Freedom in Laughter

Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, and the Civil Rights Movement

Malcolm Frierson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479064, 9781438479071
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyzes the dynamic period in which Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby moved African American professional stand-up comedy from the chitlin' circuit to the mainstream.

In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Frierson moves comedy from the margins to the center of the American Civil Rights Movement. Freedom in Laughter reveals how stand-up comedians Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby used their increasing mainstream success to advance political issues, albeit differently. Frierson first explores Gregory's and Cosby's adolescent experiences in St. Louis and Philadelphia and then juxtaposes the comedians' diverging humor and activism. The fiery Gregory focused on the politics of race, winning him credibility at the expense of his career in the long term, while Cosby focused on the politics of respectability, catapulting him to television and film stardom. Although militant blacks repeatedly questioned Cosby's image, Frierson suggests he and Gregory both carried the aims of the black freedom struggle. With an epilogue that considers the comedians' post–civil rights era trajectories, this book is accessibly written and filled with Gregory's and Cosby's original material, appealing to academics, history buffs, and anyone interested in American popular culture.

Chapter 1

The Green Room

Young Dick Gregory was an easy target for ridicule. He was one of the poorest kids on his St. Louis block, and everyone knew he was without a father in his home. He initially responded to insults by running home and crying, but in time figured out that humor, directed at himself as well as at those who antagonized him, was the most effective tool in confronting his particular social crisis. In his best-selling autobiography from 1964, Nigger, Gregory recalled an exchange in which he was taunted by a neighborhood friend about his father’s perpetual absenteeism:

Hey, Gregory, where’s your daddy these days?

Sure glad that motherfucker’s out the house, got a little peace and quiet. Not like your house, York.

What you say?

Yeah, man, what a free show I had last night, better than the [movie theater], laying in bed with the window open, listening to your Daddy whop your Mommy. That was your Daddy, York, wasn’t it?

When another friend intended to ridicule Gregory’s cramped living space, he employed a less venomous but equally effective approach. To the potentially embarrassing question of just how many siblings he shared a bed with, Gregory replied: “Googobs of kids in my bed, man, when I get up to pee in the middle of the night gotta leave a bookmark so I don’t lose my place.”1 For Gregory, the positive reactions by those around him proved that his mother had been right about there being “freedom in laughter.”2

Young Bill Cosby, born and raised in Philadelphia, encountered similar taunting from peers. Reflecting on his school days in his 1991 book Childhood, Cosby recounted an incident in which a classmate and teacher initiated an embarrassing round of questioning after he wore a community league baseball uniform to school instead of traditional clothing. His odd choice of attire was very likely due to a lack of other clean clothing options, and the baseball uniform garnered twice the negative attention because of its extreme discoloration:

“William,” said my teacher, “does this look like Shibe Park to you?”

“Oh no,” I replied. “This is a school.”

“An excellent answer. So tell me: Why are you wearing a baseball uniform?”

“Gee, I didn’t know I had it on.”

“You mean you put it on by mistake?”

“Yeah, that musta been it.”

And then she stared hard at me. “By the way, what color is that uniform?” To get the answer, I had to look down at myself, for my mother put something in her laundry that kept making the uniform a new color, or two or three; there were times I resembled the Hungarian flag.

“What team you with?” said a boy named Calvin as we were walking out of the classroom. “The Boston Pink Sox?”

Based on these types of interactions, Cosby eventually learned the difference between people laughing at him versus with him. He worked to become a specialist at the latter. By the time he reached Mrs. McKinney’s fifth-grade class, he knew how to maneuver himself into the role of entertainer rather than accept life as the butt of the joke. On the day Mrs. McKinney taught her class the art of storytelling and invited students to share personal stories that would entertain the entire group, Cosby immediately volunteered:

“I got a story about sleepin’ with my brother,” [he] said.

“You always sleep with your brother, William?”

“Well, I get in bed with him, but there ain’t much sleepin’.”

“Fine, you come right up here and see if you can make a good story out of sleeping with your brother.”

