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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2020
This article examines comedian Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory's comical articulation of religious belief and belonging through his speeches and religious writings during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, during his most visible public presence as an activist and comedic entertainer, Gregory bore an irreverent scriptural authority for his readers and comedy audiences who sought a prominent, public affirmation of their suspicion and criticism of religious authorities and conventional religious teachings. This suspicion would allow them to grapple with the oppressive presence of religion in the long history of Western colonialism, in the U.S. context of slavery, and in the violence and segregation of Jim Crow America. Following this religious suspicion, however, Gregory's consistent goal was to implement just social teachings stemming from socially and theologically progressive readings of the Hebrew Bible and of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Gregory's irreverence modeled, and reflected, the maintenance of belief in both the divine and in the justness of remaking an oppressive, violent, unequal world through nonviolent activism in accordance with his understanding of the teachings of the King James scriptures that he read throughout his life. This study of comedy uses one African American male's production of irreverent, authoritative religious rhetoric to display a noteworthy mode of mid-century African American religious liberalism. It is also a case study highlighting the complexity of religious belief and affiliation. Despite acknowledged ambivalences about his commitments to religion, Gregory also modeled ways for audiences to reframe religious commitments to produce social change.
I am grateful to the following scholars and organizations for inviting me to present draft versions and content from this article: the African and African American Studies Workshop at Dartmouth College; Terrence Johnson and the Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop at Georgetown University; Leslie Ribovich, Wallace Best, and the Afro-American Religious History Unit at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion; and M. Cooper Harriss, Charles McCrary, and Andrew Walker-Cornetta at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
1 Gregory, Dick, From the Back of the Bus (New York: Avon Books, 1962), 86Google Scholar.
2 Dick Gregory, “Moral Force,” track A5 on Dick Gregory at Kent State, Poppy, PYS 5600, 1971, vinyl LP.
3 Gregory, Dick, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, with Commentary, ed. McGraw, James R. (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), 157–58Google Scholar.
4 Gregory, Dick and Moses, Shelia P., Callus on My Soul: A Memoir (New York: Kensington, 2000), vGoogle Scholar.
5 According to Gregory, by 1971, he was speaking at “more than three hundred college and university campuses each year.” See Gregory, Dick, No More Lies: The Myth and the Reality of American History, ed. McGraw, James R. (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer, 1971), xxGoogle Scholar.
6 Booker, Vaughn A., “‘Pulpit and Pew’: African American Humor on Irreverent Religious Participation in John H. Johnson's Negro Digest, 1943–1950,” Journal of Africana Religions 8, no. 1 (2020): 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Best, Wallace, Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He quotes Leigh Schmidt, E., Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 11Google Scholar.
8 Sorett, Josef, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 26–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sorett offers a further explication of African American religious liberalism in Jim Crow America that begins with Black subjects who opted to engage with, and thereby signify on, religious traditions: “As Barbara Johnson has argued, ‘To be a subject means to activate the network of discourse from where one stands. . . . To be a subject also means to take nourishment from more than one source, to construct a new synthesis.’ So for persons who were racial subjects in Jim Crow America, the aim was also to insert themselves into the master narrative by embracing the inclusive ethics of religious liberalism.” Sorett states that his aim is “to highlight the tradition within black communities of reconfiguring the master tropes of American religion—what might be called ‘signifying.’” See Sorett, Josef, “‘We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow’: Racial Ecumenism and Religious Liberalism in the Harlem Renaissance,” in American Religious Liberalism, ed. Schmidt, Leigh E. and Promey, Sally M. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 196–97Google Scholar.
9 Best, Langston's Salvation, 22.
10 Ethel Patricia Harris, “An Afrocentric View of the Rhetoric of Dick Gregory” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1982), 141, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1487175951040128&disposition=inline.
