The program was set for 7 p.m. But by 4:30, several hundred Detroit residents were waiting in the freezing rain, senior citizens in wheelchairs, parents with children, the hopeful and the hopeless huddled in line together. The doors opened early, a nod to the elements, and by 6:30 not a seat remained in the Wayne County Community College building, and there was nowhere to stand either — not even in the three overflow classrooms where folks had squeezed in to watch the event on big screens.
What had drawn 1,900 people was the sheer star power of a 67-year-old comedian who hadn’t come to do comedy. Bill Cosby had come to give a stern lecture — free of charge — about the failures of black parents and black Christians, about how systemic racism can’t explain everything that drags down some African-Americans, about how too many black youths are “standing on the University of the Corner” and too many black adults are poor role models.
He had come to make people think: What are we doing to ourselves?
This was a black-on-black conversation.
“How do you think our children ever got to accept the word ‘pimp’? It’s in our house,” he said. “It’s the mother’s boyfriend.”
Cosby didn’t mean to indict all black people or all low-income blacks or all single mothers and their boyfriends, but nuance is not his specialty. His fastball sometimes comes straight at your head.
To applause and laughter, Cosby did a parody on black politicians who’ve made a cause out of battling sentencing disparities for crack and powdered cocaine offenses. “I’m having a problem, ladies and gentlemen. OK, we even it up, let’s have a big cheer for the white man doing as much time as the black man. Hooray! Anybody see any sense in this? Systemic racism, they call it, that the white man is not doing as much time as the black.”
What we need to do, Cosby added, is tell the crack dealer to stop selling crack.
Detroit was just the latest stop in an extraordinary tough-love tour that had been sweeping the country, playing to packed houses from Newark to Atlanta, Baltimore to Milwaukee.
Then, unexpectedly, Cosby’s traveling town hall show shut down.
Sam Fulwood III, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, was at home at 10:30 p.m. Jan. 19 when he got a distressing call from Cosby spokesman Joel Brokaw, canceling Cosby’s appearance the following night.
Brokaw “sounded really shaken,” observed Fulwood, who was slated to moderate what had been billed as “A Cleveland Conversation With Bill Cosby.”
Brokaw told him a story was about to break out of Philadelphia, “a Kobe Bryant kind of thing,” Fulwood recalls. The next night Philadelphia’s NBC-Ch. 10 reported that a 31-year-old Canadian woman had accused Cosby of sexual misconduct at his suburban Philadelphia mansion. At the time of the alleged incident, in mid-January 2004, the woman was director of operations for the Temple University women’s basketball program. She had been recruited by coach Dawn Staley, a close friend of Cosby’s.
The woman told the following story to authorities:
She’d been out to dinner with Cosby and mutual friends and was invited alone to come back to his place. After she complained of stress, Cosby gave her some pills — “herbal medication,” he said — that made her dizzy. Though her memory is hazy, she remembers Cosby touching her breast and placing her hand on his genitals. She awoke at 4 a.m. to find her clothing in disarray and her bra undone. She then drove herself home. [The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post don’t generally publish the names of alleged victims of sexual assault without their consent.]
After investigation, Montgomery County, Pa., District Atty. Bruce Castor Jr. announced last week that he had found “insufficient credible and admissible evidence” to file charges against Cosby. The complainant’s attorney, Dolores Troiani, has said her client will file a civil suit against Cosby.
Cosby’s Philadelphia attorney, Walter Phillips Jr., called the allegations “utterly preposterous” and “pointedly bizarre.” But neither Phillips nor other Cosby spokesmen would comment on news reports that Cosby had acknowledged to authorities that he had “consensual” sexual contact with the woman that night.
While the Pennsylvania investigation was unfolding, a 57-year-old California attorney alleged a similar incident in the 1970s when she was a model and aspiring entertainer. Tamara Green, who wanted her identity known, said she had been ill at a restaurant and Cosby gave her what he said was Contac, which only made her feel worse. After driving her back to her apartment, Green alleged, Cosby started taking off her clothes and dropped his pants before she scared him off. Cosby, through a spokesman, said he doesn’t know Green.
Green said she came forward after so long to support the Canadian woman, who she felt was being viewed with skepticism. “I’m not suing him for money,” she says. “I would have waited my natural life if he hadn’t drugged another person. It’s not about me. It’s that women are not listened to.”
Confusing events
Discussion of Cosby these days can be confusing.
In 1997, Cosby admitted to an affair with the mother of Autumn Jackson, then 22, who claimed to be his out-of-wedlock daughter and who was sentenced to 26 months for trying to extort $40 million from the entertainer. During her trial, Cosby acknowledged paying $100,000 over the years to support the mother and her daughter, even though he doubted he was Jackson’s father. He agreed to a paternity test; Jackson refused.
Now the most recent accusations against him have become intertwined with his stalled community crusade.
