Born in St. Louis in 1932, Gregory ran track for Southern Illinois University in Carbondale on a scholarship, got drafted, and eventually ended up in Chicago, where he became one of the hottest entertainers of the early 1960s. Hugh Hefner of Playboy, which was still headquartered in the Windy City, was a huge fan and helped to massively increase Gregory’s audience. Like Lenny Bruce and other cutting-edge comics of the time, Gregory played with social conventions in a way that was both thrilling and nervous-making. “Segregation is not all bad,” went a characteristic one-liner. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” He was a regular presence at civil rights events during the ’60s, ran for president, authored a popular natural-foods cookbook in 1974, Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature and helped popularize the idea of healthy fasting. “When I look at the obituaries,” he once quipped, “I don’t see no one but all you eaters.”