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[Lipsyte] I met Dick Gregory for the first time
on the evening of September 16, 1963.
At the time, Greg was the hottest comedian
in the country, and he had signed
the typical publishing contract
for one of those humorous rags-to-riches autobiography.
And the problem was that Greg had rejected
every writer maybe in America, and finally the publisher
scraped the bottom of the barrel with me.
I was a 25-year-old sportswriter
at The New York Times,
and I went up to his hotel room.
He was on his bed. He was curled up in a fetal position.
He was wearing only underwear, and he was crying.
I sat down in a chair next to the bed,
and I asked why he was crying,
and he said, "Didn't you read about the four little girls
who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?"
And he just kind of rolled over on his back,
and for the next hour, he just talked to the ceiling.
Mostly I just listened. I was fascinated.
This man was angry. He was passionate.
He was not the cool, slangy hipster
who was on the nightclub stages,
and I really do believe that he had missions to accomplish,
and it wasn't just making jokes.
When they say this show features living color,
you better believe it.
[laughter]
Of course, back in my hometown,
we had what you call the friendly Ku Klux Klan.
Oh, yeah, they'll come to your house to burn a cross.
If they didn't have no matches,
they'd knock on your door and ask you for a pack.
Dick was the first one that stepped in that I knew of
that made political and social issues
the subject of his humor.
Found out that cold weather makes it very nice
for race relations.
But last month when it was 15 below zero in Chicago,
I walked out of a nightclub. A drunk walked up to me,
said, "Why don't you get back to Africa where you belong
and take me with you?"
[audience laughter]
Dick Gregory was one of the greatest political comedians
to ever live.
There are a lot of comedians in the history of comedy,
who are "political comedians,"
but they're not actually taking a side.
Dick Gregory was always taking a side
and then suffering the consequence of taking that side.
I chose to be an agitator.
Next time you put your underwear
in the washing machine, take the agitator out,
and all you gon' end up with is some dirty, wet drawers.
Are you out to give people a good laugh?
Are you out to make a very definite
and a very pungent point,
or is it a combination of the two?
I happen to be a very firm believer--
believe that you can't laugh social problems
out of existence,
and the day we find a cure for cancer,
it won't be through jokes.
It'll be through hard, sincere work.
For him, making people laugh wasn't enough.
To be out there on the front lines
of the civil rights movement,
he made a huge sacrifice.
We've seen plenty of entertainers march
and march repeatedly and always, always go back
to the big money of show business.
But we do have this one example of this one person
who went all the way with it.
[Dick] Thank this movement--
I'm not talking about the ones we know about.
Talking about the ones we don't know about.
Facts are, there is a God that know all of the names,
and because of this movement, it gave me a turtle philosophy.
Hard on the outside, soft on the inside,
and willing to stick your neck out.
That's what it's about. Huh? That's what it's about.
[man] Ah! Ladies and gentlemen, Dick Gregory!
[cheers and applause]
Dick Gregory!
[cheers and applause subside]
[click]
This is Bob Lipsyte, room 1705,
the Hotel Beverly in New York City, 1963.
When you first tried to get a job
with the kind of jokes that you do,
I imagine it was kind of tough.
So how did you break through to the big white clubs?
[Dick] Biggest break I had was I opened up
at the Playboy Club for one night
to fill in for a comic in Chicago,
and everyone who had heard my act told me, "Don't go on,
"because we have a Southern convention in town,
and the room is filled with Southerners."
[Lipsyte] A room full of Southerners?
[Dick] A room full of Southerners.
[Lipsyte] So what happened?
upbeat jazz music
[Dick] So the Playboy Club,
it was...it was the only one in the country,
and it was just getting started,
and it was, like, the talk of America.
And they said they'd pay me $50,
and I couldn't believe it was that much money in the world.
He was invited to do the Playboy Club.
Mr. Hefner gave my father the opportunity
to come and do flat-foot, stare-you-in-the-eye comedy.
He jumps onto the stage on a night
that they'd rather he hadn't.
[Dick] The room that I was working had been rented out
to a frozen food convention.
It was a delegation from the South.
ominous music
Victor Lownes said to me,
"Hefner told me to tell you, you don't have to go on tonight."
And he said, "We're sorry, but we rented the room out
to a Southern delegation."
And I just pushed him out the way
and said, "You don't know what I went through to get here."
And, uh, got up on the stage and started talking.
Got a little snow down in Georgia
for the first time in a hundred years.
[man in audience shouts indistinctly]
[Dick] Oh, it's not funny.
Can you imagine what it feels like being my color
in an all-white Georgia? - [audience chuckles]
Hell, I had a cousin damn near got killed
after that first snow.
He thought he was leaning up against a snowbank,
and it turned out to be a Ku Klux Klan rally.
[laughter]
Well, I remember when I was a kid back home.
It got so cold one night, the Ku Klux Klan
tried to burn a cross on our front porch,
and we opened the door and told 'em, "Bring it inside."
[laughter]
I go on at eight o'clock.
At ten o'clock that night, I'm still on.
They are just going off.
At eleven o'clock that night, they called Hefner.
They said, "You better get over here.
Something's happening."
And nobody can believe that this Black comic
can take this room of Southern white men.
[Christian] The door was open.
Dick Gregory walked off that stage
and never looked back the same.
[Dick] The press just went insane.
Time Magazine wrote about my act,
and then Jack Paar picked it up,
which was probably the most powerful personality on TV.
[Christian] My father loved Jack Paar.
He loved Mr. Paar's smoothness, his delivery, his timing.
[telephone rings]
[Dick] I got a call from the Jack Paar show.
"Dick, he wants you on the show."
I said, "Well, tell him I don't wanna be on the show."
Because a negro had never sit down on the couch
on that show.
So I hung up.
And I'm crying now, 'cause I mean, I knew
what it would be to my career not to go on that show.
Then the phone rings back, and it's Jack Paar.
"What do you mean, you don't wanna go on the show?"
"Negroes never sit down."
He said, "Come on in. You can sit down with me."
theme music plays
[applause]
[applause subsides]
It was, like, so wild.
I just finished doing the one-nighters
at the colleges all across the country,
and last week, I worked Brown University.
But the way I got this booking, they called my office.
It just so happened, I happened to have been in the office.
And I picked up the phone, and the guy said,
"I wonder if we can get
Dick Gregory to do a concert in Brown."
[laughter]
And I said how else?
[laughter]
Dick Gregory changed the entire landscape
of standup comedy by just walking through the door
and taking up so much space that more people can come through.
[Hart] When Dick Gregory was doing comedy,
there was a lack of diversity.
He was in the game at the time
when there wasn't many of us in it.
It was because of the change that he was a part of making
that I'm able to do what I do.
Well, since we first met, things have sure happened for you.
That's a nice apartment you got.
- Oh, thank you. - What kind of car you got?
- A Lincoln, naturally. - No, well, that's...
[laughter]
What's overlooked is how unafraid he was
to not only call white people out,
but he wasn't afraid to call Black folks out.
Of course, if you get some money, you get a Lincoln.
Oh, you're a good audience tonight,
and treat me nice,
because with President Kennedy's new housing bill,
I might be your neighbor now.
[laughter]
You saw it here for the first time
from a Black person's mouth
what life is like in America from a humorous standpoint.
NBC got so many calls, their switchboard blew out.
Now I did not know if you sit on the couch,
you become the family.
And sitting on that couch,
my salary jumped from $250 a week to $5,000 a night.
That's the power of that show.
I couldn't believe it slow funk music
I don't know what went through Paar's mind
when he said, "I want him on the show."
Okay.
[jet roaring]
Paar's show and a jet plane in the same day.
To get on a jet, see, like, the height
of a poor man's ambition is to be on a jet,
like standing outside the world looking in.
[man] Mike Wallace interview with guest Dick Gregory,
take one.
[Wallace] Until how recently-- I mean this quite seriously--
was money a problem for you?
[Dick] Up until a month ago.
[Wallace] Up until a month ago?
[Dick] Last year, I think I cleared about $1,500.
[Wallace] From $1,500 to half a million dollars
in one year.
- You must be a happy fella. - I'm very happy.
When I was young, we were poor. We were hungry.
We were raggedy, you know? And, uh, and, well, you know,
matter of fact, the best day we had in our house
was Halloween, you know?
[laughter]
In fact, that was the day you could wear your natural clothes
and everybody thought you was dressed for the occasion, right?
[laughter]
Ooh, look at Richard, got on shoes
look just like feet.
[laughter and applause]
dramatic music
[Christian] My father had an extremely difficult childhood.
He was born in 1932, which was literally the poorest year
of the Great Depression.
He used to always say, in order to know happiness,
you have to have known sadness.
In order to have known health,
you had to experience sickness and disease.
You can't truly appreciate any spectrum of life
unless you'd spent some time on both sides.
[Dick] I didn't like where I lived.
I didn't like my mama. I didn't like none of that.
You know, so I'd just go walking
and walking and walking and walking.
So I started running.
And so next thing I knew, I was running and running and running.
My father used to take us on these mandatory runs.
He taught us how to run.
Uh, we had to spend a great deal of time in nature,
and particularly running.
Letting your feet touch that ground
and feeling that cosmic force coming up through the roots
into our feet-- he wanted us to feel that.
Growing up in extreme times,
I really do believe
running became his way of reinventing himself.
My dad had two weapons. He could either run like the wind,
or that razor-sharp tongue of his could lay into you.
[Dick] Kids used to pick on me a lot.
"My daddy's not home.
You know, I'm gonna leave. "Haven't got him with me.
So how can I get him with me?"