“It certainly puts a damper on the kinds of things he was saying,” says Leonard Haynes III, a longtime educator who was once acting president of Grambling State University. Haynes says he was surprised Cosby would find himself in this predicament and disappointed “because it comes at a time when the public comments he’d been making about the state of the black community were resonating.”
“In the barbershops and beauty shops, even in the churches,” Haynes says, “everybody was talking about this thing. `Did you hear what Cosby said?’ Now the question is: Where do we go from here?”
After initially canceling several concert performances, Cosby has returned to his paid gigs. But he has yet to resume his campaign for personal responsibility.
“There was almost palpable citywide disappointment” when Cosby canceled his Cleveland appearance, says columnist Fulwood, who heard from “a lot of people — blacks and whites — who thought it was a setup to silence Cosby.”
Some whites, who were happy to see an African-American celebrity blame blacks for their own social dysfunction, figured there must be a conspiracy to stop this kind of truth-telling. And some blacks figured it was part of the same old pattern, another black icon brought down.
It was last May, at a 50th anniversary celebration of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision at Constitution Hall in Washington, that Cosby had something he wanted to get off his chest.
In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. … I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? … And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? ….
Five or six different children, same woman, eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. ….
The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing. Fifty percent drop out, rest of them in prison. ….
Waiting backstage to speak was Ted Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which co-sponsored the evening. Shaw admired Cosby who, with his wife of 40 years, Camille, has a distinguished record of philanthropy to African-American causes and organizations, including Shaw’s. So Shaw wasn’t looking for a fight. Still, he was bothered. When he took the stage, Shaw responded, saying that while he believed in personal responsibility, not all wounds are self-inflicted.
“My grandmother was a single black woman who did domestic work,” Shaw said later in an interview. “She struggled and did the best she could. My concern was it sounded like an attack on all black poor people.”
The two spoke later by phone. Cosby assured him it was not his intention to tarnish all poor blacks, and Shaw let Cosby know he had not been careful enough.
Shaw agrees Cosby is onto something but believes that what he’s onto is more complex than Cosby has articulated.
“There already is a class divide in the African-American community,” Shaw says, “and we should be conscious of how we talk about these issues. Not that we shouldn’t talk about them.”
After the controversy generated by his Constitution Hall remarks, Cosby began refining his words.
Retooled message
When Cosby later spoke at a Congressional Black Caucus public forum, some noticed he had retooled his message. Day and night, he became available for wide-ranging conversations, sometimes talking for hours with interested parties — columnists, activists, educators. In a Washington radio call-in show last fall with D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey, Cosby acknowledged being too sweeping with some of his observations and not careful enough with others.
Referring to his Constitution Hall judgments, Cosby said: “The mistake that was made by me was to say, `I’m afraid the lower-economic people are not holding up their end.'”
Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, is one of those who helped Cosby improve his presentation. “He was misreading how the statistics should be presented,” says Poussaint, a close friend and consultant on “The Cosby Show.” Cosby often speaks anecdotally, tells stories and improvises to connect emotionally with his audience, Poussaint says.
“He meant to wake people up and say, `We’ve got to do something for the sake of our children. It’s much more awful than you suspect.'”
Another motivation, Poussaint suggests, may have been the tragic death of his only son, Ennis, in January 1997. Ennis, 27, was shot by a Ukrainian immigrant as he was changing a flat tire in Los Angeles.
“The event was devastating, just devastating, as you might imagine,” Poussaint says. “And I still think it is.”
It is Poussaint’s view that there were too many demands for town hall meetings and inevitably Cosby would have burned out.
“I mean, this was going to become his career? I don’t think so,” Poussaint said. “I think he felt a responsibility to continue something he started. He wanted to let people know he cared and would meet with them. So he was being a leader in a way he hadn’t before.”
Nearly eight months after his Constitution Hall remarks, Cosby flew to Detroit by private jet, and the city was waiting.
Onstage was Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and representatives from community organizations addressing issues from illiteracy to gang violence. Actor-director Robert Townsend and TV judge Glenda Hatchett spoke. There was moving testimony from a former drug dealer, and inspiring words from a Swarthmore College student.
After more than two hours, it was Cosby’s turn.
He spoke about saving children. He dissed the “poverty pimps” in the black community. He didn’t mince words. To Detroit: “You’ve got a reputation and it stinks,” Cosby said, referring to the city’s lingering reputation for high violent-crime rates. “It’s not all of you, no. I’m not talking about all of you. I’m talking about 55 percent, 70 percent.” And since Detroit is more than 80 percent black, he noted, it can’t be the white man’s fault, he said.
“It’s not what he’s doing to you, it’s what you’re not doing.”
There were no groans, no rejoinders from the crowd. They laughed at every punch line, and grew strangely silent when the comedian turned serious.
The program went on so long the audience never got to ask questions. And some in Detroit are now wondering the same thing they’re wondering in other cities: When will we see you again?
Will we ever see you again?