11 Thurman, Howard, Meditations of the Heart (Boston: Beacon, [1953] 1981), 73–74Google Scholar. Thurman explains on page 73, “Humor may not be laughter, it may not even be a smile; it is primarily a point of view, an attitude toward experience—a tangent. It requires a certain quality of objectivity—the inspired ability to step aside and see one's self go by. To take in the total view is to establish perspective, and many things fall into place. What is extra, what does not belong, becomes the source of the overtone, the chuckle that restores the balance. There is nothing superficial here; there is no cruelty, as is indicated when humor becomes a weapon to embarrass and attack persons. True humor is a weapon, but it is used creatively when it is held firmly in the hands of a man who uses it against himself and his own antics. All the gods of depression, gloom and melancholy must shriek with alarm when there rings down the corridor the merry music of the humorous spirit. It means that fear is in rout, that there is deep understanding of the process of life and an expansive faith which advises the spirits that, because life is its own restraint, life can be trusted.”
12 Gregory and Moses, Callus on My Soul, 233.
13 Baldwin, Lewis V., Behind the Public Veil: The Humanness of Martin Luther King Jr. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2016), 260, 317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Booker, “Pulpit and Pew,” 28.
15 Tucker, Terrence T., Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 95, 97Google Scholar.
16 Carpio, Glenda R., Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20–21Google Scholar.
17 Haggins, Bambi, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 15Google Scholar. This depiction aligns with Mel Watkins's description of Gregory as a stand-up comic: “Gregory had devised a stand-up persona that cast him as a patient, self-assured ironist, capable of dispensing witticisms about racial relationships with cool detachment. His monologues mirrored the bitingly satiric perceptions of the most alienated segment of black America but, because they were delivered deftly and without rancor, were not perceived as obloquy. Sophisticated, aloof, and seemingly observing from a viewpoint of amused neutrality, he was able to introduce into integrated settings a racial satire that, while more aggressive than that of his predecessors, was clearly more palatable to white Americans.” Watkins, Mel, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 498Google Scholar.
18 Tucker, Furiously Funny, 105.
19 Brink, William and Harris, Louis, The Negro Revolution in America: What Negroes Want; Why and How They Are Fighting; Whom They Support; What Whites Think of Them and Their Demands (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 243, 245,121–22, 179Google Scholar.
20 This opposition to killing animals led to Gregory's activism with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as well as his promotion of meatless diets. See Gregory, Callus on My Soul, 111–12. In his discussion of Jesus casting the unclean spirits from a man into a herd of pigs, found in Matthew 8:28–34, Mark 5:1–17, and Luke 8:26–37, Gregory refrained from maligning these animals because they were “innocent and neutral” until they underwent demonic possession. For Gregory, “the unhealthy and improper food people shove into themselves feeds (or more properly creates) the evil spirits inside them,” producing unclean minds, attitudes, and behavior. Gregory implied a connection between proper diets and the practice of nonviolence, claiming that “an improper diet, feeding the unclean spirits, causes attitudes of violence, hostility toward one's self and to others, wars, racism, and so on.” See Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 162.
21 See Kyle Swenson, “J. Edgar Hoover Saw Dick Gregory as a Threat. So He Schemed to Have the Mafia ‘Neutralize’ the Comic,” Washington Post, August 22, 2017, accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/22/j-edgar-hoover-saw-dick-gregory-as-a-threat-so-he-schemed-to-have-the-mafia-neutralize-the-comic/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.29a16d79ec83; and Rob Warden, “Files Show Hoover Sought to ‘Neutralize’ Black,” Washington Post, March 10, 1978, accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/03/10/files-show-hoover-sought-to-neutralize-black/f9850070-d1ea-4f34-8b23-2756de0cf402/?utm_term=.1f2277f6435f. For a comprehensive study of Hoover and the FBI's relationship with civil rights religious activists, see Martin, Lerone, “Bureau Clergyman: How the FBI Colluded with an African American Televangelist to Destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 28, no. 1 (2018): 1–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Krefting, Rebecca, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 36–37Google Scholar; Tucker, Furiously Funny, 109. Tucker continues on 109, “Where Nigger contained the affability that made Gregory beloved by audiences, and No More Lies demonstrated the unrestrained rage that forced him to leave the stage, Up from Nigger (1976) attempts to blend the two sides of Gregory's life.”