I laid home in bed one night, and I figured it out.
I start making jokes about me not having no daddy,
how poor we were, and then I noticed that
once you get a man laughing with you,
it's hard for him to laugh at you.
And the whole thing changed then.
Can you remember when you first stood up
and told jokes to an audience? When was that?
Oh, yeah, first time I told jokes to an audience
was in, uh, 1959.
funk music
[Dick] I had never had nightclub life.
I never smoked. I never drank.
And so I went to a nightclub one night, South Side Chicago,
and I saw the Black comic come out.
Everybody got quiet.
And I said, God, what a lovely way to make a living.
jazz music
So I went out to a real small nightclub,
which was the Esquire, and I told the guy
I was this big-time comedian, and he let me up on the stage.
And I was funny.
I went out on the stage, and I tried to look as funny
as I could, so I took... I took some white buck shoes,
and I painted 'em powder blue,
and I put some big suspenders on
and a big cap, you see?
Because, you see, in the low income nightclub,
the brother got a lot of problems on his mind,
and he's off from work, and he will out-talk you
if you don't come out there and shock him into his thing.
He gave me a job.
And the next thing I knew, I wasn't funny.
When you're not a comedian,
but when you become a profession,
then you have a challenge to make them laugh, you know?
You could have a 5-year-old son that's a marvelous piano player,
and you could bring him here,
and everybody would listen to him and say,
"Beautiful, beautiful," but put him in Carnegie Hall
at $5 a ticket, and, uh, we might decide
he don't play that well, you know?
And so this is what happened to me.
So those early days at the Esquire
was really learning the audience,
but most of all, learning timing.
It's the timing, breathing properly,
learning how to play a joke, how to play it with your face,
how to play it with your body.
When I used to smoke cigarettes,
I wasn't aware until I stopped smoking
how much I used that cigarette for timing.
If I could believe everything everybody told me,
we wouldn't have a racial problem in this country.
'Cause everybody I meet in the nightclub,
after they get drunk, they all tell me the same thing.
"Greg, some of my best friends are colored."
[laughter]
Mike, you know and I know
there's not that many of us to go around.
[laughter]
[Rock] He was a real cool cat, like another level of smooth.
'Cause most Black comics come from a tradition of preachers,
so they're loud, and they talk a certain way and...
and they were there for five, seven minutes,
and they had to get your attention in a certain way.
With Dick Gregory, he had the same five or seven minutes,
but he really took his time.
Excuse me.
I have to smoke here because I made the great mistake
of writing off 180 cartons on my income tax.
[laughter]
And then the Internal Revenue boys told me
every time they see me, I'd better be smoking.
[laughter]
[Chapelle] Dick Gregory, real handsome guy.
Rock a suit onstage, smoke a cigarette onstage.
There's a few comics that did that,
they looked real suave when they'd do it.
They timed themselves with their cigarettes
to say a funny joke and the punchline hits,
and he was one of the guys who just did it.
When you stop and think,
football's a fair sport for my people.
How many sports in the world, a negro can chase a white man
and 40,000 people stand up and cheered?
[laughter and applause]
[Rock] Chappelle and Gregory have a lot in common.
Dave and Dick have this really, like, goddamn,
you motherfuckers are relaxed.
I kinda perform like they're gonna
take the stage from me at any moment.
Like, I've never been that comfortable.
[Bell] Dick Gregory was a pioneer in political comedy.
He doesn't get enough credit for being the bridge
for Black comedians to come out of the Chitlin' Circuit.
He wasn't moving around a lot.
He wasn't tap dancing. He's not, like, selling out Black folks.
In fact, he's standing up for Black folks by saying,
"I'm going to do the same things I do
in front of a Black audience here,
and they're actually more powerful here
because the stakes are higher.
20 years ago,
the light-complected negro had it made.
Today it's the dark-complected negro
simply because of government contracts.
In order for big business to get good government contracts,
today you'd have to hire negro and white on an equal basis.
So they go out and get the blackest cat they can find.
[laughter]
So when that government inspector walk in that plant,
he can see him seven blocks away.
[laughter]
"Sir, you got one!" "Darn right, we had one."
Oh.
[laughter and applause]
His stage presence was, like, just so smooth.
I'll say thank you very much, but never clap for me.
Just take me to lunch when it's not Brotherhood Week.
He's saying powerful commentary. It's like, damn,
he's talking to these white people like that?
Where is he? Dick Gregory!
Well, will you welcome now, please,
on the stage of the Little Theatre, Mister...
Dick Gregory.
[applause]
[Dick] I developed quick, watching television,
Paar's show, all the comedy shows,
Ed Sullivan, every form of entertainment
I could watch, catching the people
and developing new material on 'em.
Next thing I knew, I had me a little following going for me.
By Christmas of '58, I could taste that fame.
One Sunday afternoon, a girl walked in there.
Lillian Gregory was,
in the truest sense,
Dick Gregory's foundation.
If you would call Greg in one city
and ask him where he was going next, he never knew.
He'd say, "Call Lill."
Every phone call I had with Greg,
Lill was on the phone.
At some point in the call, he'd say,
"Lill, can you patch in Mark Lane?"
And, you know, she was part of him.
He could not have lived the life he did,
nor could he have accomplished
the things that he did without Lill.
In 1957, I was a secretary at the University of Chicago,
and he was running
on the University of Chicago track team,
and also he was appearing in a nightclub
called the Esquire on the South Side of Chicago.
I really hadn't heard anything about him before,
but he was performing, and I--
you know, and I really interested in him,
and, uh, he came over to the table and talked
to my sister and a few other friends that were with us,
and then, in fact, I think I came back the next night also.
slow jazz music
[Dick] That's why it's always so nice
to be polite to people.
Because in walking to that table,
I didn't know I was gonna meet my wife.
[Lillian] We were married in February 2, 1959.
[Dick] Have you checked out the price of onions lately?
You believe onions?
'Cause onions are still how my wife used to cry
when she'd peel 'em. She cry when she buy 'em now.
[laughter]
[Christian] My mother worked at the University of Chicago,
and my father liked that.
My father always liked intellect.
She would type up his shows for that night.
[Lillian] I used to go by and see him after a night
after I'd get off of work,
and, uh, I would always bring him
a lot of magazines and things.
He was always very interested
in what was going on in the world.
[Christian] My dad had a routine.
He would look at the newspapers.
He would highlight and he would extract
that evening's show based on the front page.
Kennedy and Khruschev is arguing over Berlin,
and pretty frightening.
I think both these men have the one button
they can push and do away with the whole world.
And the frightening thing about it
is Kennedy's button is located in Caroline's playroom.
[laughter]
He had that cool monotone, and he'd tell a little story,
and once he had you seduced into the story he was telling,
he would pop the color thing on you.
A lot of people got caught right in the middle
of loving what he was doing and then being given a message.
And he was a genius at that.
And we have a lot of racial prejudice up north,
but we're so clever with it.
Take my old pal in Chicago.
I mean, you can't see it just...just going in there.
But when negroes in Chicago move into one large area,
and it look like we might control the votes,
they don't say anything to us.
They have a slum clearance.
[laughter]
- [cheers and applause] - Mr. Tan? Mr. Tan?
- Man, Tanman Moreland. - Hey, Nipsey Russell.
- Where have you been? - What do you wanna know?
- What...What you wanna-- - Where have you been?
What do you know where I've been for?
[Dick] You show nothing in this country but my bad.
Show my good. Show my good.
And we weren't really saying take "Amos 'n' Andy" off.
We were saying balance it out.
Put the man on there that's splitting all the verbs.
But also, let me see my Ralph Bunche.
Let me hear my Marian Anderson.
Get me a negro news commentator.
Then balance it out.
See, wherever we call big crimes,
which is pretty cool, and, uh, we have small crimes,
which they hang you for. - [laughter]
No, no, I mean, like a guy go out,
and he's been on relief, and his check hasn't shown up
in, like, six months.
His war disability check haven't shown in a year.
And he sticks up a bank for about $20,000.
They catch him. He get about four years in Alcatraz.
The president of that same bank embezzled it
for, like, $2 million, he get three years' suspended sentence.
[laughter and applause]
[Christian] He took that power at the height of his career
to do a step that most people didn't see coming.
Pretty early on, he was willing to give his time,
which was money, when you were an entertainer
who could be booked probably three or four different cities
in any given night.
And then in the fall of 1962, he goes down to Mississippi,
and that will change his life.
ominous music
[Dick] Everything was all right, but, uh, something missing.
[Christian] The folks in the North
continued to see the images in the news reports
of what was happening down South.
See, just one thing I have learned.
They're not bad folks,
provided you can treat a negro like a nigger.
It was a time of terror,
and I'm not exaggerating with that.
Um...the system, as it was, was determined
not to allow people of color
the opportunity to register and to vote.
The clerk, who might have had a sixth grade education,
and a person of color may have had a college education,
could simply throw your sheet out.
[man] I would think certainly,
that it would not be for the welfare
of any community to have illiterate, uneducated people
to be able to vote.
[Dick] The demonstrations started in Jackson, Mississippi.
I read about 'em, I listened to 'em on the radio,
I looked at 'em on TV.
And I told myself, what those negroes do down there
don't affect my life.
I was definitely afraid.
It seems like he was getting more and more aware
of the civil rights thing, I guess maybe during the time
that Martin Luther King came into being,
and being known.
The future of the United States of America
may well be determined here in Mississippi.
But it's here that democracy
faces its most serious challenge.
And I realized if I can subject myself
to go to a foreign country, lay on some cold dirt,
take a chance of losing my life to guarantee some foreigner
a better way of life than my own family has in America,
then it's a must that I get involved.
