OCR Text |
Show Gregory Speaks At Conference By J. BAUMAN Chronicle Editorial Assistant At a press conference held Monday Mon-day night in the Ur.'.versity's Union Building, Negro comedian Dick Gregory said he was against the war in Vietnam. "In fact," he said, "I'm against wars period. I was against this one even before most people could spell 'Vietnam.' I think the only honorable solution is to pull out. I think we should put it in the UN's hands. . . "If Democracy is as good as people think it is we don't have to go around jamming it down peoples' peo-ples' throats. Just leave it on the back steps and people'd steal it. Anything that's good you don't have to force on people ask any prostitute." pros-titute." Gregory said he planned to fast between Thanksgiving and Christmas Christ-mas to show his "moral support for the kids protesting the war. I think we've attacked the war the wrong way, though. This country isn't run according to any Constitution, Con-stitution, it's the Capitalists who govern the country. I think that if we could convince everybody who isn't in sympathy with the war to boycott Christmas, the war'd be over in no time. But until we put economic pressure on the Capitalists Capital-ists we won't do any good. People say we need the war for economic reasons; say if we were to pull out of Vietnam tomorrow the Stock Market would collapse well, let it. Hell, we've got fifty states -if you wanted to keep people employed em-ployed all you would have to do is divide the country in two; have the people in twenty-five states blow up balloons all the time and the people in the other twenty-five states bust 'em. I don't feel you have to shoot people to keep the economy up." Moving on to the subject of civil disobedience, Gregory said he felt "Salt Lake City has the potential for being a Newark. Whenever you have a race problem you have the possibility for this kind of violence. It's the beginning of a revolution. You read in the history books about the first American Revolution, one of the most vicious revolutions of modern times. That revolution was fought over a tax on tea. Why 85 per cent of Americans didn't even drink tea. . . I don't see how we can boast about one revolution and frown on another . . . there's a coming revolution now in this country. coun-try. I give it three years. "This revolution is being fought because of a moral problem, not a color problem. This is a fight not of black against white, but of right against wrong. This is an American Ameri-can revolution. The black folks are just the vanguard. We're like an iceberg: you can see a little of it sticking up above the water, but there's a lot more beneath. There were white people involved in the Detroit riots but in three days everybody forgot about white folks out there lootin' and shootin' at po-lice." Gregory said he would not fight in case of full-scale revolution; he said "I'm against all violence; I don't even eat meat. I don't support sup-port revolution at all I don't support sup-port cancer either, but I understand it exists." Asked about charges of Communist Com-munist influence in the Civil Rights and Peace movements, Gregory said the charges were "typical of the insane way we react to problems. prob-lems. Ever since the Civil Rights protests started J. Edgar Hoover has been claiming there are Communists Com-munists around. This country is really silly enough to believe that if a white man has his foot on a black neck for two hundred years, you need an ideology to tell him to take his foot off." When asked to define "Black Power", Gregory told a reporter to "find a white dictionary and look up 'black.' Then look up 'power.' 'pow-er.' It's two simple words Rap Brown uses it a lot because when he started yelling it white folks got scared. Well, if I pick up a stick and you think it's a gun, I'm going to keep it and try to make you keep thinking it's a gun . . . "If you segregate twenty-two million mil-lion roaches you get 'roach power.' If I go to a zoo where all those animals ani-mals are concentrated I feel 'animal 'ani-mal power.' I can walk down the street in the middle of the night and not worry about a gorilla jumping jump-ing on my back but I suspect if I ever get killed by an elephant, it'll happen in a zoo." Gregory announced he was a write-in candidate for the 1968 presidential pres-idential elections. A reporter asked him if he would disavow his candidacy candi-dacy and support New York Governor Gover-nor Rockefeller if he were nominated. nom-inated. Gregory said "I'm not going to support nobody but myself. If God ran I wouldn't support Him. aureate degree, if completed with- |