Cosby Speaks

Bill Cosby is taking his message directly to the people.

“A lot of people are misguided, and he’s here to basically show us and tell us where we’re going wrong,” says 16-year-old Christina Griffin, who attended a recent Cosby forum in Atlanta.

Foremost on Dr. Cosby’s agenda is education. He points to the landmark Brown versus Board of Education case and the efforts of African-Americans 50 years ago to bring equality to the classroom. Those elders, Cosby says, valued learning. “They weren’t basketball players. They didn’t run the hundred-yard dash. They didn’t jump the broad jump. They didn’t play football. These black men and women read books.”

Yet today, he says, too many African-Americans devalue education. His supporters agree. Says 18-year-old Janay Smith, “Too often, black children take education for granted because it’s free. What they need to realize is knowledge is power.”

Parental responsibility is also a hot topic for Cosby. “You sit up in there, and you have a child and then you mean to tell me you don’t know how to raise it?” poses Cosby in a rhetorical question, “… cursing at the child, yanking the child by the arm, dragging it all around the place calling it names.”

Critics say the comedian is out of touch with poor and disenfranchised blacks and that he’s airing “dirty laundry.” Others disagree. “It may be ‘dirty laundry’ to some, but when do you clean it up? When do you stop hiding?” asks Brenda Griffin, the mother of a 16-year-old girl.

Clark Kelly, father to a teenage son, echoes Griffin’s sentiments and Dr. Cosby’s for that matter. “I think what he has to say and what he has been saying is a message that’s long overdue,” says Kelly. “I think it needs to be broadcast to children, and I think the number one way you reinforce what you want your children to hear is you participate.”

It’s clear that Dr. Cosby’s message resonates with many. But will those he’s targeting be moved to change? Row land, 16, is a little cynical. “Some will and unfortunately some won’t.”

In the 1960s, Bill Cosby was a trailblazer. While other black comedians of the era focused their routines around race, Cosby told tales of his childhood. He was one of the first African-Americans to star in a TV series, “I Spy,” and received an unprecedented equal billing with his co-star, Robert Culp. He won three Emmys for his performance in “I Spy.” Cosby has also produced several Grammy-winning comedy albums.

The smiling, avuncular commercial spokesman for Jell-O and Coca-Cola is a distant memory. Bill Cosby, who many Americans conceive as the wisecracking tennis coach of “I Spy” or the jokester, stand-up comedian, is now a man on a mission.

The Bill Cosby in today’s media is more reminiscent of the Dr. Huxtable who told his TV son Theo, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it” in an early episode of “The Cosby Show.” The program, which premiered in 1984, was TV’s No. 1 series for many years.

Cosby’s most recent controversy came after he gave a speech at a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation. “People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around. … The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting,” he said, addressing an audience of Washington VIPs.

Defending himself against some critics, Cosby said: “I don’t care what right-wing white people are thinking. … How long you gonna whisper about a smallpox epidemic in your apartment building when bodies are coming out under the sheets?”

• Raised in a poor Philadelphia, Pa., neighborhood, Cosby dropped out of high school as a sophomore and joined the Navy.
• A teacher once called him “a schemer with a high IQ.”
• After serving in the Navy, Cosby earned his GED through correspondence courses.
• He earned an athletic scholarship to Temple University and worked nights as a bartender, where his comedy talent was discovered.
• Cosby earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977. His thesis concerned the use of the “ Fat Albert” series as a teaching aid.
• He has attempted to integrate education with television in many other projects, such as “ Picture Pages,” where he taught children how to draw in a series of shorts aired by PBS.
• Cosby was a regular on “The Captain Kangaroo Show” in the 1980s.
• He is now a leading educational philanthropist.

Cosby’s ire is focused at the African-American community: its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. He says: “This is about little children … and people not giving them better choices. … Talking. Talking. Parenting. Correctly parenting. That’s what it’s about. And you can’t blame other things. You got to — you got to straighten up your house. Straighten up your apartment. Straighten up your child.”

Cosby publicly denounces black communities for having low standards in allowing fatherless, single-parent households, high crime rates, and high illiteracy rates. He further states that it is up to the black community to fix its own problems.

Cosby admits he once lived life on the edge. He says, “What kept me out of trouble is going right to the edge and then … thinking that my mother would be embarrassed, and that I didn’t want to embarrass her, and that my father would be embarrassed, and I just didn’t want to do that to my family.”

As a 67-year-old multimillionaire entertainer old enough to be the crotchety grandfather of today’s teens, he knows it’s going to be hard to make people listen. But he wants to try.

Cosby attempts to motivate his audiences with these messages:

• You can do better.
• Don’t let yourself be victims.
• Don’t let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.

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