About the Author

A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today's popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Dave Chappelle, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than 50 years. As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing humor with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the civil rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter. He died in 2017.