Nation: Yankee, Go Home

Greenwood, Miss., has been roiling with tension and violence ever since last summer, when Negro students from out of town moved in to get a voter-registration drive going. A fire has gutted the students’ headquarters, one Negro has been wounded by a gun blast, 27 have been arrested, and one has been bitten by a police dog. Every day clusters of Negroes march toward the courthouse to register, and every day the police methodically disperse them.

Hoping to dramatize their cause, the student leaders recently appealed for the help of outstanding U.S. Negroes. Into Greenwood last week came Chicago’s Dick Gregory, 30, a nightclub-circuit comedian, whose stock in trade is acidulous (and sometimes funny) commentary on segregation, both Southern and Northern. His performance in Greenwood was enough to make Negroes there wish he had stayed in Chicago. The uninhibited jeers and gibes he aimed at the cops and other whites (“You’re nothing but a bunch of dirty dogs!”) were noisily and embarrassingly out of key with the quiet, deliberately passive tone of the student leaders.

For the most part, the Greenwood police let Gregory yell unmolested. They were plainly wary of tangling with a celebrity. During one demonstration, the police intercepted a band of marchers and systematically hauled them onto a bus to be sent to jail. A cop grabbed Gregory, but Police Commissioner B. A. Hammond instantly rushed in, ordered the man to let go. When all the other Negroes had been stuffed aboard, the bus rolled away, leaving Comedian Gregory standing there all alone.