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CNN Saturday Morning News
Interview With Dick Gregory
Aired February 02, 2002 - 07:48 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: As you know, this is the start of Black History Month, and kicking it off with us here at CNN is a man who has done it all. Dick Gregory was a civil rights leader. He is a comedian, a health and spiritual advocate, a motivational speaker and author, and he is out with a new book. It's "Callous on my Soul," a memoir. He joins us live from St. Louis, where he grew up -- good to have you with us, Mr. Gregory.
DICK GREGORY, COMEDIAN, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Good morning -- God bless you, and shall we say happy Black History Month.
O'BRIEN: Yes. I think we should.
GREGORY: But before we go any further...
O'BRIEN: Yes.
GREGORY: ... let me say I am 70 years old, so when you talk about progress, when I was a youngster, it used to be called Negro History Week.
O'BRIEN: Wow!
GREGORY: Now, it's called Black Month.
O'BRIEN: Good.
GREGORY: Now, wouldn't you know, when they get ready to give us a month, it would be the month of February and all them days missing.
O'BRIEN: Yes, you've got to mark progress wherever you can, right? You know, maybe we'll go for a 31-day month next go round.
GREGORY: Next time.
O'BRIEN: Yes. Your book is very, very compelling and heart- wrenching reading at times.
GREGORY: Yes.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk about your mother for a moment. When you think back on her, there is a passage in here which really struck me. You talk about your mother's difficulties raising all of the children essentially by herself. GREGORY: Yes.
O'BRIEN: And you say: "I thought about mama when I saw Mother Teresa receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Something she said in her speech just touched my soul. When asked why she had helped so many people, she responded, 'You have to love them first.' Somehow that's what your mama did. She loved who were unkind to her and to us. You have to love them first. Yes, that's what mama did. She loved them first."
How did she do that, and what lesson was that for you?
GREGORY: I guess it wasn't a lesson to me. I resented it. It was her church, just her connection to the Baptist Church, her connection to her God, to her Christianity. She believed that. I never understood the power of that until Dr. King and my involvement with the movement, to be in Birmingham and to see the hoses. And remember, when I went there, I am scared. I'm thinking we're going to die. And to look and see the fire hose sweep a 4-year-old child past you, and before you can react to that, you see this white nun being swept past, and then the priest and old black folks, and you see the smiles that keeps saying and we shall overcome. And for some reason, I could see my mother, although she was dead, I could see that smile on her face. I could see her saying, "Richard, don't do that." And...
O'BRIEN: And we all get that.
GREGORY: Yes. And so...
O'BRIEN: You know.
GREGORY: But you know -- but the one thing that I didn't learn from her that I learned from the movement, I thought love was the epitome of where the human spirit could go, and I thought my mother was full of love. And then found out it's not love. It's can you be lovable? And then I realized that mom was lovable. When you talk about turning the other cheek, when you're talking about taking abuse, you have people that's married, particularly men, "I love you, dear. If I can't have you, ain't nobody going to have you." Love is very dangerous if you just have love and don't have the ability to be lovable.
And I think everything I got out of my mother as I look back on her -- remember, my mother was not my hero when I grew up. John Wayne was my hero. John Wayne didn't talk love. John Wayne say "If you're right, they wrong, go get your guns." And so the whole mama, the whole civil rights movement went against the whole grain in my head. I thought you couldn't be cool without a cigarette. You couldn't be cool without a drink. And so I ended up smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, a fifth of Scotch every day. As a matter of fact, my top weight at one time was 365 pounds.
O'BRIEN: Wow! Wow! Well, that's -- you know, we will be remiss if we didn't talk about your father's influence, a negative influence obviously. And he -- well, watching him, the way he treated your mother, and you specifically had this tremendous impact on you. And I got the impression that it is out of his abusive relationship that your comedic career was born. Is that accurate to say?
GREGORY: No, not really.
O'BRIEN: OK.
