A young and frankly angry Bill Cosby is the host and narrator for an eye- opening documentary from Xenon Home Video that first appeared on CBS years ago, probably in the late 1960s or early `70s to judge by Cosby`s wardrobe.
”Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed” (60 minutes, $19.95) is a serious-minded attempt to raise the awareness of black contributions to the building of the United States.
Cosby, speaking from an urban classroom populated by a rainbow cross-section of elementary students, is not the warm and smiling dad from ”The Cosby Show.”
In his ”Shaft”-era leather coat and mild Afro hairstyle, he looks at the camera with grim purpose as he reels off an account of the Establishment`s neglect of black history. But like Cosby today, this more radical incarnation shows the same concern for children`s well-being and education that has marked all of his TV productions.
The tape is one of a seven-volume collection from Xenon called the Heritage Collector`s Series, which focuses on black history. Other titles include ”Black Like Me,” starring James Whitmore; ”An Amazing Grace,” the only black-produced documentary on Martin Luther King Jr., and ”The Jackie Robinson Story,” with Robinson himself. Inasmuch as February is Black History Month, the collection, which has been on the market for several months, takes on new currency.
From the vantage point of the `90s, much of what ”Lost, Stolen or Strayed” points out is hardly the revelation to white audiences it must have seemed then. The motion picture ”Glory” has paid cinematic tribute to the black Civil War regiments that Cosby mentions here, and it`s well known that black cowboys as well as white roamed the Wild West.
Even at the time this program was produced, Cosby has to go all the way back to a 1943 history text to find a sentence as offensive as this one that described the underpinnings of the Civil War: ”As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its `peculiar institution.` ”
We might excuse the text as being an unenlightened product of the 1940s, but the book in question is ”The Growth of the American Republic,” by the distinguished historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. At another point the book refers to the ”incurably optimistic Negro.”
Cosby asks rhetorically: So what if American history has slighted blacks? And then he answers his own question with comments from child psychologists, who explain the poor self-image that`s common among black schoolchildren. Asked to draw a white person and then oneself, they often produce fully realized white figures but stunted, armless (i.e. powerless) visions of themselves.
At this point the program takes a sudden turn away from the neglect of black achievements to focus on the black image as perpetuated by Hollywood. In silent movies that predate ”The Birth of a Nation” all the way to TV`s
”Amos `n` Andy” (started by white men on radio), Cosby shows us the painfully comic image of the black that was a central part of white filmed entertainment.
The clips of black faces turning white with fright at the sight of a lion, a newsreel that shows a ”darkie” watermelon-eating contest in Georgia and the ”hush my mouth” routines featuring Stepin Fetchit are so patently demeaning as to be almost shocking today.
If nothing else has changed since Cosby made this program, at least the media have broadened their concept of who is in their audience and how minorities can be treated with dignity.
But such awareness evident in public discourse does not mean that the fundamental issues raised in ”Lost, Stolen or Strayed” are outdated. The show is still an education.
