From politicians and actors to activists and comedians, to fans and friends — people have been taking to Twitter in droves to pay homage to Dick Gregory, the iconic satirist and civil rights activist who died on Saturday at the age of 84.
“He taught us how to laugh. He taught us how to fight. He taught us how to live,” wrote activist Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Dick Gregory was committed to justice. I miss him already.”
Dick Gregory was jailed and beaten by Birmingham police for parading without a permit in 1963. He took a bullet in the knee while trying to calm a crowd during the Watts riots in 1965. Two years later, he ran for mayor of Chicago against the infamous Richard Daley.
He was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and in 1968 he ran for president against Richard Nixon. He pulled an astonishing 1.5 million votes—as a write-in candidate. During that campaign, he was arrested by U.S. Treasury agents for printing and distributing fake American currency with his picture on the bills as campaign literature.
He was an activist and a comedian, well known for his hunger strikes for justice. In 1967, he weighed more than 280 pounds and smoked and drank heavily. Then he began a public fast starting Thanksgiving Day to protest the war in Vietnam. 40 days later, he broke his fast with a hearty glass of fruit juice. He weighed 97 pounds.
In the summer of 1968, he fasted for 45 days as a show of solidarity with Native Americans. The following summer he did another 45 days in protest of de-facto segregation in the Chicago public schools. In 1970 he went 81 days to bring attention to the narcotics problem in America. Beginning in 1971 he went nearly three years without solid foods, again to protest the war. During that stretch he ran 900 miles from Chicago to D.C.
During the Iran hostage crisis, he traveled to Tehran in an effort to free the hostages and he traveled to the north of Ireland to advise hunger-striking IRA prisoners. In his campaign against hunger he traveled to Ethiopia more than ten times.
Throughout his life, Dick Gregory was a target of FBI and police surveillance, and he was virtually banned from the entertainment arena for his political activism.
He died today at the age of 84. We spoke with him many times on Democracy Now!, about racial profiling, the death penalty & more. Hear him tell his life story, in his own words:
February 26, 2002
