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KVOS Special: Dick Gregory
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- [MUSIC PLAYING]
- Welcome to Daily Quiz.
- This is Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and today, we're
- going to find out how high their PDIQ is, Parent's Dental
- IQ, that is.
- Are you ready?
- A baby tooth isn't too important since it eventually falls out.
- Right or wrong?
- You're right.
- Those baby teeth save space for permanent teeth.
- Here's the next question.
- Fluoridation helps prevent tooth decay.
- Right or wrong?
- Right again.
- Fluoridation reduces tooth decay by 60%.
- Ready for the last question?
- A 6-year molar is a baby tooth.
- Right or wrong?
- Right again.
- That permanent 6-year molar should last a lifetime.
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you certainly have a high PDIQ.
- Why?
- I see five good reasons, all with perfect smiles.
- And your prize is a lifetime of dental health
- for you and your children.
- By the way, how's your PDIQ?
- A public service announcement of the American Dental Association
- and this television station.
- Dick, you're described as one of the foremost Negro comedians.
- Is that description fairly accurate,
- or would you rather drop one or other of those two
- phrases, those two words?
- No, I think at one time, it had to be one of the foremost Negro
- comedians.
- But I think now, I rank among the top comedians
- anywhere in the world because of the demand
- that happened for me and because of the uniqueness
- in social satires.
- Not too many comics that would tread out into certain fields.
- But I think the description like it is now could stay,
- but it just haven't been updated, I would say.
- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
- Well, today, for example, in your appearance, say,
- here at The Cave are you out to give people a good laugh?
- Or are you out to make a very definite and very pungent
- point?
- Or is it a combination of the two?
- No.
- It's a combination of, one, wrestling with myself,
- to be honest, with me.
- If I'm honest with me, I got to be honest with the audience.
- Two, I come in here only as an entertainer and only
- to entertain the audience.
- When I go out and demonstrate for social changes,
- I don't go out to tell jokes.
- I happen to be a firm believer of the belief
- that you can't laugh social problems out of existence.
- People like to say this, but we didn't laugh Hitler out
- of existence.
- And the day we find a cure for cancer,
- it won't be through jokes.
- It'll be through hard, sincere work.
- Laughing helps the people create an atmosphere
- to amuse themselves, to take a five minute break.
- But the soldiers on the front line in Vietnam
- today, you probably find your most rich humor pertaining
- to that war over there, which is, for them, to stand up
- on the stage and use the same jokes back here that they
- use over there would be insulting and derogatory.
- But this is the thin line that humor carries.
- And if I worked to a room of 10,000 of the world's biggest
- bigots and won them all over, if I didn't get a laugh,
- I'd be a defeated man.
- Same thing if a minister worked to a room full of sinners
- and won them all over, if they laughed at everything he said,
- he would be a defeated man.
- Well, when I first saw you, which was, I think,
- either two or three years ago at the hungry i in San Francisco,
- this was the time of Birmingham and Bull Connor.
- Your humor then, the monologue which you delivered then,
- was quite different from the one that you deliver now,
- both in terms of racial texture as well as
- your kidding the establishment.
- It's a little different.
- Is this a deliberate change?
- Well--
- Is it a case of just evolving because of current events?
- No.
- One, I'm a better comic today than then.
- I've gone through more.
- I've paid more dues.
- I've spent more money for research.
- I've been around the world to various key spots,
- and I understand certain issues today.
- And of course, my act in Canada is not watered down,
- but there's certain little inside things
- that I don't want to take the chance that
- have not made the papers.
- For instance, if I was in America tonight,
- I would be doing, oh, 10 minutes on the recent transit
- strike in New York City.
- Now being this far west, I don't know how--
- and plus, out of the country--
- I don't know just how that affected the general public.
- If I was in California, I would do less material
- on the transit strike.
- Now what could go worldwide was the blackout in New York City.
- You know beyond a shadow of a doubt this was worldwide
- because it caused a security problem,
- and it's a potential threat to everybody
- on the face of the Earth, a potential inconvenience.
- Whereas a transit strike, half the people in the world
- don't have transit, so this wouldn't affect them anyway.
- So it varies.
- Plus I am a better comic today than I was then.
- You were in the Watts area in Los Angeles during the riots
- there.
- It seems to me you were injured, were you not?
- Yes, I was shot in the leg.
- You were shot in the leg.
- What do you think can come out of that?
- Anything?
- Did it make any point anywhere?
- I don't think it did.
- I think the point that it did made the politicians covered it
- up.
- And I don't think anyone could have actually slept Watts
- and realize the explosive situation,
- realize that this was a normal reaction to people
- who's been oppressed over a long period of time.
