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KVOS Special: Dick Gregory

  • [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.