23 Krefting, All Joking Aside, 45, 40. Krefting's periodization of influential “charged comics” ranges from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, with Mort Sahl as its inaugural stand-up humorist. Krefting writes, “Revered and reviled alike, charged comics performing during this time like Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Robin Tyler, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor used the stage to promote social justice (some still do). . . . They performed during a time when audiences were increasingly hospitable to critiques of institutionalized inequality, particularly around indices of race and ethnicity. Public support for these critiques allowed charged comics more opportunities for achieving mainstream status.” Krefting, All Joking Aside, 37.
24 What's Happening? (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965) was Gregory's humor book with Bob Orben and Jim Sanders during his movement activism. It contained critical religious humor focused on an Uncle Tom preacher (one of several character portraits by Gregory), capital punishment via a clergyman with a prisoner on death row, antiblack violence as sin, and Gregory giving up nonviolence for Lent.
25 “Tenth Book By Gregory Deals with Bible Tales,” JET, December 26, 1974, 55.
26 Mary Rourke, “Malcolm Boyd Dies at 91: Episcopal Priest Took Prayer to the Streets,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2015, accessed April 21, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-malcolm-boyd-20150228-story.html.
27 Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm Boyd, and Harvey Cox's blurbs for Dick Gregory's Bible Tales are printed in the hardcover back sleeve of Gregory and McGraw, James R., Up from Nigger (New York: Stein and Day, 1976)Google Scholar.
28 Montgomery, Robert P., “An Evening with God, by Renewal Magazine in celebration of the Pentecost,” Theology Today 24, no. 3 (October 1, 1967): 396–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Beyond Gregory, Boyd, and Cox, participants included Paul Krassner (b. 1932), Timothy Leary (1920–1996), and Len Chandler (b. 1935).
29 Stein and Day, the publisher for Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, listed net book sales of 13,658 in December 1975 and 5,275 under the Briar Books reprint thereafter. See Fox v. Commissioner, 80 T.C. 972 (Tax Ct. 1983), accessed May 10, 2020, https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4705876/fox-v-commissioner/.
30 See “Ebony Book Shelf,” Ebony, December 1974, 28; “Publishers’ Listing of Black Books,” Black Scholar 8, no. 2 (October–November 1976): 47; Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1974, accessed April 19, 2018, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dick-gregory/dick-gregorys-bible-tales-with-commentary/.
31 Speech at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, April 27, 1968; from FBI transcript, “Richard Claxton Gregory,” United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 24, 1968, 23.
32 Gregory, Dick and Lipsyte, Robert, Nigger: An Autobiography (New York: Washington Square, 1964), 5–6, 36, 6, 12–13Google Scholar.
33 Gregory, Nigger, 17–18.
34 Gregory, Nigger, 18, 19, 20, 21.
35 Gregory recalled a high school conversation with his mother in which she affirmed an oracle's prophecy over his life. Gregory asks her, “Remember when you took me to that old woman, I was a real little kid, and she said I'd be a great man some day. [sic]” Lucille embraced Gregory and replied, “She saw a star right in the center of your head, and I knew it, oh, how I knew it. You're gonna be a great man, Richard.” Gregory, Nigger, 54.
36 Gregory, Nigger, 23.
37 Gregory, Nigger, 25.
38 Gregory, Dick, “Foreword,” in African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, ed. Watkins, Mel (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2002), xiGoogle Scholar.
39 Gregory, Nigger, 40–41.
40 Gregory, Nigger, 38.
41 Gregory, “Foreword,” p. xii. On the relationship between Gregory's performance style and those of previous black stand-up comics, Watkins writes, “Unlike his precursors, he had not been thoroughly groomed in black circuit stage humor, which requires, among other things, that one be a funny man or a jester in the traditional sense. Less hampered by the baggage of traditional Negro stage images, he more easily assumed the cockier, more self-confident approach of a social satirist.” See Watkins, On the Real Side, 501.