- What happened in Watts didn't make the people criminal.
- The conditions that produced a Watts is criminal.
- I think it's no big secret that if this social problem existed
- any place on the face of the Earth today,
- we Americans could solve it.
- We have the know-how.
- We have the honesty when we want it.
- And we have the power.
- We have the finance.
- The fact that we played around with it, to me,
- reminds me of the same path the Romans took before she fell.
- She was too strong to be destroyed from without
- and crumbled from within with little social problems
- at a time when the statesmen had been completely pushed
- to one side in Rome, and the master politicians
- had come to the front.
- And politicians cannot solve this social problem.
- Politicians do more to create a social problem than solve one.
- And the same way that we can solve the Watts situation
- as a social problem is the same way we decided when we found
- out America was running behind the Russians
- in the missile race, we closed the gap, not
- through emotions, not through lying to the public,
- but by sincere effort, by going out,
- buying the best minds money could buy,
- and that way, we closed the missile gap.
- And the only way we're going to solve this social problem now,
- because it's so far out of proportion,
- is by bringing in top minds from all over the world and saying,
- OK, baby, it's no disgrace to have a problem.
- The disgrace is having a problem that can be solved,
- and you refuse to solve it, and you have the facilities
- and the know-how.
- And so I say I don't think we woke up from Watts.
- I think everybody looked at Watts
- as a negative blurb on the Negros
- instead of looking at Watts as an American situation.
- I think the British took the same outlook on George
- Washington and that band of cats he had as America's
- looking at Watts today.
- And had the British realized that this was not mob action.
- You see, five disciplined cops can stop a riot and a mob,
- but Hitler's army couldn't stop a protest.
- This is a legitimate protest that's going on.
- And if we're going to put Watts down,
- then we got to crucify the American history book.
- Because the American history book with George Washington
- told the mother country we weren't going to pay the tax
- and dumped her tea in the water, that was Watts, man.
- What happened in Watts was justified under the Declaration
- of independence.
- We say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident
- that all men are created equal and endowed
- by certain inalienable rights by the Creator.
- And when these rights are destroyed,
- it is your duty to destroy or abolish that government."
- The Declaration of Independence give peoples
- this right that's been oppressed over a long period of time.
- So I think had the British went in and understood
- early Americans, George Washington and them,
- and realized they were dealing with a protest and not a riot,
- we might all, today, in America, have a British accent.
- And it frightens me to think that we
- might make the same mistake that all of the world powers
- have made down through the years.
- Well, and when you went into Watts,
- you went in in an attempt to help,
- and yet, you weren't very successful.
- This brings up the point-- who speaks for the Negro today?
- Oh, it's not a matter of who speaks for the Negro.
- It's not a matter of going in to stop anything.
- I would be out of my mind to go in-- you want
- to stop something, you go to Washington, DC,
- and talk to white folks.
- That's the way you stop it.
- See, I have five kids.
- When my baby starts crying-- if anybody have any kids-- when
- the baby starts crying, if you run to the crib and yell out,
- "shut up," the baby's going to cry louder.
- Oh, I got enough sense just in my own house
- to know you don't run into something after it
- starts to say shut up.
- I went in mainly to review the situation,
- to study the pattern of it, and to ask
- the Negro, what do you want?
- Not to tell him that this is not the way to get it.
- I couldn't tell a man--
- I am nonviolent myself.
- I don't believe in killing nothing, either a fish
- or animal.
- But it's very difficult to go in and scream to a man
- that he can't kill when he's soon to be drafted and sent
- to a foreign country, and laying on some cold dirt,
- shooting at some foreigner that he never met before,
- to guarantee Vietnam instant freedom while his black loved
- ones have to get theirs on the installment plan.
- So I say again, you go to Washington, DC,
- and to the white folks in the power structure
- if you want them to shut up.
- Any time Negroes break through in anything,
- Negro leaders are not given credit for it.
- America's given credit for it.
- When we had the march on Washington,
- it was everything white folks expected out of a good march,
- America was the one that got credit for this.
- If you could have heard the American Information
- Department's tapes that they released on this, why,
- it was just unbelievable.
- And the day is over.
- When something happens, Negro leaders
- are going to get the blame.
- And when it happens good, America gets the blame.
- The problem that exists over there is the American problem.
- And if you stop for one minute and ask yourself, who's
- the white leader in America?
- They have none.
- Who's the Jewish leader?
- Who's the Irish leader?
- Who's the Italian leader?
- Then why in the world are we the only group
- in a big country, the strongest country
- in the world, that got leaders?
- If the leaders was any good for you,
- we wouldn't have none neither.