He was a very wealthy man.
When Medgar called him,
he could have sent a check.
Instead he went to Mississippi and put his life on the line.
He never stopped.
From the moment he went to Mississippi,
he never stopped putting his life on the line.
[man] Where you're going, have you been given any warning?
I just play it by ear, and I think if I can sit in a room
and entertain a room full of drunks,
I can go to Mississippi in a dry state. [laughs]
[jet roaring]
[Christian] I don't think in 1962
my father thought an invitation he received
from Medgar Evers
to come and speak at voter registration rallies
in Jackson, Mississippi, was gonna change his life.
[Evers] Now for many of us who have gone overseas,
fought for this country, fought for Mississippi,
we fought for Alabama, we fought for North Carolina,
we fought for Illinois,
and we fought for every state in this union.
[Christian] Medgar being a sergeant
who had fought in the Korean War,
Medgar was fearless. Medgar was the first person I ever heard
my father describe as if they were superhuman.
The two of them hit it off.
They were...brothers.
Stronger, I believe, than blood.
Both the same goal--justice.
Dick knew how to take a heated issue,
bring humor, and move forward.
It encouraged people.
See, I had a dream about Clark last night.
[laughter]
I was...I was dreaming that this...
this white citizen council guy
who was drunk, driving about 90 miles an hour
and he hit two demonstrators accidentally,
didn't mean to. - [man] Go ahead.
And Clark showed up, and one demonstrator
flew about 500 yards in the air and bounced off in the field,
and the other demonstrator came through
the dashboard window and landed in the front seat.
And Clark got to whuppin' this cat about being drunk
until he found out that
those were two colored cats he had hit.
And he went and he arrested the one colored guy
that was 500 yards down the road
for leaving the scene of an accident.
[laughter, scattered applause]
And the one that came through the windshield,
he booked him for breaking and entering.
[laughter and applause]
[Dick] I had no intentions on demonstrating.
None whatsoever.
I was scared enough just knowing
I was going to an area where there were demonstrations.
And after speaking to these people that night
and seeing the beauty of these people
and seeing the police harassment at the church,
and not one negro doctor
which means when these negro demonstrate,
that mean they forfeiting all their medical attention,
I'm looking at a man, that when he demonstrates,
he's gonna get his name and his picture in the paper.
And if I must die with him, man,
I couldn't think of a better way of dying.
In doing this, I know you'll kill yourself in show business.
And I called up Lill, and I said, "Honey,
are you willing to eat in a tent
and go back to where we were for right?"
And she said yes.
She told me as she's told me so many other times,
that the true test of a rich man is strip him of all his wealth,
then see how much he's worth.
[static]
[amplified voice] This is an announcement.
We will ask you to proceed in smaller groups.
And a bunch of illiterate whites that probably couldn't even
pass the test themselves. That's what you're seeing.
- Guns and sticks. - Guns and sticks.
- In America. - Exactly.
- [man] Yes, man. - Get a good look at their faces
so the rest of the world can see it.
- Yeah. - See what they look like.
[Lipsyte] A civil rights demonstration in the South
was in grave danger.
Dogs, fire hoses, truncheons, guns,
but if Dick Gregory flew down
to wherever, Mississippi,
for a rights demonstration,
one of the network news crews would follow.
But he also knew that the cameras being on
does not protect me from getting hurt or killed.
[indistinct conversations]
[Lillian] When I'd see things on TV of him being arrested,
you know, I really would get a little upset,
and, uh, at that time, we just had two children
and, you know, "Why is Daddy,
you know, why are they putting him in jail?"
[Dick] This is where we are today.
This is what we fightin' for...
to free this country.
Make this country America the beautiful.
He upset people. He really made people wanna kill him.
I mean, I got hundreds of death threats
about how they were gonna kill him at a certain place.
[Lillian] People would call.
They were gon' come kill all of us.
"And gonna come get your nigger kids,"
just many, many bad calls, many, many very bad calls.
[Dick] You can feel a town.
You can sense a town, sense the police.
And there's a stillness in a town
before something's gonna happen.
I felt that someone...
was gonna be killed.
poignant music
I decided to go the long way to Chicago
to stop by and see the wife and the kids,
only to explain to her that if anything happened to me,
if I got killed,
that she would never raise those kids with hate.
I would feel I had died in vain if my kids turned out hating.
Always had a lot of trouble with Lill
because I was on the road when they were born.
Dick Junior was laying in the bed, crying,
so I tipped him in the room, and I picked him up,
and he stopped crying, and he'd smile.
Lill walked out. She was so happy because
I was playing with my son,
kiss my daughter Michele,
kiss my daughter Lynne,
said Daddy's gonna try to make it a better world for you.
[Lillian] He really had a feeling that something
was gonna happen.
He really didn't know what,
but he just really had a bad feeling.
[Dick] Medgar Evers woke me up that morning
with a phone call.
Asked Medgar what had happened. He said he didn't know.
He tried to make me call home, and I said,
"Medgar, what happened?"
A man as brave as Medgar...
couldn't tell me.
Because when he said, "Your son is dead,"
he almost said it like he had killed him himself.
This can't be true.
I just held him...
only a few hours ago.
So I called home. Lill picked up the phone,
and she was screaming.
She said, "Greg, Richard's dead."
I said, "Honey, I'll be there.
I love you very much."
Never will forget that Medgar cried when he told me.
He was sorry I was leaving, but he understood,
got out of town, not knowing that that would be
the last time I would ever see Medgar Evers alive.
I knew my husband was gonna be killed.
We knew it.
He pulled into the driveway.
And I remember our children saying,
"Daddy's home, Daddy's home."
And in the process of getting up to go to the door,
a shot was heard.
And I think of all the blood on my car
as he tried, struggled to get in
and fell at the steps with the door key in his hand.
That nightmare...
never leaves.
[siren wailing in distance]
The only reason
Dick Gregory was not with Medgar Evers
on the night Medgar Evers was shot and killed,
is because his child had died in his sleep
at three months old.
I don't think anything less than that
you could have pried Dick Gregory
away from Medgar Evers.
[Dick] Funny about a great man, when he dies,
if the whole world didn't know him,
the whole world learns, and they can decide for themselves.
They had decided that
we had lost a great man in this country.
It's a strange world.
To quit demonstrating,
we want complete desegregation of all public facilities
and all the charges dropped.
Now we're not gonna stop for nothing short of this.
[applause]
Police dogs is not enough no more.
If they don't give us this demand here,
they better go out and try to put smoke in the barrel
in the contract.
[laughter and applause]
We went to southern Atlanta.
People all over the world should understand
the American negro will not be told any longer
that it's gonna take time to solve this problem.
There's no more time. We don't want a man to tell us
that we're gonna get it, that we have to understand.
When you're out demonstrating in the street,
the social revolution is on, and it's gonna stay on
until the negro receives full rights.
We don't want these rights tomorrow.
We don't want 'em next week. We don't want 'em tonight.
We want what we are demanding right this minute.
He is without doubt the most talked about
and written about comedian in show business,
not necessarily on the amusement pages these days
but right on the front page.
Uh, I think he has some provocative
and interesting things to say to all of us tonight.
I'm sure he has. So would you all welcome Dick Gregory?
[applause, band playing jazz music]
The government realized when negroes are integrating things
in America today, in about six more months,
they're gonna be forced to hire negro bus drivers in Mississippi
so we're growing steering wheels
so they can drive from the back of the bus.
[laughter]
[applause]
I received a letter one day informing me
that I had made Who's Who in America.
This is why I'm willing to lay down my life, die,
'cause no place else but America
could a man born and raised on relief
from 1932 to 1952, through 11 years later,
I made Who's Who in America.
Yeah. This is worth fighting for.
Trying to save this country.
You see, bread in your stomach means nothing
when you're walking around with a full belly
but your soul has been robbed of dignity.
All right. Now I'd rather die trying to be free
than be a full slave.
[audience murmurs]
[indistinct conversations]
[applause continues]
[Healy] Whenever Dr. King called, Dick was there.
He was kind of his front man.
If Dr. King wanted him to go and bother Bull Connor,
he would send him in a week before Dr. King arrived.
That's how he did it.
And Dick would go down there and speak maybe at a college
or a community event or it's in the Black community
or at a Black church,
but he'd go down there and aggravate and stir it up
so when we arrive, we can make something happen.
There'll be somebody listening, there'll be somebody talking.
[Bell] As a comic, I can look at Dick Gregory
and tell that he was killing in that moment,
'cause he has that look that comics get
when they've just gotten a big laugh
and said, "Yeah, I did that." [laughs]
And I don't know that I've ever seen a picture
of Martin Luther King Jr. where he looked that relaxed,
and he looks like, "Dick, you take it from here.
I'm-a sit here and just enjoy it."
[Lillian] Dick, being a comedian,
he was always telling Martin a funny joke or something,
and then Martin would just roar with laughter.
I mean, he just loved to talk to Dick,
you know, 'cause he would-- you know, Dick had
something to say about everything.
[Christian] My father and Dr. King
became good friends, confidantes.
They realized that their time on this earth
would probably be cut short.
[Connor] You can never whip these birds
if you don't keep you and them separate.
I found that out in Birmingham.
You've got to keep the white and the Black separate.
dramatic music
[Dick] I'm standing there at the door
with my hands around the bars,
and I'm thinking about Lill, I'm thinking about home.
[indistinct shouting]
And Bull Connor, them, they come in with baseball bats.
[crowd shouting and screaming]
They beat me so bad with the baseball bats
and had done a larger area,
that probably would have killed me.