Instantly, young Cosby was at the front of the room using comedy to defuse the potentially embarrassing circumstance of sharing a bed with his younger brother:

“I share a bed with my little brother, but he’s not little enough. Y’ see, he keeps touching me an’ I don’t like a bed that feels like a bus. An’ sometimes, he does more than just touch me. He thinks the bed is a boxing ring, but he never goes to a neutral corner.”

The laughter of his classmates pleased Cosby because it had not originated from someone else’s attempt at ridicule. In fact, he credited the “sweet sound” his earliest storytelling induced as the “only vocational guidance I would ever need.”3

Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby had remarkably similar experiences in their childhoods. With respect to race, class, gender, and even particular family dynamics, their lot was the same. Their urban environments, odd jobs, participation in organized sports, educational endeavors, and military experience bore striking parallels. As adolescents, they were separated by little more than geography and a small span of time.

Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory was born October 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Presley and Lucille Gregory. The second of six children in a low-income, single-parent household, he experienced many of the hardships characteristic of urban families in the North. Food was scarce, beds and clothing were shared, and money was claimed by basic necessities. On July 12, 1937, nearly five years after Gregory’s birth, William Henry and Anna Pearl Cosby welcomed William Henry “Bill” Cosby Jr. to the world. Like the Gregorys, the Cosbys were familiar with economic hardship and developed a similar sustenance formula. Public assistance, informal systems of credit, benevolence from friends and neighbors, and income supplements provided by largely absentee fathers helped both households survive adverse circumstances. Both Gregory and Cosby grew up familiar with the difficulty and strain associated with life below the poverty line.

Gregory’s St. Louis was a city that began the twentieth century with great promise. Its Civic League—a coalition of businessmen, politicians, and community leaders—initiated a “City Beautiful” program in the first decade of the twentieth century that soon provided parkways, public playgrounds and baths, a riverside drive, commercial development, and a new civic center. Initially, the improvement projects were inclusive enough to be enjoyed by all St. Louisans, including immigrants and African Americans. The city’s mayor, Rolla Wells, was so proud of the widespread enjoyment that he credited the parks director with having “no caste prejudice,” and he later wrote that the parks initiatives marked the first time the city’s wealthy “mingled with” and showed “conscientious interest” in the poor and their recreational needs.4 But widespread access to the city’s public space accommodations did not translate into interracial harmony, as indicated by the savage race riot that occurred in East St. Louis on July 2, 1917, when white mobs burned, lynched, and shot African Americans in protest over the latter taking jobs vacated by white workers on strike. At least fifty people were killed in the affair known as the “Massacre at East St. Louis,” and the total property damage was estimated at $1.4 million.5

At the time of Gregory’s birth, residential segregation characterized the city. Although a federal judge had issued a permanent injunction in 1918 blocking a city-wide referendum that prevented any person of one race from moving to a block where 75 percent or more of the existing residents were of another race, de facto segregation continued throughout Gregory’s childhood. This separation only intensified after World War I, as European immigration slowed and African Americans from the South migrated northward to answer the call of industries suffering labor shortages. The migrants sought escape from extreme racism and poverty. St. Louis railroad agents and city officials recruited African American laborers from the South with the promise of high wages and decent shelter, but they failed to deliver on both guarantees.6 Nonetheless, the city’s 1920 census reflected the rapid growth of its African American population. From 43,960 in 1910 (6.4 percent of the total population), the number of African Americans in St. Louis rose to 69,854 (9 percent of the total population) by 1920.7 When Gregory was born in 1932, the number of Black St. Louisans had reached 93,580 (11.4 percent of the total population).8

Like many African American women in the North, Lucille, Gregory’s mother, earned a living as a domestic servant for a white family in a far more advantageous economic position. In his autobiography, Gregory recalled wondering just how she and the other African American women who left their neighborhoods at six o’clock each morning to iron, cook, and provide childcare for white people survived the physical and mental strain. He contemplated how his mother must have felt instructing white children to brush their teeth after meals and wash their hands after using the bathroom, while “she could never tell her own kids because there wasn’t water or soap back home.” Gregory knew that his mother was not alone in “wearing sacks over [her] shoes because it was so cold” while walking to and from a white family’s home to help her own family survive.9