42 Gregory, “Foreword,” xii.
43 Littleton, Darryl, Black Comedians on Black Comedy: How African-Americans Taught Us to Laugh (New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2006), 102Google Scholar. Gregory also authored the introduction to Littleton's book.
44 “Oral History Interview: Dick Gregory,” 41, the Bill Dana Oral History Interview Collection, American Comedy Archives, Emerson College.
45 Spalding wrote, “It is in the context of [a black preacher's] authoritative role that he also becomes the target of the humor and witticisms of his people; for the black man in America has usually been able to see through pretense and bombast, whether his own or anyone else's. As a result, he not only views his pastor as a gifted leader and advisor, but also as a human being who is subject to all the frailties of mortal flesh. It is a practical and quite affectionate outlook, but tolerant only to a point, and it is within that range that a body of humorous folklore—the preacher tale—has evolved.” Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor, ed. Henry D. Spalding (New York: Jonathan David, 1972), 161. The African American folklorist J. Mason Brewer (1896–1975) endorsed and wrote the introduction to Spalding's volume.
46 LaRue, Cleophus J., I Believe I'll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 135Google Scholar.
47 Tucker, Furiously Funny, 97.
48 “Oral History Interview: Dick Gregory,” 56.
49 “Oral History Interview: Dick Gregory,” 56.
50 Martin, Lerone A., Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 93Google Scholar; “‘Bunch of Hypocrites,’ Gregory Tells Churchgoers in Sermon,” JET, October 27, 1966, 24.
51 Gregory, Dick, “Divine Libel,” in Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations, ed. Lecky, Robert S. and Wright, H. Elliott (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 105–6Google Scholar. A version of this anecdote also appears in No More Lies, where Gregory states that “Mr. White Christian rubbed my head for luck” before providing the bread and juice, and he rewrote the punch line as, “So I decided then and there I would have to add Mr. White Christian to my prayer!” Dick Gregory, No More Lies, 41–42. Gregory's FBI files indicate that he developed and repeated this comedic religious anecdote and others while speaking and performing at various churches and college campuses.
52 Gregory, Dick, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” in Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965, ed. Houck, Davis W. and Dixon, David E. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 601–2Google Scholar.
53 For historical studies of “romantic racialism,” see Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)Google Scholar; and Bay, Mia, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For studies of African American racial notions of “redemptive suffering,” see Glaude, Eddie S., , Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Moral Evil and Redemptive Suffering: A History of Theodicy in African-American Religious Thought, ed. Anthony B. Pinn (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); and Azaransky, Sarah, This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Howard-Pitney, David, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990 [2005])Google Scholar.
54 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 605.
55 Hamer, Fannie Lou, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011)Google Scholar, specifically, “I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” speech delivered with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York, December 20, 1964, 57–64; “The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,” speech delivered at a chapter meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967, 70–73; “To Tell It Like It Is,” speech delivered at the Holmes County, Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party Municipal Elections Rally in Lexington, Mississippi, May 8, 1969, 86–93; and “America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,” speech delivered at Loop College, Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 1970, 104–20.
56 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 608, 609.
57 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 610.
58 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 611, 611-12, 613.
59 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 616.
60 Harris, “An Afrocentric View of the Rhetoric of Dick Gregory,” 162–64.
61 See Lane, Mark and Gregory, Dick, Code Name “Zorro”: The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977)Google Scholar; reissued as Lane, Mark and Gregory, Dick, Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
62 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 616.
63 See Wood, Amy Louise, “We Wanted to Be Boosters and Not Knockers: Photography and Antilynching Activism,” in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 179–221Google Scholar; and Goeser, Caroline, “Religion as ‘Power Site of Cultural Resistance,’” in Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 207–45Google Scholar.
64 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 617.
65 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 617. For studies of kneel-in protests, see Haynes, Stephen R., The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lyon, Carter Dalton, Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017)Google Scholar.