[indistinct shouting, water rushing]
My...my arms swolled up so it tore my suit right off.
I didn't wanna complain because I didn't know
if they would take me someplace
where they would amputate my arm.
Five guards came by. That's when they opened the door
and started to come inside, and that's when I walked out
rather than have the kids here,
and this is when the beating took place.
Birmingham woke a lot of people up.
Birmingham woke us up to this cancer
it is not too late to cure.
And if America wants to be a doctor,
we have to be the doctor to cure this.
I would like to introduce very briefly
a comedian fresh from the jail, Mr. Dick Gregory.
[cheers and applause]
[applause subsides]
I'd like to say thank you very much,
and it's a pleasure being here
and nice being out of jail. - [laughter]
And I'm very confused this year because I never thought
I'd see the day I would give out
more fingerprints than autographs.
[laughter]
[Bellamy] People have no idea.
You know, he would not compromise his integrity,
making $5,000-plus a night
and gave that up to go down
with Medgar Evers and Dr. King.
His economic situation totally, totally
went down the toilet.
What about the, uh, contracts
that you have to perform elsewhere?
What are you doing about those?
Well, the only ones that I have to worry about now
are the ones as of today, 'cause when I'm in jail,
those contracts are automatically forfeited.
It'll just be a matter of calling my manager
and just canceling everything out straight across the board
until...until I get out of here.
[Madison] Dick used all his credit.
He would come back from a protest or a demonstration,
and the mortgage payment was due,
and they didn't know how they were gonna pay it.
[Belafonte] Well, not many people in entertainment
that, uh, rocked the boat.
They were all very intimidated with the fact
that whether they made commentary,
the establishment would fall down on them,
so for a long time, Black humorists remained mute
until Richard.
[Williams] He really was out of money and, you know,
because he was giving it all the civil rights movement,
and some of his children needed money,
uh, to go to school, because some of them
were in private schools.
He was given a check by a gentleman
by the name of Bertram Lee to pay for this tuition
for his children, but then he saw Hosea Williams
down in Atlanta and found that Hosea
had been beaten up very badly, bloodied,
and he needed money because he said,
"We're going back in two weeks."
And he just signed over the check
that he had just gotten for his children's education
because he said what Hosea was doing
was more important than his children's education,
and he usually chose whatever it was
that was gonna help the greatest number of people.
[Dick] It was me seeing ordinary people,
people that would never get their name mentioned,
people that no one would ever say thanks to.
And that's what that movement was about.
Lot of Black folks died, lot of decent white folks died,
setting people free.
And in the eyes of God,
those people would be honored one day.
And that's what the movement meant.
Let us die. Not kill.
Let us die to set people free.
[protestors chanting]
[chanting continues]
Oh, I'm sure today for the first time,
people all over the world know where I am.
[protestors shouting]
[Dick] And I hope that you'll be aware there are two jails.
[woman] That's right, Dick! [continues indistinctly]
One that the establishment sends you to
that you can break out of,
and one that the establishment puts you in
that you can never break out of.
[Williams] He was arrested over 100 times,
and he kept going back
because he was able to use his celebrity
to make a difference.
You put enough pressure...
[woman] That's right!
[Dick] ...on this foul, corrupt, insane system.
[woman] Yes! We've got to do it.
[Dick] See to it that can give America her status back.
[horn blaring]
[man] What started the riot? What was the incident?
[Dick] Well, the incident
that started the riot was an automobile incident.
There as an argument. There was a scuffle.
By then a crowd
of several hundred negroes had gathered,
and the story of police brutality
quickly spread through the community.
[Dick] Every incident that had been tipped off in this country
in the last two years
had been tipped off by a uniformed police.
I'm not saying the police is right or wrong.
I'm saying when you have these incidents
that's tipped off with this one symbol,
then we should look into it and see what it is.
These negroes aren't throwing bricks
just for the sake of throwing bricks.
[indistinct shouting]
Police brutality is not when a cop
necessarily knocks me upside the head.
It's when a cop calls me nigger when he's making the arrest.
This is a form of police brutality.
As you know, I just got back from Los Angeles, Vietnam.
[laughter]
[man] That was quite a morning.
We all picked up our papers here in New York.
A lot of people didn't read beyond that headline.
All it said here in New York was,
"Dick Gregory shot in race riot."
[Christian] A bullet to his leg,
trying to step in between forces,
trying to find a peaceful solution to what was happening.
[Dick] I would never go to my baby's crib
when my baby was crying and say, "Quit crying."
First, I would find out why she was crying,
uh, because kids do not cry for no reason at all.
It's the same thing about what's happening in America today.
Those people have such
legitimate gripes and frustrations
built in them for so long.
Nobody ever talked about Watts,
and it's gonna be a whole lots of Watts
all over this country, up north,
if we don't go in and start solving
not only the problem of the negro
but the problem of the poor white man.
You have white people that live in the ghetto,
that they're gonna be next,
unless we sit down and solve this problem
which is not a Los Angeles problem,
which is not a Mississippi problem.
It's an American problem.
[indistinct shouting]
[man, amplified voice] This area is being closed.
Please go in your homes.
[woman, chanting] You can't stop the revolution!
[male reporter] In Newark alone,
thirty persons were killed in four days of rioting.
Hands up! Don't shoot!
- Hands up-- - [gunshot]
[indistinct shouting]
[female dispatcher] All units, looters at 62 and Broadway.
[Dick] People, whether you like it or not,
are controlled by nature.
If you put a tight shoe on your foot, you get a corn.
If you wear the shoe long enough,
it turns into a callus.
If you wear the shoe long enough,
it turns into a bunion,
and eventually, it'll wear the shoe out.
Black folks in America got a callus around their souls.
And if the system don't back up their shoe,
it's gonna be wore out.
[indistinct shouting]
There used to be many who doubted the motives
of Dick Gregory.
He's been a leading figure in the civil rights movement,
and yet he is billed as a comic.
Uh, there were charges of publicity, money, career.
Recently, he was shot in a race riot in Los Angeles.
He and his family have been jailed
both in the North and South.
He won his fame as a comedian,
and yet his fellow negro comics say his dedication
has blunted his humor,
that he's lost his sense of satire,
that he's now more angry than funny
Judge for yourself, 'cause we believe him to be
a funny, funny, courageous man.
Here is Dick Gregory. Yeah.
[band playing uptempo jazz, applause]
[applause continues]
[cheers and applause]
[applause subsides]
[laughter]
And nobody's not that funny, but you're about to convince me.
[applause]
We give so much to celebrities.
We want 'em to be perfect.
As long as all the negativity you're doing is glamorous,
you could be a drunkard,
you could be hooked to dope,
we can still admire you
Come out here and get to saying
that we can't treat women a certain way or...
Catholics a certain way or Jews a certain way
or Blacks a certain way, Chicanos a certain way
then you can lose your celebrity status.
You get dirty.
There are certain people in society
who love you but can't touch you.
If I was young enough to get drafted,
I would wait till I got my induction notice,
then, uh, show up in the draft board,
and they give you that little questionnaire to fill out,
and when it got to that little section
that said "Occupation," I would just write "murderer."
[laughter]
That sounds funny, but you know, we got such dumb laws
in this country, we would never be permitted by law
to draft a murderer into the army to send him to Vietnam
to kill Viet Cong?
[laughter]
It was one thing to talk about moving into your neighborhood.
That was...That was something that he said on the Paar show.
But it was another thing to talk about the war of Vietnam.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
is waging and will continue to wage a relentless warfare
against crime and criminals.
Further advances against the insidious activities
of underworld characters
and their vicious, conspiring parasites
must yet be made.
Hoover had written, "Watch this negro comedian Dick Gregory."
Only a fool today would sit back and blame Hitler's army
and not blame Hitler.
That's why the whole world is looking at us
very critical now.
Because anytime we can go to Vietnam
and do the same thing there Hitler was doing,
the world will know it will not be too much longer
before they do it to us.
[Greg] The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
signed a letter asking for the FBI to do an investigation
of Dick Gregory.
[Dick] This secret, secret police was out to discredit you,
not to help you but to discredit you.
It said, "Chicago, as office on Richard Claxton Gregory,
also known as Dick Gregory,
Chicago should develop
counterintelligence measures to neutralize him.
This should not be done in the nature of an exposé,
since he already gets far too much publicity.
Instead, sophisticated, completely untraceable means
of neutralizing Dick Gregory should be developed."
I had every government agency in America's tapping my phone,
the CIA, the FBI, bunch of cats we ain't never heard of.
[laughter]
Once in a while, there would be phone calls,
and a telephone call from Greg
would usually be at three o'clock in the morning.
And it would be a whisper.
And he would always say...
uh, "Talk clearly so the FBI
can understand what you're saying." [laughs]
[Dick] You know, I mean, I ain't into nothing.
[laughter]
And I mean,
they know I know they're tapping the phone.
[laughter]
The people booking entertainers, especially comedians, said,
"We don't wanna talk about the war in Vietnam.
We don't wanna talk about civil rights movement."
And he realized he was talking to the wrong people.
1960s rock music
He was getting a lot of calls from universities and colleges
all over the country who wanted to hear him talk.
These are educated young people
who were really interested in changing the world.
And it dawned on him that this was the greatest audience
he could have.
[Dick] You know how it felt
with the civil rights legislation is?
White folks in America gonna get their rights
under the United States Constitution,
and Black folks got to get our rights
under civil rights legislation.
I don't want my rights on no damn installment plan.
He was like the most popular,
most in-demand guest lecturer you could find.
You got three hours of information,
and it was from one of the funniest guys in the planet.
