W.E. A.L.L. B.E.: W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Special: Weds. 2/9/2011 @ 9pm c/ 10pm e*"Dick Gregory: Makin' It Plain & LIVE"

Sunday, February 06, 2011

W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Special: Weds. 2/9/2011 @ 9pm c/ 10pm e*"Dick Gregory: Makin' It Plain & LIVE"

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February 2011 Theme: Telling Our Story...

Air Date: Weds. February 09, 2011

E-mail: r2c2h2@gmail.com

Time: 9 PM C/10 PM E/7 PM P

Call-in Number: 646-652-4593

Show:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe/2011/02/10/tha-artivist-presentswe-all-be-radio

***

topic: "Dick Gregory: Makin It Plain & LIVE!!!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn91cVwNf24

About Bro. Dick Gregory

During the golden era of skinny-tie comedians, Dick Gregory was one of the biggest: a $12,000-a-week headliner on par with with Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. Mr. Gregory influenced Bill Cosby, who inherited his stage presence, as well as Richard Pryor, who expressed biting racial candor.

Mr. Gregory was a headliner in Las Vegas when the casinos were still largely segregated, played all the hot clubs in New York and San Francisco, published a best-selling 1964 autobiography, titled "Nigger," and became the first black guest invited to the sofa on Jack Paar's show, where he startled audiences by mixing obligatory family jokes with sharp political humor.

Mr. Gregory was, in his words, "the first flatfooter" -- no dancing, no shuffling -- to play white clubs, a break with the singing and dancing routines of his black predecessors. Wearing a white shirt and three-button Brooks Brothers suit, he balanced himself on a stool and talked in rolling sentences, punctuating his routine with long pauses as he slowly dragged on his cigarette.

But while he talked politics, Mr. Gregory wasn't a political comic. If anything, he had an antipolitical genius for personalizing, and then disarming, relations between races:

"Down South they don't care how close I am as long as I don't get too big, and up North they don't care how big I am as long as I don't get too close."

"Don't just sit there and heckle me. Pay your check, burn your cross, and leave."

During the civil rights era, Mr. Gregory was friends with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, delivered food to N.A.A.C.P. offices in the South, marched in Selma, Ala., and was threatened many times and arrested more than once. In 1968, Mr. Gregory ran for president, after an unsuccessful bid to be mayor of Chicago. His candidacy was a stunt, but it was not a joke: on Election Day he received about 47,000 votes.

In the years after, he hit the health-food speaking circuit, pushing a raw food diet and something he called the Bahamian Diet Nutritional Drink; wrote alternative-history books; tried to intervene in the Iranian hostage crisis; and enjoyed an odd revival with his public campaign to help Walter Hudson, a 1,200-pound man, lose weight.

When not in Washington, where he has an apartment, or at his home in Plymouth, Mass., where he lives with Lily, his wife of 50 years, he is on the road doing around 200 shows a year. -- Bruce Headlam (New York Times)