Race Relations

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 4

Race Relations

Nigger. By Dick Gregory with Robert Lipsyte. Allen and Unwin. 224 pp. This is the story of Dick Gregory, welfare case, star athlete, hit comedian and civil rights campaigner. It

conveys something of what it means to be a Negro in the United States under a system in which a white man can destroy the self-respect of a black man with the single word—Nigger. These reminiscences of a ghetto child who made good do much to explain why the Negro quarters of American cities on occasion explode in violence. Dick Gregory grew up in St. Louis. The family was on ! relief, the father was absentee and the mother heroic. As his mother explained, they were not poor but broke, a purely temporary condition. A tremendous determination to crash a system designed to keep him down in the mud, carried Dick Gregory through high school and college as a record-breaking athlete. Athletics was not a recreation; he could not afford such luxuries; it was a means to an end.

Early in life Dick Gregory had learned to fight back with jokes rather than with his fists. Drafted into the Army he ended up in the Special Services entertaining the troops with commentaries upon camp life. He told them how the Army charged him eighty-five dollars when he lost his rifle—“ That is why in the Navy the captain always goes down with his ship.” After a long and bitter struggle for recognition, Dick Gregory became one of America’s top entertainers. Dick Gregory has already achieved a great deal but he has a further ambition —to be an American citizen, firstclass. He wants respect, dignity and freedom. For these he has marched with colleagues of the civil rights organisations—Selma, Greenwood, Chester, Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, he knows them all—and for these he has gone to prison. “When we’re through,” he declares, “there won’t be any niggers any more.” This is a personal account of the contemporary revolution in race relations in the United States. It is a valuable corrective to those who talk of going slow with desegregation for it shows with painful clarity the way in which segregation demoralises both white and black.