I got on the plane yesterday morning flying in here,
and I'm on my way to my seat,
and this old white cat sitting there,
looked at me and say, "Uh, uh, can I talk to you, my brother?"
[laughter and applause]
Your what?
Things have got so bad, I'm your brother now.
He had this vast college audience.
You see, the word "white liberals"
is an unconscious racist statement
because nobody's ever admitted that we got Black liberals,
which is far more worse than white liberals, definitely.
[laughter]
[applause]
The reason I spend about 90% of my time
on college campuses today because I sincerely feel
that the young people in this country today
are the most honest, ethical, dedicated, committed
group of young people that's ever lived in this country.
You young folks have come to the nation's Capitol today
to do away with the military industrial complex.
We're gonna see to it
there will be no more war!
[cheering]
The promises of the great society
have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
The war on Vietnam was the demarcation point
for him, for Dr. King, for a lot of people.
That was the point where they had to give up everything.
[Dick] But being an agitator,
I realize that you get dirt on you.
But looking at my children wash their hands,
I can tell the intensity of their playing
according to how dirty the soap is.
Dirty soap don't bother me 'cause I can wash it clean.
But looking at that, I realized that I'm America's soap,
and all the dirt you see on me come off of America.
For those who say to me, "Stick to civil rights,"
I have another answer.
Injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere.
Dr. King was standing on the balcony
of a second floor hotel room tonight,
when according to a companion, a shot was fired
from across the street.
somber music
[Lillian] And they killed Dr. King.
There was no turning around.
Dick was just despondent, crushed,
and just terrible, terrible.
[Dick] You have to realize that we are living
in a country that's so prone to killing that they...
that a man of peace and kindness and of love
like Dr. Martin Luther King can die a violent death,
hated by Americans
while our generals of the army is loved in big parades
and standing ovation.
That's the mess you youngsters is fixing to inherit.
When you asked me to be nonviolent in Mississippi...
...or go to Vietnam and be so violent, I can be a hero,
to someone that's never smacked my mother,
to someone that's never insulted my children.
You know, America,
you're gonna have to stop expecting
Black folks to be better than them.
I didn't know what I could do to protest strongly
the war in Vietnam,
and I thought that if I did a 40-day fast,
it come dramatize the issue
better than any other way I knew.
funk rock music
[male reporter] The White House announced
that another 50,000 troops would be sent to Vietnam,
bringing the total to nearly half a million.
That call probably broke into a weeklong series
of increasingly bloody demonstrations.
The draft week continued today...
1968 really was a unique year.
Some historians have said it was like a second civil war.
The fight for freedom and to end all communism.
And these punks here walking around,
that's what you call anarchy and treason.
For the first time in American history,
there was a very serious anti-war movement.
I'm just sad you young folks don't tie up and paralyze
every city in America, because there should be
no order of business in this country anymore
but the business that's at hand.
Yes, I'm determined to set an example as an individual,
American, lawfully protesting
against my government's involvement
in the war on Vietnam, and we're probably
the only country in the world, uh, that's overfed,
and I think the fact of... of someone in our society
as we know it withdrawing from food
from Thanksgiving to Christmas,
I think this will have a tremendous effect.
I don't know anything that I ever did in the whole movement
that got as much press reaction as that 40-day fast.
[applause]
[applause subsides]
[laughter]
You know, this is my... my 14th month
of not eating any solid food in protest of the war in Vietnam,
and the reason I mention that to you now is because I'm hungry.
[laughter]
What do you have now in the course of a day?
Uh, fruit juice and water. I travel with a juicing machine,
not to be mixed up with a blender.
This is where you put it in, and it extracts the juice.
Sends the juice one way and the pulp go another.
You really feel well? Still feel well?
I really...I really feel good, yeah.
I go through little periods of...of...of hunger.
Do you dream of cheesecake or anything--
Man, I dream of dog food.
[laughter]
- [applause] - Cheesecake.
Eight ounces of water, eight glasses a day.
You're starving yourself. Why?
And he said, "Because what'll happen is people will ask you,
'Why aren't you eating?' And then once they ask you,
you now get to explain to them what the issue is about."
The United States Constitution talks about justice,
and I think that we're being shortchanged
because everybody's worried about communism.
If America could become as frightened
of things like injustices as she is of communism,
and wipe it out with all of the vigor
she's trying to wipe out communism,
this would be a groovy country,
and that in itself would be the greatest goal
in the history of communism.
You don't use the fast to change the minds
or hearts of tyrants or to make bad people good people,
but to create a positive force
where other positive forces can join,
and eventually things will change.
When he first said that, you know,
he was going on a long fast,
I really thought he was out of his mind
just to go that long, uh, without eating.
And then when I would see him, I would see how he was,
you know, losing weight.
[Dick] I weighed 288 pounds when it started,
98 pounds when it finished.
- How's everybody? - [man] How are you?
Do we need to test, check for levels, everybody?
Testing one, two, three, four.
[man] Do you think this gesture is futile?
Do you think it will really bring about what you want?
I think if enough pressure comes down,
uh, in the money areas,
I think it will have a profound effect.
I didn't expect a tremendous amount of college kids
to go on and fast.
Uh, matter of fact, I've had to intercede
and get' em come off because they wanted to go
for long, long periods.
Uh, word of mouth had really carried it.
It's really surprising.
[man] You think this will have a lasting effect on your health?
- On my health? - Yeah.
I don't know. I don't have any...no idea.
[man] Are you under a doctor's care at all?
No.
Brother Dick also did a tremendous amount of harm
to his body, not being reckless and irresponsible,
but really prepared to die for the movement,
and he just didn't know how belated that fatal aspect
of what he was doing was going to be.
[Dick] The minute you say go on a fast,
they wanna know, "Did you check with a doctor?"
See, people don't check with a doctor when they snort coke.
People don't check with a doctor when they smoke reefers.
People don't check with a doctor when they smoke cigarettes.
As long as I was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day
or drinking a fifth of Scotch every day,
nobody worried about how I felt.
A lady named Dr. Fulton-- she basically taught me
what to look out for and how much water to drink.
My success in fasting would be thanks to Dr. Fulton.
The greatest nutritionist in the history of the planet.
She had that special magic of putting herbs together,
plus the prayer piece.
I have not run across anybody like her yet.
[Bellamy] Dr. Fulton had a health food store in Chicago.
She explained to him that you need to do something
that's going to leave a legacy,
and it's important that you get your health together.
[Dick] And we just talked and talked and talked and talked,
and the next thing I know, my whole life changed.
To smoke four to five packs of cigarettes a day,
I started smoking when I was 13 years old,
and I smoked all the way up to six months ago,
and I'll tell you why I quit.
[applause]
I did my homework, and I looked up,
and I found out every time I bought a pack of cigarettes,
I gave the government eight cents tax,
and at the end of the year, the cigarette industry
gave the government $2 billion more,
and at that point, I decided I will not catch cancer
and buy napalm and mace at the same time.
[applause]
I really never understood hunger until I went on a fast.
When I look at television, I see a dog food commercial.
And I wanted some, and then after I came off the fast,
I started checking,
and in St. Louis, Missouri, they sell more dog food
in the stores next to the projects
where the people are not permitted to have dogs.
And for the first time, I was aware
that how many people was eating dog food.
And so consequently, when you start looking at these things,
and then for the first time, I started realizing,
you know, what crime in the street is all about.
[Christian] My father was profoundly impacted
by the nonviolence of the civil rights movement.
That's what led to him being a vegetarian
and then ultimately a vegan.
He figured, "If I am not gonna harm another man,
I'm gonna give that same respect to other living things."
The number one force
on this here thing called planet Earth is us,
human, real, and one of the things we need to survive
is what they call whole food.
We sort of take diet culture as, like, that's just something
that we all do or we... or, you know,
now I'm gonna eat vegetarian or vegan.
But none of that's happening then.
He was way ahead of his time in that,
as far as, like, thinking about what you put into your body
and how it helps you long-term.
poignant music
[Dick] I had to get out of Chicago.
Be where the air was pure
and, uh, where you had some room to move around in.
Close to nature.
So Lill got out the hospital with baby number 10,
and we packed up everything, and I wanted to find a place
where the children could have fresh air and clean water.
My first reaction, I looked out and saw this water.
I said, oh, God, the...all my children are gonna drown.
[laughs]
It seemed like that road was, like, 20 miles long,
and I said, wait a minute. You mean the kids
that are school age, they gotta go up and down that road?
It just seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere.
I probably was in tears every day.
Take a family of 10 Black kids from, you know, Chicago,
and move them to Plymouth, Massachusetts,
and I joke with people often that when we moved in '73,
we integrated the town.
First day of school, you know, the teacher...
"Uh, Gregory Greg?" One name, and, you know, all...
all eyes on me.
We hated it at first, but as we grew older,
man, what a...what a blessing it was, you know?
After a while, just suddenly, I fell in love with it.
[Dick] There's something about nature.
There's something about outside.
It changed my whole life.
It gave me a new energy.
One of my small daughters, I said, "Hey, come here."
And she walked up. She said, "What do you want?"
I said, "Give me some sugar." And she looked at me.
She said, "What's that?"
- [laughter] - Oh, wow.
We never had sugar in the house.
That's great.
[Christian] We had this extreme diet of veganism
where not only was it no animal products,
it was, you know, no white flour, no white sugar,
no fried foods.
Couldn't eat what we wanted, stuff, you know,
folks were hiding things in different places,
and all I knew is that when Dad came home,
a lot of stuff got shut down.
I remember one day, they got a pizza that
they weren't supposed to have.
