Again he slapped their faces, one by one. Slap, move to the next, slap. Then he took an ax and chopped the gods to pieces, some as small as toothpicks. He chopped up all but the largest and put the ax in this idol’s hand.
When the people came to worship their gods, they found them in a splintery pile around the chief idol. They bemoaned their fate and that of their gods. “Who would do this?” they cried in unison, a chorus of wails.
“Surely it was someone,” Abraham exclaimed. “The big one stands there with a guilty ax in his hand. Perhaps he was envious of the rest and chopped them up. Should we ask him?”
“You know they don’t speak,” the priest said.
“Then why do you worship them?”
“Heresy,” the people cried in unison, and took him to see his king.
* * *
About four years ago, I was on a cartoonist panel at the Lahore Literary Festival in Pakistan. I wasn’t sure why I, a novelist, was asked to pontificate on political cartoons and graphic novels. That was part of the overall charm of Lahore: not much made sense, so you went with the flow. There were two other panelists, one arguably Pakistan’s most famous political cartoonist, and the second a graphic journalist who, in my opinion, was nothing short of a genius. The audience hall was overfilled, more than seven hundred people, mostly young adults, university students, some high school kids. The conversation was lively, and as was to be expected, halfway through, the moderator asked how the panelists felt about the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. The other panelists, while defending free speech and the right of the Danish newspapers to publish the cartoons, argued that it was not a good idea to offend religions and that the newspapers should not have done so. Those two panelists knew more about the subject than I ever could, but that did not stop me from keeping up a running uninformed commentary. I mentioned that my problem with the cartoons was that they were not funny. I talked about how insults and offenses are ways for humans to figure out boundaries. Like children, we have to test the rules, have to figure out how strict those rules are.
During the Q&A, it became obvious that the majority of the audience preferred that no one offend their religion. The moderator asked the panelists if they had any last thoughts to close the session. Well, I did.
I said that had the prophet Muhammad not wished to offend, we would not have had Islam.
* * *
Many Christians will tell you: proclaiming truth always offends.
Jesus caused trouble wherever he went. He was so offensive that he was crucified for it. He violently insulted the beliefs of the time. He made a whip out of cords and drove everyone from the Temple. He overturn
ed the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who were selling doves.
What did he have against doves? I ask you.
Muhammad destroyed the idols surrounding the Kaaba, 360 of them that various Arab tribes worshipped. He showed no respect to the pagan religions of his time.
Moses not only offended; he challenged an empire.
Would a plague of frogs be considered a sign of disrespect?
* * *
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
And usually demanded with no little offense.
* * *
Sidney Street was an African American veteran of World War II and a Bronze Star recipient. On June 6, 1966, when he heard that civil rights activist James Meredith had been shot by a sniper during his march through Mississippi, Street went to the intersection of Lafayette Avenue and Saint James Place, one block from his apartment in Brooklyn, and burned an American flag. He was arrested for it. The New York City Criminal Court charged Street with malicious mischief for willfully and unlawfully defiling, casting contempt on, and burning an American flag. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction.
The details of the burning are what I find fascinating. Sidney Street placed a piece of paper on the sidewalk. The flag he set on fire was properly and exquisitely folded. He held the burning flag in hand as long as he could, then laid it on the paper so that it would not be soiled by the sidewalk.
* * *
When I was fifteen, I made a list of all the ways in which I could kill my parents. I separated the murderous possibilities into two categories: on the left were those where it would be obvious that I killed them, and on the right were those I would almost certainly have gotten away with.
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