Appreciating Dick Gregory, historian

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, 8-28, 29 or 30

When comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory died Aug. 19 at the age of 84, the African American’s contribution to U.S. history came to mind – especially at a time when the Oval Office Occupant’s goofy claims of “fake news” are being augmented by his assertions that are genuinely “fake history.”

This month, after terrorists attacked Barcelona, Trump repeated a story he’s told over and over, about U.S. Army Gen. John Pershing executing Muslim insurgents in the Philippines in what would have been a war crime had it occurred, although it’s been debunked for years.

Of course, such outrageous dishonesty is nothing new, as tracked by fact-checkers at the Washington Post, which as of a week ago have cataloged 1,057 false or misleading claims by Trump in the first seven months of his presidency.

As for the ongoing controversy about statues of Confederate officials, I’m personally divided. It’s true that they’re monuments to men guilty of treason, killing Americans and defending slavery, but maybe adding historically accurate plaques to that effect could transform an outlandish celebration of a 152-year-old defeat into a liberating clarification. After all, statues need not inspire visitors to betray the nation, take up arms against fellow citizens or enslave others any more than the wonderful statue of Richard Pryor in Peoria causes viewers to use salty language or the monument to Popeye in Chester, Ill., instigates a hunger for spinach.

Genuinely inspirational? Dick Gregory. In 1961, he became the first black guest to not just perform on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” but to sit on the couch with then-host Jack Paar. Gregory’s show-business talents influenced contemporaries Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge and a host of comics since, from Pryor to Dave Chappelle.

Befriended by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Gregory was beaten and jailed in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 for “parading without a permit” and was shot trying to calm people during 1965’s riots in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood.Also that year, he appeared at one of the first anti-Vietnam War events, a 1965 “teach-in” in Berkeley, Calif., and would engage in hunger strikes protesting war, segregation, mistreatment of Native Americans, and drug abuse, and his innumerable fasts led him to become an expert on diet and nutrition.

In 1967 he ran against Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley and a year later against Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon, annoying FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered agents to “neutralize” Gregory with help from organized crime. Gregory spoke truth to power and traveled the globe, from Ireland and Iran to multiple trips to Ethiopia, often blasting the CIA and its activities worldwide.

On Instagram this month, comic Chris Rock wrote, “We lost a king. They'll never be another. Read his books. Look him up. You won’t be disappointed.”

Indeed, remembered in recent years as a funny guy and a busy speaker – he attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale on a scholarship and visited Western Illinois University in Macomb – he was a skilled writer, too. His book “No More Lies: The Myth and Reality of American History” – an idea in 1971 more bold than his provocative 1964 autobiography, which used the lower-case N-word as its title – was one of the first comparisons of conventional wisdom to real history. Dedicated to Women’s Liberation and Native Americans, the 372-page book addresses myths ranging from “Puritan Pilgrims” and “the Mason-Dixon Line” to “Free Enterprise” and “Free Elections.”

Other similar works followed: “Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States” a year later, Howard Zinn’s “A People's History of the United States” in 1980, Thaddeus Russell’s “A Renegade History of the United States” in 2010, and along the way the best of the bunch, James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” in 1995.

In the New York Times, comic writer Roy Wood Jr. of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” said, “We need comedians like Mr. Gregory, people who shine light in the dark, now more than ever. We need more bold voices.”

And the voices must look to the past as much as the future.

As African-American novelist and social critic James Baldwin said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”