He got a chain and put it around the refrigerator
and says, "When you get the food that is supposed
to be in this refrigerator, I'll take the lock off."
And that lasted three days.
[Frost] There's all the talk of divorce today and of...
of love that doesn't last and so on.
Does it seem like a foreign land to you?
No, I feel...I feel strange talking about it
'cause I'm not home most of the time.
[Lillian] He was always gone. He was gone out of the country.
One of the kids said, "Oh. Like, you're a stranger."
[laughs] And he didn't take that very well.
By his admission, he was probably gone
from the homestead 90% of the time.
I think to a great extent, Dick Gregory
struggled with the effort to mix his family
and his responsibility as a citizen
and to the civil rights movement.
I think he didn't know how to do it sometimes.
Lill imbued in the kids an understanding
that their father was really being
a father to the world also.
[Lillian] It was a family where you knew
you were doing something good.
You were doing something for the cause,
and even though he was gone more than not,
he had enough faith in me to know that I could take care
of everything at home.
[Christian] The farm that us Gregorys grew up on
in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was called Tower Hill Farm.
Tower Hill Farm was a lot of things for the Gregory family.
But for my father, it was his workshop.
It was where he formulated his 4X Formula.
The 4X Formula was a combination of vitamins
and nutrients, ground into a powder
that you would scoop and mix with water or juice.
We would go to whatever health food store was in the city.
He spent about $2,000, $3,000 on vitamins,
and he would make individual packs,
and he would be up all night long in the kitchen,
just making pill packs.
It was a secret concoction of ingredients
that Dick Gregory had put together,
and any individual that he found had a health issue,
he would literally put his formula together
and send it to him for free.
Greg played a... a very important role,
as told by Yoko Ono in finding a formula
to get both she and John Lennon off of drugs.
[Christian] My dad and Michael Jackson
flew over to Ethiopia during the famine
and were able to save hundreds of infants
by bringing that product over and paying the money theirselves
to distribute it.
He influenced individuals, not just in the United States,
but globally,
people start drinking water
because of Dick Gregory, because when he said to them,
that no matter what your disease,
no matter what your ailment,
no matter what your health challenge may be,
if you just increase your water intake,
you will find yourself improving.
That made sense to people.
And so around the world, millions of us
started consuming large amounts of water
for the first time in our lives.
We're talking about people starving right now.
We're talking about a world
where there's a half a billion people
that could be dead from starvation
in the next six months, and I'm just insulted
living in a nation that can send tanks around the world
but can't send turnips,
that can supply the whole world with napalm,
but not fertilizer.
rhythmic drum music
I ran from Chicago to Washington, D.C.,
drinking nothing but orange juice, fruit juice,
and taking this solution,
which the base of it being kelp, k-e-l-p, which is seaweed,
which is 70 million tons laying off the Indian Ocean.
One heaping tablespoon full were to keep you alive.
We can produce this now at five cents a day per person.
[indistinct conversations]
We're not gonna tolerate living in a world
where millions of people gon' die for lack of food.
This is what it's all about.
When he was running across the country,
he was telling the press and telling anyone
that would listen that this country
is going to experience a serious epidemic
in obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure,
and all kinds of illnesses.
The newest stunt was gonna be a cross-country run.
[Dick] We're gonna run from New York City
all away cross to Los Angeles, California,
to dramatize that there's a need
for all the major governments to deal
with the hungry people in the world
and that this food do work.
[Christian] He got wind that a schoolteacher
by the name of Gordon Brooks
had already mapped out a route
and was planning to do the same thing.
He called me up and said, "Hey, brother, how you doing?
I want you to coordinate my run from L.A. to New York,"
and I went, "Okay."
Yeah, I got to spend, like, four or five months with him,
and he kept me cracked up all the time.
[laughs]
Sometimes, we'd have to hop in the van
and get to a media event,
because he was trying to raise awareness.
John Doe citizens should not have to go around
running across countries to feed hungry people.
He was always trying to test the public, test the media.
Nobody believed he could do it.
And he did it, basically, on a total fast.
That was the scary part.
[Dick] We're averaging 50 miles a day,
which is the equivalent of two marathons a day.
Pain going through my body that it's hard to believe
that the human body could take.
[Brooks] The pain that Dick Gregory was going through
was beyond comprehension.
They don't call it Hells Canyon for anything.
It was hell.
[Bellamy] The blisters that he would get on his feet,
the tiredness, how tired he was,
but he would say, "I gotta do it."
We'd wake up the next morning. He'd say,
"Let's go to work."
He gets to New Mexico, roughly,
calls me and said, "Jack...
we're not getting the press we need."
"You have to go out and see Muhammad Ali tonight."
Said, "Mr. Ali, we need you in our run across the country."
Ali said, "You know I'm the greatest fighter
in the world. I'm gonna destroy Jimmy Young tonight?"
Uh, yes, sir. Yes, sir.
"I'm gonna pee blood for two weeks, pay for this myself,
and you want me to go out there, run in that damn desert?"
Yes, sir, I do.
"Okay!"
[crowd shouting]
Here he is, the heavyweight champion, leaving no doubt.
I must say that Dick Gregory's a great man.
He's running from coast to coast,
putting an emphasis on the food problem.
He's now about 20 miles out of Wichita, Kansas,
on Highway 54. I wanna say hello to him.
funk music
It was for the nation. It was because Dick called him,
just like Dr. King called Dick.
They felt something inside of themselves
that was important to the nation,
important to the world.
[Ayanna] Running initially was a way out.
Later in life, running, just like fasting,
was a way of protesting.
He ran for activism against apartheid.
He ran for Native Americans. He ran for women.
His time in the civil rights movement,
he learned that there is no more humane thing
than to take care of your health and well-being,
and that led to the natural transition
of him becoming an advocate of healthy living and clean living.
He decided at that time that health and wellness
was right up there with activism.
Somewhere way, way, way down was entertainment.
[Dick] I saw a conflict in saying to young folks
that drugs and alcohol is bad than coming to a nightclub
and catching my act, and--
[Cathy] Where people were smoking and drinking.
[Dick] Yeah.
[man] And then all of a sudden, he called me and said,
I'm not gonna do any more dates at nightclubs.
As many of you no doubt know,
this is a very special and historic night
in the history of show business
and in the almost legendary life of Dick Gregory.
His final nightclub performance.
No man has given more, asked less,
or been more needed.
As you go on to other service,
we thank you and dedicate ourselves
to returning your gifts in kind to your chosen beneficiary.
Mankind.
[applause]
[Dick] Why am I giving it up? Well, I'll tell you why.
I will be 41 years old this coming October,
and thanks to the civil rights movement,
thanks to the peace movement and all the beautiful people
I was able to meet because of my involvement
on a worldwide level, at 41-years-old-to-be,
I know now that there is a universal force
that controls the whole thing.
You call it anything you wanna call it.
One day it's gonna balance out all of our ledgers,
and it's gonna be a simple question.
Not "How much money did you make? Were you funny?
Did they like you? Were you a celebrity?
Who was your mother? Who was your father?
Where did you live? What school did you go to?
Where'd you send your kids to school?"
Well, here's one simple question
that all of us are going to have to deal with.
How much service did you give to your fellow human beings?
Just that simple and just that sweet.
[woman] Yes.
[applause]
You may remember Dick Gregory
as the hip, acid-tongued nightclub comedian
of the '60s whose outspoken political views
so rankled the FBI that an internal memo
called him demented, or you might remember him as
the civil rights activist or the man who fasted
for nearly two years to protest the Vietnam War,
or the man who has devoted himself
to stamping out world hunger.
At 57, his life has been more chaotic than calm,
but he says that's what happens
when you walk the path he's chosen.
[Dick] The number one problem that we're confronted
with today is diet, uh, the poisons,
the additives that's in the food,
the vitamins it destroys when it's cooked or it's frozen.
My goals is to...to really help change the priorities
in this country, that I could change the whole food industry.
Because I think that this nation,
will never be a great nation, will never be a strong nation.
Great nation is not a gun or a bomb or an Air Force.
This great nation is a nation that has the healthiest people
mentally and physically.
Oh, we've been eating bad shit for hundreds of years.
You know, there's no whole foods in the hood.
There's very few choices,
and the fact that he took nutrition,
it's one of the most basic things
to improve the quality of someone's life.
I told him. I said, "Greg, you have come down
from almost 300 pounds.
You need to find a way to convert the 4X Formula
into a diet and take it to the market."
He said, "I don't... I don't know how to do that."
[man] Dick Gregory for the Bahamian Diet.
The problem is you're overweight.
Whether it's 10 pounds or 150 pounds,
hey, I've been there, and the solution is simple.
The Bahamian Diet.
You can do it. I know.
I've been there, and it ain't pretty.
We were able to find someone that assisted him
with the finalizing formula for 4X, Dr. David Allen.
And Dr. Allen took the product and started marketing it
to multi-level marketing.
When the Bahamian Diet came to market in 1984,
we did about $113 million in sales
in a two-year period of time.
He was concerned about nutrition for poor people
and Black people in particular.
It's like we were poisoning ourselves.
[Sykes] That was killing us, too.
High blood pressure, diabetes, all of that.
So I think he was pushing nutrition another way
to try to help his people.
And it was so popular, you know?
I mean, everybody was, "You on that Bahamian Diet?"
You know, whenever you see somebody lose weight,
"Oh, you on that Dick Gregory."
Hey, now, fix me some of that Dick Gregory.
At that point, if you're talking about diet culture
or food culture,
anything that's about taking better care of yourself
is white people talking to white people.
