Dick Gregory: Playboy Interview

Brought up in the Negro ghetto of St. Louis, Richard Claxton Gregory seemed destined to remain, like so many of his race, the prisoner of a deprived environment. He grew up, however, to become the first Negro comedian to break into the big leagues of show business, and the only entertainer of any color to commit his fame and fortune—even his physical well-being—to the cause of racial equality. Few people would seem less likely to become a leading figure in the civil rights movement—yet, for good or ill, he has assumed just such a role.

This improbable success story began in January 1961, when Gregory's fortunes, as an unknown comic burdened with chronic unemployment as well as the responsibility of a wife and child, were at their lowest ebb. Scheduled to be interviewed for a possible engagement at Chicago's Playboy Club, Gregory was asked, without notice and without audition, to fill in for ailing comic Irwin Corey. He brought down the house—and with it, the tacit prohibition of race relations as a socially acceptable subject for humor in big-time nightclubs. Within a year, at $6500 a week, he was playing to capacity crowds from Basin Street East in Manhattan and Mister Kelly's in Chicago to the hungry i in San Francisco. He had received a $25,000 advance on his first best-selling album, "Dick Gregory in Living Black and White," and had written and posed for a satiric photo-and-comment book (part of which first ran in Playboy) called "From the Back of the Bus," with an introduction by Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner.

It was then, at the crest of his success, that Gregory began to involve himself in—and dedicate himself to—the civil rights activities which have come to eclipse his career as a comedian. A prominent participant in boycotts, sit-ins, stall-ins, marches and Freedom Rides in Arkansas and Illinois, Massachusetts and Mississippi, he has been arrested eight times, served a total of two months in various jails, and posted $2000 bonds on at least six occasions. In all, he has spent almost a quarter-million dollars of his own money on the movement, and has lost an estimated $100,000 in canceled nightclub bookings since March of 1963.

Apart from the honorary compensation of an Emmy citation from Los Angeles' station KTLA-TV for his eloquent enunciation of the Negro cause on a local television show, and the Negro Publishers' Russwurm Award for "outstanding achievement" in the field of civil rights, Gregory has been rewarded with mingled approbation and abuse for his sometimes vociferous militancy. His importance, however, as a pivotal and powerful figure in the nationwide Negro movement is generally conceded.

At this juncture in his stormy public life, we felt that the time was ripe for an outspoken "Playboy Interview" with the 31-year-old funnyman-turned-freedom-fighter. During the late-night tape sessions that followed, Gregory explored for us—with deep gravity and disarming candor, but only occasional dependence on his well-known wit—both his reasons for taking up the Negro cause and his controversial views on what one writer has called "the crisis in black and white." We began our conversation on a negative note, with a question about recent criticism of his total commitment to the cause of racial equality.