Post a Comment On: Feminist Law Rant

Just a reminder to anyone coming across this blog without knowing anything about my project. Signal Boost is my effort to commit to 365 posts of learning about People, including women, of Color, Jewish people, and movements for social justice. The idea of the project came from being tired of media was amplifying the voices of white supremacists and craving to hear the sides all to often left out.

It's only day three and I'm doing something I didn't want to do, take a short cut and write about someone getting significant national attention. I am making the exception already because this project is about educating myself and I did not really know of Dick Gregory before. I was listening to DemocracyNow!, the best source I've ever found for  news that centers voices of activists and people of color and they dedicated their show to this man and I was simply blown away (not unexpectedly, when you see the images of the Civil Rights Movement, we know there are a lot of unsung heroes who put their lives on the lines over and over again who will never get proper credit for their roll in making this country live up to its ideals).

Dick Gregory was comedian and activist. I'm not a huge fan of comedy because it so often takes shortcuts with homophobia, sexism, racism, ablebodism, etc., etc. Listening to him speak, here is a man that mentioned problems of intimate violence multiple times in his interview. Not as a joke, but as a serious commentary on the problems in our world.

Here's one example from the DemocracyNow! transcript

Alcohol consumption, right now, as we talk right now is about 34 percent higher than it was before Ground Zero. Now, what do this mean? It mean get ready for battered wives. If, before Ground Zero, every four seconds in America a woman got beat up by her boyfriend or husband — not strangers, people she know — then think about what happens now with the amount of alcohol and drug consumption that’s out here.  What he did to open doors for Black comedians is incredibly important. But what turns my head was his remarkable lifelong quest for justice.  He marched and integrated lunch counters, and schools. He protested the Vietnam War:
No, nonviolence to me means not that I’m not supposed to hit American white man, nonviolence mean to me that death might put me on its payroll, but I’ll never put death on my payroll.  And this thought on police brutality:
Let me say this, never before in the history of this planet have anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30 year period, in spite of black folks and white folks — the now — the number one problem we confronted with now is police brutality. Now am I saying police brutality is worse today than it was 50 years ago? No. Then what has has changed? My mindset. There’s things I would have tolerated 50 years ago, that I won’t tolerate. 
 In addition to DemocracyNow! Tributes to Dick Gregory are available at NPR  and the New York Times. 

I learned from the NYT he is an author and Goodreads author page lists the following books that he authored - so in the spirit of Signal Boosting, check out his own books.
nigger by Dick Gregory and Robert Lipsyte (1965)  From the Back of the Bus - (1962)
The Shadow That Scares Me Jan 1968  by Dick Gregory and James R. McGraw
Dick Gregory's Political Primer (Perennial Library, P264) 1972 by Dick Gregory
Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature  by Dick Gregory, Alvenia M. Fulton (Editor), James R. McGraw (Editor) (1973)

Up from Nigger Nov 1976 by Dick Gregory
Bible Tales (Perennial Library) May 1978 by Dick Gregory
No More Lies Nov 1, 1997 by Dick Gregory
Callus On My Soul: A Memoir Feb 1, 2003 by Dick Gregory and Shelia P. Moses (American history in a conversational memoir.)
As someone not into comedy, it didn't even occur to me there would be audio collections, but there are some- check out this link fro Amazon.