- And who gave them to us?
- The white press?
- So the true Negro leaders in America
- are unheard of by the masses, which
- is people like Lawrence Landry, Jesse Gray, Stanley Branch.
- These are the people on the local level
- that all of the national figures have to go in and deal with
- to have effective demonstrations.
- The Negroes love Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jim Farmer,
- Jim Forman, because they have always
- had the eloquence to go downtown and ask the white folks
- for our demands.
- But they kept coming back empty-handed.
- Now, I love my Mama.
- And if my mama didn't bring me nothing on Christmas,
- she could justify the first one.
- But don't let me sit through every Christmas,
- and you not bringing me nothing, and when
- you do bring me something, it's short of what
- everybody else is getting.
- I turn against my own mama.
- Let alone a negro, who's not close
- to me but from a national level, and this is what happened.
- And this is where the white power structure
- have made a tremendous mistake, is by putting the Negro
- leaders out on a limb where the things that they bring back
- to the community is far short of what the community wants,
- after the community had listened to them
- for a long period of time.
- And there's going to be more problems of this.
- You see, we have Negroes now flying jets for United
- Airlines, Negro stewardess.
- Hertz and Avis Rental Cars, you see Negroes at the ticket
- counter, in the airlines.
- Thurgood Marshall is Solicitor General.
- Ralph Bunche is in the UN.
- But the type of Negroes that this impress
- wouldn't throw a brick anyway.
- If they didn't have, they ain't going to throw no brick.
- The brick-throwing ghetto brother, man, he
- ain't never heard of Thurgood Marshall.
- Don't know United Airlines exists till they have a wreck.
- And Hertz and Avis don't mean nothing to him.
- He never wanted a white woman.
- He don't want no tremendous education.
- He's been without it for so long,
- he's learned how to survive.
- All he's trying to do is outlive that rat in the bedroom,
- and there's no poverty program to teach him how to do that.
- That's what's going to bring America down to her knees.
- That's the guy we got to go in, and we can't trick him.
- When you go into Watts, and you ask him,
- you say, what do you all want?
- And he say, nuttin.
- Well, "nuttin" not in the dictionary,
- but nuttin in the revolution mean "everything."
- You go to the Negro leaders, they give you a list of stuff.
- We want equal jobs, equal housing, equal schools,
- and a lot of things we forgot to mention.
- That little guy in the ghetto, when he say nuttin,
- he mean everything.
- He ain't bringing you no list.
- You know what he wants.
- Give it to him.
- Only way we going to solve the problem.
- And by blaming these things on Negro leaders, which
- America did, is not going to solve the problem.
- If it weren't for demonstrations,
- country would've gone up in smoke a long time ago.
- It's a simple pattern that the cities where
- we've had mass demonstrations have been the cities that
- haven't blew up.
- And I don't know why white folks all over the world
- can do research, but for some reason,
- they haven't done the research to really find out the angles
- to solve many of the problems.
- And if they knew this, they'd pay.
- They'd finance demonstrations, and get some of their Uncle Tom
- Negroes, and get them a line drawn and get out.
- There's something about demonstration
- that gives the brick-thrower a ray of hope.
- He feels that somebody's really looking after him
- and going to solve his problem.
- Another pattern that seems not only America,
- but the whole world seems to be ignorant of
- is that we never have race riots in the South.
- We blame all the racial--
- everything on Mississippi.
- They never have race riots.
- This is northern products.
- And Watts had never occurred in the South.
- So somebody better go in, and do the research,
- and find out, with all the publicity
- the South has been getting, how come
- they never had a race riot?
- Because they honest.
- They don't hide it.
- And they air it out, and it's not hard to see.
- But in the North, they lie about it,
- and it creates a tremendous bitterness.
- What do you think of the legislation
- which has been passed recently, the Civil Rights
- Act and so forth?
- Is this helping any?
- Is this providing any kind of ray of hope
- to the guy in the ghetto?
- It's not providing too much ray of hope
- because he wants his now.
- If you put a tourniquet around a man's leg,
- it stops the bleeding.
- But if you don't get him to the hospital real soon,
- get the tourniquet off, gangrene's going to set in.
- He's going to die anyway.
- Well, what else along the legislative line do you feel
- will come forth soon?
- Well, there will be plenty of legislation that
- will probably be coming forth.
- I think we'll start getting legislation for the North now.
- Particularly, the Civil Rights legislation
- was aimed predominately at the South.
- And we need legislation that will make the United States
- Constitution work.
- And this is a constitutional problem.
- We were not out demonstrating in Birmingham three years ago
- and on the [INAUDIBLE] streets of America
- for something that didn't exist.