So to have a Black man who's saying,
"We need to take better care of ourselves,
and we need to do it for ourselves,"
like, he's not recommending you go to, like,
a white product and do it.
He's saying, "We can do this ourselves."
That's the revolutionary idea in there.
[Dick] There's a new economic arm
to the civil rights movement.
The Black neighborhood is
the only neighborhood you can come in in America,
and someone's selling the product other than that group,
and so we saying that when we sell to one another
and open up our businesses, that money changes hands,
and it stays in the neighborhood
and you see the whole piece change.
And if they can bring dope and cigarettes, caffeine,
and nicotine to your doorstep,
then we want to bring health to your doorstep.
That's the greatest welfare system I know,
is entrepreneurship.
- How so? - We businesspeople,
we can go and buy all the booze we wanna buy for lunch,
and a welfare mother would have trouble
trying to get free apple juice for the babies.
It's just so insane.
I started getting so many phone calls
from people crying out for help.
People said, you know,
"I'm thinking about committing suicide."
dramatic music
Walter Hudson was a man in Long Island, New York,
who was over a thousand pounds.
He had actually tripped and fell
and got wedged in the doorway between his bedroom
and his bathroom.
It took eight rescue workers four hours
to get him out of that doorway,
and it made such big news in Long Island,
that it caught the attention of Dick Gregory.
[Dick] And we were on "The Phil Donahue Show."
Eliminate all the sugar, uh, all the bread.
The most important thing, he was drinking almost no water.
Uh, he was drinking soda pop.
We've increased his water now to about 12 glasses a day.
We'll eventually move that up to 16 glasses a day.
He was under house arrest. He will eat no cooked food,
no animal product, no dairy product,
no white refined sugar,
no bread, no butter, no cheese.
And...and we're gonna do it.
[reporter] But for a man who hasn't left the house
but once in 27 years,
content until his recent fall to lie in bed
watching television, reading the Bible, and eating,
it's an enormous task.
[Dick] You know, there's a lot of people out there...
- [Hudson] I know. - ...that love you.
[Hudson] Yes, I know.
[Dick] You wanna say anything to 'em?
[Hudson] Well, I wanna tell them that I haven't given up.
I have hope, and I believe that
I'm gonna do it.
I will lose that weight.
[male reporter] In just three months,
he lost 300 pounds.
But his biggest lost came the first time
he tried to leave his house.
[Dick] Next move was to get him out of that house
and take him to a facility
where we could get him in the ocean.
[male reporter] On that day in February,
with the world watching,
Walter refused to walk outside.
So Dick Gregory walked out on him.
Energy-wise and nutrition-wise, he's ready.
The psychological problem, we can't deal with.
Do you feel you are letting people down?
No, because I figure that, you know,
I'm still going on with my diet so I haven't let them down.
I feel that, you know, that they'll know that,
and I figure further down the road,
when they see me more thinner,
they'll know that I didn't give up.
[Dick] Two years later, he passed away.
I can't help him. I didn't know what to do,
and I really felt bad about it.
[waves lapping]
I decided that if I could take a group
and could really dramatize them on the press,
then maybe we could wake America's conscience up.
This is gonna be the first breathing exercise.
So move it in.
[Bellamy] We opened up a facility in the Bahamas
called Dick Gregory's Health Resort,
and it just began to blossom. It began to grow.
- I love who? - Myself!
[Dick] Most doctors and most hospitals
don't know what to do with the morbidly obese,
and yet there's 34 million Americans obese.
There's 100 million that's overweight.
- 301. - 301!
[cheers and applause]
Some of the guys hadn't seen their feet,
you know, standing up.
They hadn't seen collarbones in their bodies in years,
things that we take for granted.
We were able to effect change in...in people's lives.
[male reporter] And last year, he sold the franchise rights
for his Slim Safe Bahamian Diet for a reported $30 million.
Do you think people would find it somewhat of a paradox
to...to see a man who is such an activist,
who has so long been connected with so many cause,
to be such a wealthy man?
No, well, I think you'd probably be surprised,
but I've always made money.
[Sykes] When Dick Gregory became this entrepreneur
with the Bahamian Diet, I don't remember anyone saying
that he was a sellout or... or was disappointed with him,
as, "Hey, this is a good idea," you know?
At least it was something positive.
It's not like he was selling, you know,
Dick Gregory Cigarettes.
[Christian] My father, as somebody
who came from very little,
had very little attachment to money.
If he had it, he was going to use it,
and he was using it to advance something for the better.
[male reporter] But we're talking about
millions and millions of dollars here.
[Dick] No, I don't think so. I mean, I'm sure.
I'm sure they're shocked because--not shocked because of,
I don't act the way you think wealthy people
are supposed to act.
[Yohance] What his net value was
was never even remotely important to him.
And so when you don't keep your eye on that financial needle,
yeah, things can go wrong.
somber music
- Tried your diet. - I love it.
- Thank you. - All right. Fine. Okay.
He was a great entertainer and a very poor businessman.
He did not end up in a situation
where much of the money flowed to him at all.
[Christian] It became an inside fight between Dick Gregory
and his partners.
They felt as though Dick was spending too much money
in these desires to have a facility and other things
he wanted to do versus what they wanted to do,
was just basically move and distribute product.
Two different sides of the executive team
sued each other, and it wound up in federal court.
The facility in Fort Walton Beach
ultimately closed.
It ended very badly
with over $2 million worth of his royalties
were tied up in court that he couldn't access.
Bankruptcy really was the only option.
[birds calling]
I got a call from him one day, and he said,
"Doctor, it's gonna be bad. It's gonna be bad,"
and I said, "What do you mean?
He said, "Well, I'm at the point now
where I will no longer be able to pay my life insurance.
I will no longer be able to protect my family."
[Christian] It wasn't long after that
before we started to lose things.
And it was just me and my mother and my daughter
living there at the time,
and I see these big trucks outside,
and I'm like, "Mom?"
somber music
[Lillian] Oh, God, it was a terrible time.
It was just a terrible time,
and it all just sort of happened in a blur.
[Christian] We lost the farm, Tower Hill Farm,
it was a fixture for us Gregorys,
was no more.
I was at Morgan State at that time,
and I just remember getting a call that
we had lost the farm
and that everything got taken offsite.
The lien holder had secured a company to come
and move everything and move it into their storage unit.
I never knew for sure, except I knew every time
I needed to reach him directly, there wasn't really a phone.
There was no home phone.
I could call Lill or I could call his son Christian,
but I kinda sensed
that he was living from place to place.
[Dick] I didn't know that I'd have a Rolls-Royce repossessed,
that I'd be put out of my house with worldwide television there,
and I didn't care.
[woman] Did he wish he was still a millionaire?
I'm sure he did,
but I think what he really would have missed,
if someone said, "You are not Dick Gregory anymore.
What you say does not matter,"
that would have broke his spirit.
There's a whole generation that grew up listening
to Dick Gregory.
And I don't know that you have the visibility today
that you had before. - No, I don't.
One day, I went into this huge showroom.
Did my whole act to an empty auditorium.
I just went in and did my whole act.
I don't know why I did.
Ooh, it was painful. I mean, painful 'cause why?
Ain't no laughs.
When you're doing humor or doing entertainment,
you depend on human beings to react,
and if you don't get that reaction,
then your rhythm, your juice don't flow.
That made me have respect for hecklers.
You know, I would rather be in a room full of hecklers,
try to do my act than in a room with nobody in it.
Next up, we are honored to have a world-renowned
civil rights activist and nutritionist
who allowed me to eat his pre-roast meat,
and I appreciate that.
Please welcome the very old Dick Gregory.
[cheers and applause]
[Schneider] I met Dick Gregory at the roast of Hugh Hefner.
After I met him, I knew he was funny,
and I...I remembered I went like, "I gotta hire him."
So I asked him if he wanted to be in one of my movies.
And I said, "It's a... It's a silly movie."
Movie was called "The Hot Chick." [laughs]
I wanted Dick to come in there and have some fun.
He got it instantly. He just nailed it.
- You got to hold on to it. - Oh!
Not too tight, but enough to let it know you the boss.
- [grunting] - Remember, if you shake it
more than twice, you're playing with it.
[grunts]
If you know funny, you don't ever lose it.
You...you always know it.
And then, 'cause like a month later, I got a call,
and he said, "Because of that movie I did,
I got health insurance for Lillian,
and, uh, she broke her arm, and she, uh,
we got insurance, paid for the whole thing,
so thank you, my brother."
I didn't know he didn't have insurance.
[indistinct conversations]
[Christian] We all get older. We all have a life cycle,
and you know, it doesn't matter how legendary you may be,
aging's aging.
He called me up, and he said,
"Hey, hey, doc, I've been walking around this hotel
for 20 minutes looking for my kitchen,
and it took that long before it dawned on me
that I wasn't home."
He had early onset of Alzheimer's.
That was the first time that I started to see
the anger kind of rise up.
What you say? See, you keep looking for shit.
But I'm not understanding what the difference
of your search and my search.
You ain't supposed to understand. It's money.
Fucking money.
I was a former assistant
and manager of Dick Gregory.
[laughs] Man, Mr. Gregory cursed me out so many times,
and I got fired so many times,
and then rehired in the same sentence.
You know, he cursed out everybody.
I seen him curse out Kevin Hart.
[Hart] Nick Cannon was in the hospital.
Dick Gregory was there when I showed up to visit,
and he started cussing me out.
"You better put your money in the Black financial institution,
you stupid motherfucker." [laughs]
He...He would cuss at you, and it was aggressive,
but you still had to understand that he meant well.
