Dick Gregory spoke at SUNY Stony Brook in early 1966 — and inspired a gymnasium full of radicals. He riffed on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, firing salvo after salvo into the void, challenging the thousands of students there to put our bodies on the line for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, all done with scathing (for us) humor. He hated Lyndon Johnson: “Too bad Lyndon Johnson isn’t the pope,” he exclaimed in a zinger that has always stayed with me, “that way we’d only have to kiss his ring.” At the time I, just turned 17, couldn’t believe anyone could actually oppose the war so forcefully and publicly.

He also quoted by heart from the Declaration of Independence:

… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I used that quote when I was resisting the draft, as did thousands of others — we certainly would never have read it in the same way as it rolled off of Dick’s tongue, stopping and stressing the word “duty” over and over again.

Another old Stony Brook friend, Bob Marcus, recalls that Dick Gregory told us, “If we all give up cigarettes until the war is over, the tobacco industry will end the war, really fast.” He understood.

Dick Gregory was incredible, always something to say about our situations, our lives, and always with such sharp slashing sarcasm. Our paths crossed many times. In Chicago ’68, when Mayor Daley‘s police banned the antiwar march on the amphitheater where the soon-to-become-infamous Democratic Party convention was taking place, Dick Gregory invited the 4,000 of us to his house, which was on the other side of the police barricades en route to the convention hall, “for bar-b-q.” And Dick led the march. My dad Abe Cohen, an ex-Marine in World War II who drove us to Chicago carrying with him his medal for heroism awarded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — and who, in an anti-war tirade told his sons, “You’ll go into the military over my dead body” — said “Let’s join Dick Gregory for dinner!” The cops tear-gassed and beat the shit out of us.

A few years later, Dick, along with the brilliant Mark Lane (who died last year) continued to challenge the official story of the Kennedy Assassination. Dick released photos that the corporate media was sitting on, of the so-called “bums” in Dallas on that fateful day in 1963 — among them, E. Howard Hunt, CIA agent, and two others (Sturgis, aka Fiorini, and one other who would later become involved in Watergate — the CIA hit squad). Red Balloon and a few other underground papers published them on our front page, breaking the media white-out of the CIA’s role in the assassination. Both Mark Lane and Dick Gregory came to speak at Stony Brook again, and again made a huge and radicalizing impact on our lives.

Many memories of Dick Gregory, who challenged way ahead of time the way officialdom framed every single issue … including that of nutrition, health, and diet. In 1992, it was Dick Gregory who pointed out that — “What a coincidence!” — the path of the burning down of buildings in the Los Angeles rebellion “just happened” to follow the route of the planned subway system, which needed to acquire those properties. Go figure!

Years later, yes it’s true, Dick was involved with Pacifica Radio as well, and served on one of the national boards.

So very sorry, of course, to learn of Dick Gregory’s passing, so grateful that our paths crossed when they did. I do have a few of his early records — probably unnecessary now in the YouTube era but still, I’ll be dusting them off and getting the needle into the right groove, there’s something special and fitting about hearing Dick, again, at 33-1/3rd rpm with all the scratches and bumps instead of on YouTube, what it meant at the time to play his records in the mid-1960s, where only one person on the campus would have it, and crowds would gather to listen to the one phonograph in G-dorm lobby (just as we did with Tom Lehrer‘s albums), and find ourselves charged up and laughing down to the cafeteria.

Here’s to Dick Gregory. I drink a green juice to you, Dick, and a great big and bigger thank you for helping us find the revolutionary meaning in our lives and for being so damn funny about it, amidst all the pain, killing, and brutality ….

Also, give a listen to this where Dick Gregory in 2008 apologizes to Bill Clinton, “our first Black president”.

Mitchel Cohen