- It would be very unfair if we was
- asking white folks to create something special for us.
- And I think they're very unfair when
- they create something special for us, like a Civil Rights
- bill.
- We didn't march for a '64, '65 legislation.
- We marched for the United States Constitution.
- And if Black America's going to be judged
- under '65 legislation, and White America's
- going to be judged on the United States Constitution,
- that's racial segregation.
- What of America telling us they're
- going to give us a new version of racial segregation?
- Or are they going to do away with it, period?
- And this is the problem that legislation creates.
- You see, if a man's been riding on your back for two weeks,
- and you never tell him to get off, he got a good ride.
- But at the point you turn around and tell him get off your back,
- he might not get off, but he going
- to have a bumpy ride from there on.
- And for 100 years, we've had someone riding on our back,
- we never said anything.
- But now, we've said, asked, very gently, to get off,
- and he's refused to, in a very insulting way.
- He's loosened his grip, and he says,
- boy, let me tell you something.
- I know I'm wrong for riding your back,
- but I can't stop riding your back now,
- and you got to be out of your mind
- to ask me to get off your back after me
- riding your back for 100 years.
- But I won't ride your kids' backs.
- It's going to take a generation for me to get off your back.
- Well, I know he means that, so I'm
- going to head on down to the bridge
- and jump off, because I'd just soon be in the river,
- dead, than to have him riding on my back
- after I told him to get off.
- He didn't even have decency enough
- to say ride on my back for a while, let's swap.
- Same thing.
- No different.
- And if White America had to wake up tomorrow morning
- as black as I am, they'll be fighting soon
- as they open their eyes up because they would get hell
- in the bedroom, man, before they even walked to the kitchen,
- before they even walked outside the house.
- And they wouldn't take it.
- And if they think we can put up with this
- any longer than we have put up with it,
- then they admitting that something's wrong
- with us, some kind of way.
- Either we are inferior or superior, one of the two.
- How bumpy is this ride going to get?
- It's going to be very bumpy, very, very bumpy.
- Because with the war going on in Vietnam now,
- and Negroes going over to Vietnam to fight,
- and when these Negroes come home,
- they have different attitudes.
- You see, we don't have the type of Negroes
- we had during World War II.
- They could lay over in France, and jump out the Jeep and land
- in the gutter when they heard the German planes coming by,
- and didn't know at what time they were going to be killed.
- And the war was over, and the German come over here,
- and we still got to jump out the Jeep
- and get in the gutter to let him by to get the job, and this
- and that, which is no malice to the Germans.
- The malice is showed toward the government
- that could let this, permit this, to happen.
- Well, you've got a different Negro we're dealing with now.
- Negro 20, 30 years ago had an empty stomach.
- Today, the Negro has a full stomach and a hungry mind,
- and a hungry mind do not tolerate the same thing
- as an empty stomach.
- A hungry mind-- Einstein had a hungry mind.
- Empty stomach deals by smell, and a hungry mind
- deals by sound.
- And all of those things don't sound right to us no more.
- This is what's affecting the riot.
- You see, in World War II, when they
- was bringing German prisoners back to America
- to the southern POW camps, the Negro guards,
- when they stopped to eat, the German prisoners
- was permitted to go in the front door of the restaurant and eat,
- and the Negro American soldiers had to go to the back door.
- That can never happen again.
- Charlie Drew-- if you could imagine
- how many millions of people would be dead today
- if it weren't for blood plasma.
- Well, an American Negro by the name of Charlie Drew
- invented blood plasma, and he bled
- to death in a South Carolina hospital waiting room
- because they didn't accept Negroes after he
- was in an automobile accident.
- Now these things are obsolete.
- You got a different Negro that America has to deal with today.
- And she might as well wake up and get
- aware of this, that she's going to have to deal honestly
- and fairly because all the tricks up.
- And as far as us out here at the head of the Civil Rights
- Movement, we don't know where it's going to happen next.
- We can guess.
- I figure Chicago will explode.
- Probably Los Angeles again.
- San Francisco area will probably explode.
- But you're just guessing at it because you
- know what potential trouble spots look like,
- but you have no guarantee about some little, small area.
- And I think when California blew,
- everybody should have been aware that it can happen anywhere,
- because this was the last place that people
- that wasn't informed felt it was going to blow.
- The government knows about it.
- This was evidenced when they released, after the riots,
- that out of 21 cities that they knew
- were potential powder kegs, that the only two cities that
- didn't accept their summer help was Chicago and Los Angeles.
- So I think it's very obvious that certain people
- in certain key position knows what's going on in America.
- For political reasons, they refuse to really
- deal with it honestly.
