Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken."

Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, "Line up, boys!"

When I was 14 I read his books and it changed my perception on everything.

When I was elected Student Body President I made sure that Dick Gregory was the first person we had to speak to our student body.

A great man, a great warrior

and anyone could grasp his faculties were failing.

As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, he was powerful when he was young.

Courageous far beyond so many others, penetrating, wonderful sense of humor, and broken hearted for what had happened to so many people he knew, he clearly was in a league of his own.

It would surely wear away at a child, as it did him, witnessing the suffering, the struggle his mother endured trying so hard to raise her family, their crushing poverty. Who wouldn't want to come out blazing, to awaken the world to the tragedy people refused to acknowledge was going on in the lives of so many people simply because of race.

Anyone who had paid attention to this man at all when he was younger was automatically aware something had slipped with him, and not for a moment would want to claim he was his normal self as a very much older man.

Anyone who knew his value would NEVER dis him.

He was brilliant. This is going back 45 years or so. I ran into him once more on a plane a few years later. My parents had one of his first books, "From the Back of the Bus," a bitter satire on segregation. I hadn't heard much about him in the last 35 years or so.

it became trendy . RIP to a legend

a great man and observer of the human condition. I did a book report in high school on his first book "From The Back of The Bus." He will be missed in this new Dark Age of American history.

...thanks for the memories.

He was a trailblazer, a whipper snapper, and political firebrand who was only recently honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.



He always carried around a portfolio briefcase stuffed full of news articles on various things and during appearances and interviews, he would start talking about a topic and whip out an article. His portfolio was his own historical archive! And yes, he was very big on CT but in his case, it did not diminish his ability to make you think and research.

I know Joe Madison has been very close to him and this will probably hit him hard too.

R.I.P. and condolences to his family.

In 1968, Bowling Green, Ohio.

This was just at the beginning of the possibility of people in isolated places hearing some of the most interesting outside voices (as we would have thought of Gregory) because of magazines like Evergreen and, yes, Playboy, both of which had featured Gregory at one time or another, I believe. I'm afraid I was barely aware of Lenny Bruce in his lifetime, but I had a friend at the university who had several of Bruce's records.

We were isolated and hungry, and people like Gregory and Bruce fed that hunger with humor and grace. And they fed that hunger in another way, they stoked its flames.

integrated our home.

Dick Gregory, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Diahann Carroll, the Jackson 5 and Michael showed us we are all the same - but there remained a problem. They could come into our communities and homes on the TV, but not in real life.

Dick Gregory and the rest changed all that.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gregory.

spoke at my college.....very powerful.....

I saw Dick Gregory when he came to Seattle to support a community resisting police brutality, in 2001 or 2002. I read his autobiography and the writings of James Baldwin in college(early sixties), and they helped me break out of the cancerous racist culture of the south.