You try to speak out of turn when Mr. Gregory's talking,
you don't care who you are or what's going on.
He gon' let you have it.
On one hand, he's one of the greatest comedians to ever live.
On the other hand, can't stop talking.
He had a little briefcase with him.
He broke that out, and he had
you know, clippings of news articles.
So it went from, "Here comes Dick Gregory,"
to "Oh, shit! Here comes Dick Gregory."
And he gon' tell you that you don't know nothing
and that you need to sit down and listen.
"You're a stupid motherfucker." Like...and it was...
it was like, okay, "Well, hold on now, Dick."
"You know, the Russians own Mountain Dew,
and they're putting uranium in..." You know, so okay.
First of all, ain't nobody ever telling me this.
Second of all, let me... let me receive the information.
"You know, Hasbro has a chip inside your brain
that you think is a toy that monitors your..." Huh? What?
Possibly, if you lowered the tone and aggression,
and aggression...
"You know, the government counts every time you say 'nigga.'"
Huh? What? Okay.
And even though it came out aggressive,
at the end of it, he was like, "I'm talking to you
the way I talk to you because I want you to be somebody
that does the right thing so other people can follow."
He just spoke his truth. Like, that's his truth.
You know, he don't care if you don't like it or not.
He don't care if you don't respect it or not.
This is his truth.
You look on the internet now, and you just see countless clips
of just a fire-breathing, angry man.
We'd tell Pop, "You know, maybe you should rest yourself
for a little bit."
Resting for him was...I said, "Well, if you're gonna give
the same level of energy,
we might as well have you up on the stage."
So as he got back into comedy, he made a very clear decision
that he was going to, you know, be R-A-W.
He was gonna be as raw as he wanted to be.
uptempo jazz drum music
[DJ Envy] We got a special guest with us
in the building this morning.
[Charlamagne tha God] A very, very special guest.
It's a privilege and honor
to have this man in the building this morning.
- Mr. Dick Gregory. - Mr. Dick Gregory.
- I've got 10 children, man. - Damn.
- That's...Damn? - I'm happy for you. I'm proud.
Happy now?
I want my sperm to catch up to yours.
Oh, man, I'd just get me some booty.
[laughter]
Towards the end, he ended up being funny again,
and he was doing club shows.
It was like, oh, okay. Now we can hang.
Well, I got a cousin outside of St. Louis--Jabo.
He'd be my Secretary of Defense,
and I would just see these white folks on "60 Minutes."
"Jabo, now that you're Secretary,
what you plan on doing about defense?"
"See, first I'm-a fix it, then paint it."
[laughter]
- God bless. Dick Gregory. - I met you when I was 19.
Here you are today still kicking knowledge.
What drives you, sir?
- My bills. - Mm.
[laughter]
He would never get off the stage.
Imagine three hours on the stage and then an hour and a half
doing a meet and greet afterwards,
and it's like one in the morning.
[Dick] I never thought I'd see the day
that white folks would start asking me to comment
on white folks problems.
I came back in from Europe last month.
CNN. "Uh, Mr. Gregory, you think we'll ever catch bin Laden?"
I said, "We?"
[laughter]
- I ain't looking for him. - [laughter]
The best? I don't wanna talk about who was the best.
I wanna talk about who's the baddest.
I became aware of Dick Gregory
because there's something called
State of the Black Union,
and Dick Gregory was always on the panel.
The Black brother from Wells Fargo...
- [laughter] - Uh-huh.
...head of the mortgages,
I pulled him over and said, "I need to talk to you."
- [laughter] - He said, "Brother Greg,
you need a mortgage?"
I said, "No, they took my house when times was good."
[laughter]
I need two big banners,
one for the FBI and one for the White House.
Picket it, shut the shit down, and then...
and then go to jail. You ready to go?
I think people get confused and think
that he was an activist who decided to be funny.
No, no, no, his soul was that of a stand-up comic.
He just could not just do that in a world
that was falling down around him.
No, I wish Bill Clinton was here
so I would apologize to him for you Black folks.
This is why he's a comedian, 'cause...'cause...
'cause you bring up Bill Clinton,
and all...every Black person kinda goes,
"Okay, first Black president. We, uh..."
But the fact is, we...I would apologize to Bill Clinton.
Even as a Black person who thinks
you know where he's going, he's like, "Wait. What?"
No, I mean that. You Black folks tricked him.
You went in that big, old Black pot
and said, "Here, white boy. You Black."
- [laughter] - Huh?
And then you went back in that Black pot
and said, "Here, Obama. You ain't Black enough."
What kind of fool is you?
- [uproarious laughter] - Huh?
What kind of fool is you?
He was at that age that he really could say whatever.
Your children ain't violent because they Black.
They ain't violent.
Most people in the world lived in the ghetto.
They don't kill people.
What are you putting in my malt liquor, white boy?
What are you putting in it? Huh?
And you could see everybody next to him, like,
"Oh, man, I gotta follow this? Like..." [laughs]
The week before he died,
Dick Gregory was still doing engagements.
My son Christian was probably getting ready
to take him to the airport, and he said,
"Oh, I just don't feel so good," and then Christian said,
"Dad, wait a minute. You just gotta cancel this engagement."
[Christian] We thought my father was in the hospital
for a simple urinary tract infection.
It wasn't until an astute eye of a radiologist
caught what he believed to be a significant problem
taking place with my father's blood vessels.
And they said, "We really don't think
he's gonna live that long."
And we were just like, "What?" You know, we're just stunned.
I know he was ready to go.
He knows he had did everything he needed to ever do.
And I just felt he... he just...
I just wished a picture could've been taken of his face.
To this day, it's the most beautiful facial expression
that I've seen in my entire life,
was that last wink made.
Just that last wink.
[exhales deeply]
The look on his face was one of the most peaceful looks
I ever saw on his face in my life.
And we just stayed right there, and there it was.
We all quickly became clear that
the...the... the world just lost...
[voice breaking] uh... an incredible human being.
hopeful music
[birds chirping]
[Dick] I'll always have advocates,
many of my friends, people that work for me,
that see through all my ignorance
and can still see my dreams.
And that's what my wife was able to do,
see through my hostility...
and see the love.
[birds chirping]
If young people were to ask me what distinguished him,
I would say the fact that he shook the body politic,
that he enjoyed flirting with the establishment
on his terms.
I just fell in love with him all the time.
He was just my man.
He lived an extraordinary life.
Like, most people
don't get to do a tenth... [laughs]
of what he experienced.
If somebody told you, "Hey, this guy did all these things
and was kind of oppressed," you'd be like, "Get outta here."
The thing you learn from guys like that is...is try it.
Don't be lazy. Go for it.
You wanna tell jokes, tell jokes.
If you don't think you can do it, yes, you can.
You...Oh, you weigh 300 pounds. Well, I'm gonna lose it.
Yes, you can lose it all. You can make a lot of money.
You can lose a lot of money.
This guy lived the life,
and that's what everyone should aspire to.
He saw the flaws
in how we were being treated and where we were being placed.
He wanted to be a part of the change,
and he always fought for that change.
[Chappelle] The sacrifices he made aren't necessarily required
of every artist, but that there are
very special people every few generations
we're blessed with that are willing to do that.
And when you see these people,
you should give 'em your love and your respect,
protect them to whatever extent you can,
and try to recognize that
they're doing something very difficult
for the benefit of all of us.
He set a very high bar for the people that came after him.
He gave so much of himself to a movement, to a people,
and he wasn't afraid to do that,
and I think the work that he did is still necessary.
We still have to fight. We still have to protest.
We still have to speak up.
[Sykes] When I started out doing comedy,
I would look at the tapes of him from back in the day,
and it definitely taught me to aim higher.
When you gon' throw something, aim higher.
[man] Mr. Gregory, is there anything else
that you'd like to say before we leave?
I've had white folks used to tell me, "Love it or leave it."
[laughs] I'm not gon' leave America till I straighten it out
and I'm not gon' love it till she become lovable,
then I'm getting the fuck outta here.
I know now that there is a universal force
that controls the whole thing.
You can call it anything you wanna call it.
One day, it's gonna balance out all of our ledgers,
and it's gonna be a simple question.
Not "How much money did you make?
Was you funny? Did they like you?
Were you a celebrity? Who was your mother?
Who was your father? Where did you live?
What school did you go to?
Where did you send your kids to school?"
There's one simple question that all of us
are going to deal with--
"How much service did you give to your fellow human beings?"
Just that simple and just that sweet.
- [man] Yes. - [ applause ]
[Black Thought] I'm tactical and strategic
Practical and collegiate
Enough to know if you read it
Don't mean you need it, I follow proper procedure
And get my money right off top like alopecia
I see what's trending was truly the end of an era
But it's forever or never, I'm ever and ever
I am the vendetta that's never been better
Than lyrical terrors, incredibly clever
Perspective is meta
Y'all niggas need to get it together
Like birds of a feather
I pen the words of an Edgar...
Allan Poe 'cause I go for broke
Whether or not it's for more cheddar
'Cause I am a go-getter
Loaded lines, my bars bear the burden
I been in the gym overtime
No calls for disturbing my over grind
And moving on me gets you immobilized
My rhymes, super human, I've been next to immortalized
The honorable, I come right at you comical clowns
And break it down into particles and molecules
So trying me is trying the impossible
Slingshots to a monster that keep darts in the arsenal
[Dick] I would like to say thank you very much
and, uh, I really picked a good time to quit.
Probably won't miss me at all.
Plus with all them clowns in the White House,
they'll keep you laughing for years to come.
[woman] Right on! All right. All right, All right.