- Like the McCulloch Report, one of the biggest frauds going.
- He started out pretty good.
- And then again, you sometimes wonder,
- even if they had been honest with it,
- how are you going to say in 101 pages what the Bill of Rights
- said in 1?
- But to look at that McCulloch Report,
- it was a complete, total disgrace,
- and it was a political stick.
- No more, no less.
- And to think that Americans, who are supposed
- to be so intelligent, will end up
- spending over $100,000 for a three-month fraud
- and paid to get it.
- We paid for the aspirin to not cure the headache,
- but fix it so we can't feel it.
- This is all we did.
- You mentioned Chicago as a possible trouble spot.
- Is this the reason that you announced
- that you were interested in running for mayor?
- No.
- This was the reason that we demonstrated,
- to try to hold it back.
- We had a little problem in Chicago,
- but it was because we had so much trouble from the city.
- We found it very difficult to muster Negroes to demonstrate
- because the city of Chicago is so large that in going out
- with the city working against us as hard as they did,
- it was very difficult for us to get effective demonstrations
- in every area.
- So we concentrated on the powder keg,
- which was the South Side of Chicago, which we're still
- going to trials now.
- Kneel down in the street and pray,
- and you're arrested for inciting a riot.
- Cops jumped on me in Chicago and put me
- in the hospital for almost four days.
- And very conveniently, the cop goes to the hospital.
- They end up with assault and battery charges against me,
- and all of this type of stuff that would never
- happen in the South.
- The beauty of a Bull Connor was he came out
- and watched his cops, man.
- When you scream "police brutality,"
- he didn't sit in the ivory tower like our police commissioner
- in Chicago and says, I don't believe it.
- It's not true.
- Bull Connor was in the street, man, and he knew what happened.
- And he would tell you, yeah, I'm going to knock him
- down again tomorrow.
- And nobody likes pain, but physical pain
- is much different from mental pain.
- And what White America sends us through up North
- is mental pain, which runs you crazy, eventually, which
- leads you into mass violence.
- What do you think about Martin Luther King's movement
- to Chicago?
- How do you think that's going to end up?
- I think it's frightening that the city let
- conditions get to the point where Dr. King had to come in.
- I think the second largest city in America
- should have been able to solve the problems without a Dr.
- King having to come in.
- The fact that he's there creates very interesting analysim,
- because the nonviolent movement have never
- been effective up North.
- Matter of fact, this went the other way.
- It gave the Negro a cheap cop-out up North.
- The Negro said, I would have gone to Mississippi with you,
- but I'm too violent.
- He's never had no record for hitting White folks
- or lynching White folks, so he took a cheap cop-out.
- But he's been telling himself for five years
- that the only reason he didn't get involved
- was because he's too violent.
- He's told himself this.
- Now you have created a violent Northern Negro that's
- waiting for a reason to hit.
- And you see, in Selma, Alabama, when we demonstrate in Selma,
- we hold a mass rally.
- Well, you've got 12,000 Negroes at the most live in Selma.
- So if 3,000 come out to the rally,
- you have a fourth of the Negro population
- that you've taught nonviolence to,
- and that fourth can go back and teach it to another fourth.
- And then you hold your next rally, and you get some more.
- Well, in Chicago, we held a rally tonight.
- With a million and a half Negroes,
- we don't have the facilities to house a fourth.
- So in Chicago, if 5,000 people showed up,
- which is a good rally, but what is the percentage of 5,000 out
- of a million and a half?
- And that means your town is not nonviolent.
- And it would take you 20 years to reach a whole town
- without the White folks giving us their communication system.
- Will they give you that system?
- No.
- After we take it, they will.
- I think after Watts broke out, we could have went in
- and held a prayer meeting anywhere
- we wanted to hold it in Los Angeles.
- But in Chicago, we got arrested for holding a prayer meeting.
- So if the riot broke out, they give us the whole town
- to pray in.
- We haven't run short of clean water.
- Yet.
- Oh, some of our cities and towns dump their waste
- into our waters.
- Some of our factories do.
- But there's still time, still enough clean water.
- And it's true that farm chemicals and mine wastes
- are polluting some rivers and streams,
- making some lakes unusable, but there's still
- time, still enough clean water.
- Anyway, we know how to clean up our water, and we must do it,
- so we will.
- Won't we?
- Why, there are people working on the problem right now.
- Waste treatment plants are being built today,
- or being planned, or being talked about.
- But there's still time, still enough clean water.
- Would you help?
- Our supply of clean water is in danger.
- The facts are all in a new booklet.
- Get your copy.
- Write Clean Water, Washington, DC.
- There's still time.