Barrier-breaking US comedian, activist Dick Gregory dead at 84

WASHINGTON: US comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who broke barriers as a performer in the era of segregation and challenged racism through searing humour, died on Saturday night, his family said. He was 84.

In a Facebook post, Christian Gregory did not give the cause of death but said his father started feeling ill on August 9, and was admitted to a hospital on August 12. He died in Washington.

“A life well-lived but heavily sacrificed, has definitively taken its toll,” the son said. More details were to be released in the coming days. Gregory performed in the country’s top clubs in the early 1960s and was not shy about confronting his white audiences with the realities of racism.

“A Southern liberal?” he once said, according to the Washington Post. “That’s a guy that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” Or his line about trying to order at a restaurant in the segregated South and being told by the waitress, “We don’t serve coloured people here.”

Gregory replied, according to the New York Times, “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Gregory was credited with laying the groundwork for black comics who would come later, particularly Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

Later on in the 1960s, he became a fervent front-line activist on various racial and social causes. He staged a modest write-in campaign for president in 1968 that garnered fewer than 50,000 votes. —AFP