“quick-forward to the summer of 1973,” Christian explains. “They packed up the entire family and migrated to Plymouth.”
For a couple of decades, the former Chicagoan and his wife raised their large family at Tower Hill Farm in Plymouth.
“It was a wonderful place to call home,” says Christian. “Entirely too beautiful a place for me to tear it up the way I did when I was a kid,” he adds with a laugh.
On Monday, he and his family will take part in a private ceremony to commemorate the town of Plymouth’s official proclamation naming Nov. 24 “Lillian and Dick Gregory Day.” The honor was announced at another ceremony in September, when Plymouth was designated an International City of Peace.
Christian Gregory lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where his late father spent a lot of time in his later years. He was Dick’s road manager until his father’s death in 2017 at age 84.
Lillian Gregory still lives in Plymouth, in the care of her daughter Paula. Other Gregory children are scattered: Miss Gregory is a bureau chief in the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Ayanna is a stage performer who will enact segments of her one-woman play, “Daughter of the Struggle,” for the invited guests on Monday.
The siblings say they’re committed to carrying on the legacy of social justice that their mother and father instilled in them. Accolades are nice, but “that’s not what being a Gregory is about,” as Christian said on a recent video call.
Life in Plymouth was memorable, but it wasn’t perfect, said Ayanna.
“I couldn’t count how many times I was called [the N-word],” she said. “We were steeped in a culture that felt whiteness is the center.
“You have to look at the fact that ‘America’s Hometown’ wasn’t a hometown for Black people,” she said.
Yet there were plenty of times, the siblings say, when the town rallied around Dick Gregory’s global rights campaigns. The Gregorys taught their children to call out acts of injustice whenever they encountered them.
“In the name of love and transformation, he was going to get in your face to expose your hypocrisy,” Ayanna recalled about her father, and he was “gonna walk with you so we can all get it right together.”
A few years ago the Gregorys were honored with a plaque on one of the walls at the Peace Memorial Park, the public art garden in Sherborn. Lewis Randa, who established the park in 1994 as part of the Peace Abbey, petitioned Plymouth’s select board to honor the Gregorys.
Next, he said, he’s hoping to convince the town to rename a prominent square “Gregory Park.” The surname, he said, means “vigilance and watchfulness.”
It was Gregory’s widely publicized hunger strikes during the 1960s that led Randa to his own path, he said. While in boot camp, hoping to join the National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam, he became a conscientious objector.
In order to get discharged, he staged a hunger strike. In 1972 he and his wife, Meg, established the Life Experience School, a program for young adults with developmental disabilities, as his alternative service. That work eventually led to the 1988 founding of the Peace Abbey.
“I don’t know if there would be a Peace Abbey” without Gregory’s inspiration, Randa said. “I was looking for a way to be empowered.”
Though he never met the man, he traveled to Gregory’s memorial service in Maryland. The children of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Richard Pryor all spoke. The actor Joe Morton, who played Gregory in the one-man play “Turn Me Loose” (2016), was in attendance. Stevie Wonder performed.
“Muhammad Ali, Bill Cosby, and Dave Chappelle all bought farms because of Dick Gregory’s farm,” said Christian. “I always say my dad was the original social media influencer, long before social media.”
For his sister Miss, the Gregorys “lived this weird life” in Plymouth.
“Our father was somebody our classmates would see on TV,” she said. The family, she said, was always out on the town, “and there were a billion of us. People knew who we were.
“We were raised by these two people who were letting us know we were living a very privileged life, but it didn’t always look like that. We knew the world awaits.”
Their mother never sought the limelight, Miss said.
“Just seeing the respect she got by being a respectful person,” said Miss, who advocates for victims in the Brooklyn DA’s office, “that really informs my daily work.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
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