66 Gregory, “Speech at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,” 617–18.
67 Gregory, Callus on My Soul, 75.
68 Gregory, Callus on My Soul, 97.
69 Dick Gregory, “Divine Libel,” 106, 107-11, 106, 107.
70 The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is key to many feminist and womanist biblical interpretations. New Testament scholar Clarice J. Martin writes, “A womanist hermeneutics of suspicion questions underlying presuppositions, ethnocentric models and assumptions, and the unarticulated interests of particular contemporary biblical interpretation, thereby exposing ‘hidden’ presuppositions operative in historical-critical methodology. Further, it tests ways in which contemporary biblical interpretation promotes the invisibility and marginality of particular ethnic groups of women and men, and trivializes their theological, ethnic, and sociocultural significance in both the biblical narratives and within larger society.” Martin, Clarice J., “The Acts of the Apostles,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 793Google Scholar. Although Gregory's “suspicious” biblical hermeneutics did not set out to rebut or correct historical-critical biblical scholarship, Martin's definition is productive for contextualizing his humorous criticisms of dominant scriptural interpretations that produced or supported sociocultural marginalization in Western colonial and imperial history.
71 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 148, 167–68.
72 In the acknowledgements for Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, Gregory thanks McGraw and James Sanders, his long-time comedy writing partner.
73 “Let Us Remember: Memoirs—Reverend James ‘Jim’ R. McGraw, December 3, 1935 to May 28, 2012,” New York Annual Conference 2012 Journal, United Methodist Church, 2012, 331, accessed May 10, 2020, from https://www.nyac.com/files/journal/nyac_2012_nyac_journal_section8-letusremember.pdf.
74 Gregory, Dick, The Shadow that Scares Me, ed. McGraw, James R. (New York: Pocket, 1968), 11Google Scholar. The previous year, Gregory signed a contract with Doubleday to write The Sermons I Have Preached, which likely became the content for The Shadow that Scares Me. See “Gregory Writing New Book on His ‘Sermons,’” JET, March 2, 1967, 57.
75 Gregory, The Shadow that Scares Me, 31, 52.
76 James R. McGraw, “Meet the Turkey General,” in Gregory, The Shadow That Scares Me, 13.
77 Gregory, The Shadow that Scares Me, 53, 55.
78 “Ebony Book Shelf,” 28; and “Publishers’ Listing of Black Books,” Black Scholar 8, no. 2 (October–November 1976): 47. For the 1974 dollar conversion, see CPI Inflation Calculator, accessed April 19, 2018, from https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=6.95&year1=197408&year2=201803.
79 Wilcox, Melissa M., Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 168–69Google Scholar. Wilcox defines “serious parody” as “a form of cultural protest in which a disempowered group parodies an oppressive cultural institution while simultaneously claiming for itself what it believes to be an equally good or superior enactment of one or more culturally respected aspects of that same institution.” Wilcox, Queer Nuns, 70. Although Gregory was not addressing a specific Christian denomination in his religious commentary, his biblical commentary was his expressed intent to salvage the nonviolent and socially just teachings of the Hebrew and Christian scriptural texts he said Americans claimed to follow.
80 The Kirkus review of Dick Gregory's Bible Tales questioned Gregory's religious teachings because of his opposition to abortion and his promotion of a fruit-based diet: “Gregory's hip-talking, jive-assed renditions of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Samson and Delilah, etc., are his way of preachin’ and teachin’ to white folks about God's priorities and how people have messed them up. From the examples of biblical folk disobeying the Lord (who frequently comes off like a mean, spiteful, s.o.b.) Gregory extracts neat little moralisms re racial bigotry, pollution of the planet, male chauvinism, Watergate, etc. Consider that forbidden apple in the Garden: ‘Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. If there had been any Black folks in the garden, the serpent would have blamed us.’ That's about as funny as any of this gets. And when Gregory starts pushing ‘fruitarianism’ (fruit is all he eats) and birth control as a genocidal trick directed against Blacks, you do begin to wonder if he's really got as direct a line to the Almighty as he thinks.” Kirkus Reviews, retrieved June 22, 2020, from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/dick-gregory/dick-gregorys-bible-tales-with-commentary/.
