They all had a good laugh Gregory says but it wasn’t funny to me

“They all had a good laugh,” Gregory says, “but it wasn’t funny to me.”Looking back on his life, with such incidents in mind, does he feel as if he’s failed?”Failed?” Gregory replies “God, no I wanted to be free I patterned myself after people I thought were free. In my opinion nothing that happened in Mississippi, say, was a failure We marched We were beaten People died, but we did not fail. Who would ever have believed that Malcolm X’s face would be on a US stamp? Or that – as we sit here together at the same table – the head of the Mississippi State Troopers is a black man? Who could have seen that coming?”Gregory pauses.”I’ll tell you who saw it coming They did The redneck sheriffs and the KKK. Never before in the history of this planet has anyone made the progress in a 40- year period that African-Americans have achieved in America. Mississippi has more elected black officials than any other state Mississippi has 61 black mayors Failed?” He smiles. “To some degree, I think they got to him.”As recently as 1992, a St Louis patrolman, in a widely publicised incident, unsuccessfully tried to frame the campaigner for shoplifting, motivated not by his controversial past – he didn’t recognise his prisoner – but by his attitude when hailed as “boy”.When Gregory was brought in to the station, the black desk clerk greeted his arresting officer with the words: “Boy, have you fucked up this time.”He was immediately released. That said, I don’t think it would be too unkind to describe this remarkable man as eccentric.”Dick was under such so much pressure for so long,” one leading black American comedian told me, off the record.

On his website, he maintains that Michael Jackson is the innocent victim of a racially motivated campaign.Why is he carrying the toothpaste packet?Gregory points to the small print, which includes the advice: “If ingested, call the poison control centre.”"How many people,” he asks me, “do you think notice that?”There’s no question that Gregory – unlike, say, the singer Paul Robeson – has survived his struggle with his sanity intact. Gregory picks up the picture and points out a mark on the skull.”He died from that bullet hole, right there.”He is readier than most to see the hand of the state in other tragedies, including the deaths of John Lennon and Lenny Bruce.”You know what I’ve learnt?” he says. “That they don’t like nobody that bugs them.”Gregory, who has a tendency to become powerfully attached to certain beliefs and theories, gave a radio interview after 9/11 in which he seemed to imply that the collapse of the World Trade Centre was caused by explosives planted at the base of the buildings. They include the cases of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – the last of which inspired Gregory’s book Murder in Memphis.

The battered corpse in the photograph he’s brought along is that of Ron Brown, the first black Secretary of State for Commerce, reported as having died in a plane crash in Bosnia, in 1998. Which is not to say that the legacy of his endurance has been solely positive. The years of unwarranted imprisonment, death threats and beatings, have instilled in him a level of prudence which some might consider pathological. He is guarded about his movements, and still considers himself a possible target for assassination.I’ve brought along the sleeve from one of his old comedy albums, which I ask him to sign for my son, but he says he won’t dedicate anything in writing, even to a first name, on the grounds that his signature could somehow be used against him.”He’s only seven,” I tell him.He signs it, instead: “To you.”He has immersed himself in the detail of assassinations in which government complicity is suspected or proven.