Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

But there is a glare on the comedian's face on 1968's "Richard Pryor" album that seems to say, "I'm here and I'm going to change your thinking about race relations in every way possible."

That's what Pryor, who died Saturday of a heart attack at age 65, did for people all across America in the 1970s, his breakthrough decade and a time when the country was hotly divided not only by the Vietnam War but by the civil rights battles of the 1950s and '60s that preceded it.

He did it by bringing black and white audiences together to laugh as one, at least for the length of a concert or a comedy album, at the madness all around them.

"He was a brilliant and incredibly courageous performer," recalled humorist Paul Krassner, whose magazine "The Realist" once published an essay by the comedian commenting on the disproportionate number of black soldiers that seemed to be fighting the Vietnam War. Pryor headlined it, "Uncle Sam Wants You, Nigger."

It was a word he would use frequently in the 1970s, even using it in the name of his second album as he tried to take the sting out of the epithet by repeating it over and over.

After a visit to Africa in 1980, however, he would renounce it and say he no longer wanted to hear the word, either from his "hip white friends" or his fellow blacks. A subsequent recording was titled "That African-American is Still Crazy," with the offending word crossed out.

Such upfront, no-holds-barred, socially conscious commentary won Pryor the admiration of seemingly every black comic who followed him, an admiration perhaps best summed up by Keenen Ivory Wayans, who once said Pryor demonstrated "you can be black and have a black voice and be successful."