JOE MORTON AS DICK GREGORY IN "TURN ME LOOSE" AND BLACK HEROES

A JOHN LEGEND PRODUCTION

AT THE WALLIS THEATER IN LOS ANGELES,

 ON STAGE UNTIL NOVEMBER 19th 2017

Joe Morton, from performing in THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET to SCANDAL as "Papa Pope" is one of the most outstanding actors of his generation. He is a star of stage, television, and film. And if he ever comes to a stage near you, go see him work on stage.

I didn't know much about Dick Gregory's life, almost nothing to be honest. So I don't know what I was expecting. But TURN ME LOOSE wound up being a mixture of comedy and black history; comedy and perspectives on whiteness; comedy and class consciousness, and a Dick Gregory's biography. I laughed nearly the entire 90 minute show until I wound up crying over a couple of losses he endured, including his friend Medgar Evers

I wound up wishing more black people, especially black men, knew Dick Gregory's story more thoroughly. 

He was a brave man that knew he was born in a position where he would have to sacrifice in order to contribute to black progress. In fact, he and his wife Lillian decided that they would marry and put the Civil Rights Movement, the uplift of black people, before all else....including their own family. Gregory put his life on the line again and again, and was even shot in the leg during a protest.

But you know what meant more to me than him and his life deciding he would put his life in jeopardy to push the Civil Rights Movement forward? Dick Gregory turned down a career making offer.  

When a television executive called him about performing on a famous television show --"The Jack Parr Show" or "Johnny Carson" can't remember which-- when his career was just beginning to take off, he said "no" because the white producers of that television talk show didn't treat black guests with basics of respect. 

I can't imagine 99 out of 100 football, basketball, or baseball players putting one year of their career in jeopardy AFTER they already have millions upon millions in the bank, much less before their career has really begun. 

bell hooks wrote a passage I half remember about the greedy poor among us. She was talking about the greedy poor among all people but she was talking to and for black people in that moment.  And every single time I see NFL players who came from nothing be unable to take a real stand for things like Black Lives Matter, I think of how much social power most black football, basketball, and baseball players are wasting.  

I think of how afraid they are of poverty and how enamored they are of feeling personally powerful due to all the riches and fame they have accumulated. I think of them looking at themselves in the mirror thinking they have lifted the race up because they lifted themselves and their family up. 

The details of Dick Gregory's story doesn't get told that much so I don't know if he was divorced from the trappings of Toxic Masculinity; I mean, he didn't get in other black men's faces about seeking personal power. He didn't seem to put them down for dropping a little change, a few million here or there, in some charity as not being enough to uplift the race. 

So I don't know how Gregory conducted himself as a black man overall. 

I can only hope he's not a variation on Bill Cosby who, even without the rape accusations, dishonored his wife, was deeply color struck, and used his own financial success (based on luck as much as talent as an actor/comedian) to count himself as so far above black others that he put poor and lower-middle class black people down.

But when Dick Gregory was 28 years old, I do know he said "no" to personal riches for a principle. In that moment, he was a hero that black boys should look up to. 

I know this because it's not just rich black men who think of nothing but how much money they bring into the household and how much more important that makes their humanity as compared to wife and children.  Working class and middle class black men do the same thing.

This is one of the themes in August Wilson's play FENCES -- the choice some black men make to make their income, their job, the ability to sex up women, their ability to do anything they want (regardless of who it hurts) as a way to bolster a pseudo-masculinity that they feel has been taken by white men through white supremacy 

...when a true masculinity can't be taken away by anybody.

I hope Dick Gregory was a man to look up to for his entire life. After I do some more reading on black women's history, I'm going to do more reading on Dick Gregory so I can find out. 

TURN ME LOOSE
Producer & Music: John Legend
Subject: Dick Gregory
Actor: Joe Morton

I already know Gregory wasn't perfect and that I didn't agree with him on everything. But I hope Gregory never came to see his personal success as uplifting the black race -- same as when he was 28 -- so young black girls just starting to date can look up to him as a hero too and know what a real black man, who knows he's a man, looks like.

Dick Gregory lived to see this show on Broadway or off Broadway. He died on August 19, 2017 and he was still speaking publicly on race and class earlier that same month. He was married for decades to the same woman and had 10 children.

It seems like he lived a full, well-lived, life. I hope he found God and God found him in the next.


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