81 Evans, James H., We Have Been Believers: An African American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He continues, “It is this sense of being in, but not completely of, a given society that makes social criticism possible. The power of the prophetic tradition in the Bible resides precisely in the marginality—not complete detachment—of the prophet. Further, reading the Bible under these circumstances itself becomes a critical act. Apprehending the biblical message from the vantage point of the oppressed in a society where the Bible has been used as an instrument of oppression is an act of cultural criticism.”
82 Callahan, Allen Dwight, “Reading and Using Scripture in the African American Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Cannon, Katie G. and Pinn, Anthony B. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33Google Scholar.
83 Callahan, Allen Dwight, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 36–37Google Scholar.
84 Callahan, “Reading and Using Scriptures in the African American Tradition,” 34.
85 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 5.
86 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 165–66.
87 In “Divine Libel,” 107-11, Gregory referred to God as “The Boss” and Jesus as “The Boss's Son.”
88 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 158.
89 The story of Noah and the Great Flood (Genesis 6–9) authorized Gregory to incorporate his embrace of numerology into his interpretation of biblical scripture. Because God produced the flood on the seventeenth day of the second month, Gregory noted, “two is the number of the moon, and seventeen converts into eight (1 plus 7). Eight is the number of disaster. Numerologically speaking, the moon that governs the tides and floods brought disaster.” See Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 48.
90 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 150–51.
91 Speech at California State Polytechnic College, San Luis Obispo, California, October 16, 1969, from FBI transcript, “Richard Claxton Gregory,” United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1969, 5.
92 Harris, “An Afrocentric View of the Rhetoric of Dick Gregory,” 141.
93 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 15, 18, 22–23.
94 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 26, 27, 31, 35, 58.
95 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 37–38, 40, 40–41.
96 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 55, 56.
97 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 59–60, 60–61.
98 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 61, 158.
99 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 76–77.
100 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 81.
101 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 85–87.
102 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 107, 103–4.
103 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 114–15.
104 With respect to frequency of prominent names in Bible Tales, “God” appears 425 times, “Jesus” appears 98 times, “Nixon” appears 41 times, and “Holy Spirit” appears 2 times. The phrase “Jesus Christ” does not appear in Bible Tales.
105 Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, 187; Harris, “An Afrocentric View of the Rhetoric of Dick Gregory,” 141.
106 See Cone, James H., God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975), 24Google Scholar; and Hardy, Clarence E. III, “Culture/Cultural Production and African American Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Cannon, Katie G. and Pinn, Anthony B. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–90Google Scholar.
107 It is probable that Cone's firm roots within institutional Protestantism and Gregory's movement beyond Christianity account, in part, for this apparent lack of coordinated action and theological reflection. In the 1980s and beyond, the Marxist-pragmatist Christian public intellectual Cornel West (b. 1953), who followed Cone's emphasis on cultural production in black religious life, became a more frequent and immediate interlocutor with Gregory.
108 Gregory, Dick, Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 132Google Scholar.
109 I am grateful to Laura Levitt for aiding my articulation of this point.
110 Best, Langston's Salvation, 22.
111 Booker, “Pulpit and Pew,” 28.
112 Moses, Shelia P., The Last Mile: Conversations with Dick Gregory (Alexandria, VA: Braxton House, 2019), 95Google Scholar; Angelique Walker-Smith, “Laughter, Faith, and Service: The Life of Dick Gregory,” Christian Recorder, October 1, 2017, accessed May 8, 2020, https://www.thechristianrecorder.com/laughter-faith-and-service-the-life-of-dick-gregory/; Virginia Avniel Spatz, Rereading Exodus: Toward a New Sense of Joint Liberation, songeverday.org, 66, March 2020, accessed May 10, 2020, https://songeveryday.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/rereading-exodus-inter.pdf.
113 “Comedian Mark Gregory: Dick Gregory Homegoing Service,” CAMSR Archives, YouTube, September 17, 2017, accessed April 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqkOxBlwd_Y.