GREGORY: I guess watching the abuse -- now remember, my father was not home every day.
O'BRIEN: Right.
GREGORY: My father cooked on the railroad, and so we very seldom would see him. But when we would see him, it was always a confrontation with him or us. Now remember, I did not know that this is America. I mean, as we talk now, every four seconds, we have been talking a woman in America has been beat up by her boyfriend or husband, not strangers. And so I never understood, you know, the mentality of sexism. I mean, we were so busy focusing on racism that sexism became very minor.
And so as grew up and as I looked back and started trying to put the pieces together and realizing that this was not unique to my house. And then this whole bit of family values, the problems in the black community, ain't no black man at home, and that's so resentful to a black woman to sit. I mean, Hitler's mother and father was at home. I mean, Prince Charles' mother and father was at home in a palace, and you can't find no more dysfunctional children than those.
And so the burden that we put on women and the negativity we put there, so I came through thinking that oh, my god, if dad was at home, things would be different. And then I have to look back now and realize the beauty, the love that mom brought in the house. And my mother was in love with my father. I mean, that -- I think I resented that more than anything else.
O'BRIEN: Wow!
GREGORY: The way she felt about him regardless of the abuse, and then one day I met him. I met him from a standpoint of a man meeting a man, and I began to like him. And now what do that mean? That means when you get old...
O'BRIEN: You mellow.
GREGORY: ... you change attitudes -- not me, him. You change attitudes. You're not that person you used to be, and I have always believed the part in the Bible when it said "Honor thy mother and father." I used to say if they're honorable. And even now, people say, "No, no, no. If I am your father, and you saw me rape three- year-old children, took an ax and chopped them up, you've got to be a fool to honor me." I think Hitler's children, something had to be wrong with them to honor him.
And so as I've got grown in the civil rights movement and understood what lovable, I never thought I would see the day I could sit here and say to you that I would feel more comfortable being killed by someone than killing a person myself. The one thing I didn't understand about my mother, the love that she had, she still could understand war. And I used to ask her, well, how -- when "Thy shall not kill." And she would just say, "Well, the Bible said there will be wars and rumors of wars."
And so -- but the love that I find now, the love I have found, I realize it was at home with mom.
O'BRIEN: I have got to ask you one final question. I guess it's about 40 years ago now you wrote your first autobiography.
GREGORY: Yes.
O'BRIEN: And this is the second take on it. You are an older and we presume wiser man. As you look back at that book compared to this book, does that mirror the progress you have been talking about in general?
GREGORY: Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another. When you think about where we was 30 years ago compared to where we are now, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, you could lie on black folks to white children. You can't do that now. They see black folks on television. They see black folks anchoring the news, giving the weather. Who would have ever thought when Stokley and them yelled "black power," and everybody got scared.
Last week, you pick up "Newsweek" and see the cover, "The New Black Power," and three black men that heads three of the top corporations in the world. And so that progress -- the No. 1 problem we have now is police brutality, and I don't mean that police are more brutal now than they was 40 years ago. What has changed is black folks' mindset. There's a lot of things we would tolerate 40 or 50 years ago we won't tolerate now. And this is the new issue that we have is dealing worse than the Ku Klux Klan, because if the Ku Klux Klan called me a nigger, I can call them a nigger back. If you pulled a gun out on me, I could snatch the gun. I can't do this to a cop.
And the reason more while folks is not part of this fight of struggle against police, they have never brutalized a black person. They have never seen a black person being brutalized. So some kind of way we have to tell the story of this pain. We have to tell it with love. We have to tell it with kindness, and we have to say we need help.
O'BRIEN: Dick Gregory, always a pleasure hearing from you. We could go on and on I am sure. The book, his latest one, "Callous on my Soul." It's an excellent memoir. I invite you to check it out. And thank you for helping us kick off Black History Month in a very good way.
GREGORY: Thank you, my brother. Peace and love to you.
O'BRIEN: Same to you. Take care. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