The Great Depression made life more difficult for nearly everyone, but St. Louis’s African American population suffered a very severe economic setback. By the spring of 1933, the national unemployment rate was 24.9 percent; African American unemployment/underemployment in St. Louis was estimated at 80 percent (in comparison to roughly 30 percent among whites). Layoffs often concentrated on African American workers, increasing the number of jobs available for whites.10 Coupled with the absence of any regular contributions to the household’s bottom line by Gregory’s father, Presley, the Gregory family suffered from poverty. Yet young Gregory’s mother never allowed morale to sink. “We ain’t poor, we just broke,” Lucille Gregory taught. “Poor is a state of mind you never get out of, but being broke is just a temporary condition.”11

Some of the material on Gregory’s earliest comedy albums reconstructs the difficult circumstances of his childhood years created by the serious financial shortage in his home. When his mother would often refer to a biblical passage explaining that the meek will inherit the earth, young Gregory countered with the idea that the family should finally have a good meal before taking on a responsibility so large! In discussing the limited access to medical care for families such as his without the appropriate finances, Gregory further humored white audiences with a bit about falling ill as a child. Suffering from what he believed was double pneumonia, young Gregory asked his mother if she had called the doctor. When she explained that the goose grease she was applying to his chest would protect his health, young Gregory expressed doubt. If the ointment had any real value, he reasoned, then the goose it came from would not have died!

Because their family was so economically disadvantaged, the Gregory children often wore old and stained clothes. On one occasion, other parents in the neighborhood paid Gregory’s mother a visit to inform her that Dick and his siblings were not acceptable playmates for their children. Embarrassed and disheartened, Gregory’s mother demanded that her children stay home until she could afford to dress them in better clothes. Before leaving the house to work as a domestic in a white home, Mrs. Gregory also took the extreme measure of hiding all of her children’s old clothes in an effort to keep them in the house. Unable to find their regular pants and shirts, young Gregory and his siblings dressed themselves in the only clothing items they could locate in the home—their mother’s dresses, which had been given to her by “the rich white folks.” Gregory recalled the experience in his 1964 autobiography: “The people laughed at us when we went outside in dresses, pointed and slapped their legs. We never played so good as we played that summer, with all those people watching us.”12

Gregory demonstrated how life below the poverty line could be remembered with fondness. One of his favorite errands was going across the street for his mother to pick up grocery items from a store owned by “Mr. Ben,” a white man generous enough to extend credit to Gregory’s mother, albeit with exorbitant interest attached. Gregory discussed a particular visit to the store for a credit purchase of a loaf of bread:

Mr. Ben, mama want a loaf of bread—fresh bread. And you know what kind he gonna give you, because the only kind of bread he buy from the bakery is that three-day old bread that he gets for nothing. At that time, bread was six cents a loaf. And you give him the [credit] book, and he opens it up, and he’s fixing to [write] ninety-six cents, but he stops and he looks at you.

He say: Hey, lil Greg! I say: Yeah, Mr. Ben?

He say: How you like school? I say: I like it.

How you like math? I say: Oh, I love it!

What’s two and two? I say: Four.

Four and four? [I say:] Eight.

Fifty and fifty? [I say:] A hundred.

You’re smart, huh?

So instead of [writing] ninety-six cents, he put forty-four cents down there. Now I’m mad, but it doesn’t do me no good to get mad, because I know the minute I go home and say, Mom, Mr. Ben charged us forty-four cents for a six-cents loaf of bread, I know what she’s gonna say. Oh, he forgot to mark something down last week.

But I didn’t care about Mr. Ben putting forty-four cents down for a six-cents loaf of bread, because what he didn’t realize is, when he went to get the loaf of bread, I wiped him out!13

If taken literally, it is easy to identify a young, militant Gregory outsmarting a white merchant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Humor Matters
• Chapter 1 The Green Room
• Chapter 2 Coming to the Stage
• Chapter 3 All of the Lights
• Chapter 4 Black Comedy, Black Power
• Chapter 5 Edutainment
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover