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December 9, 2004

Cos and effect: Entertainer tackles woes in western Mass.

Trudy Tynan
Associated Press Writer

SPRINGFIELD — Bill Cosby was surrounded and upstaged in Springfield’s Symphony Hall by two-dozen cute first and second graders in pigtails and their Sunday best. Deliberately.

“Ladies and gentlemen this is what we are talking about. These happen to be our redwoods,” Cosby said bending down to the children he had called out of the audience. “We are in charge of bringing them up strong regardless of the winds and the flood. ... We’re in charge.

“Are there any junkies in this crowd? Any drug dealers standing here,” he said pointing to the children on stage while the cheering, clapping audience of 2,000 mostly black parents shouted “No!”

The comedian — who has become known for talking serious and tough about problems faced by blacks, pushing for young people to stay in school and calling for parents “to do more parenting” — was on almost an evangelical roll.

In the six months since making headlines during a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision by accusing some blacks of squandering the opportunities it provided, Cosby has taken his message to “Town Hall” meetings around the county. He’s appeared in Newark, N.J., Milwaukee, Wis., Chicago, Baltimore and Norfolk, Va., and before Congress.

And he says he’s just getting started.

“We’ve gone around and blamed people. That’s not talking,” he said. “Some people say I am being too harsh but we have to turn this around. It’s epidemic. We’ve got to catch these children before they go into the slump. We’ve got to.”

Over the months the delivery has been honed, become less scolding and more inspirational and inclusive with appeals to whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

“All of us are in this together,” he said.

Still, he bluntly told the minority crowd in Springfield: “You are now getting up. The victim game is over.”

“Your children are too important to wait. Stop looking for people to pour money into it,” he said. “Do it yourselves.”

For the man who knows a bit about mean city streets and dropping out school the message had a special resonance here.

“I was almost lost, but I was found. Saved, really,” said Cosby, who moved his family in the late 1960s to rural Shelburne about an hour’s drive north of Springfield when he determined to complete his own education at the University of Massachusetts.

It’s where he quietly raised his own children and where his son, Ennis, who was shot and killed while changing a tire on a Los Angeles freeway in 1997, is buried.

“Education was not number one in my mind,” said Cosby, who grew up in the projects of North Philadelphia. His own father abandoned the family. His mother worked as a cleaning lady. He dropped out of high school to join the Navy and to his mother’s dismay dropped out of Temple University when his career as a standup comic took off.

“At the time, in the late 1960s, I had shows on the major networks and four LPs in the Top 10,” he said. Still, Cosby admitted, he couldn’t get finishing school “out of the back of my mind.”

After a performance at the university, a professor approached him and told him that Dwight Allen, then dean of the School of Education, wanted to talk with him. The subject was how television could be used to aid teachers and family life.

Cosby recalls the discussion, with one of his wry faces, as his first exposure to “an oral dissertation — when Dr. Allen talks, you need a translator.”

Allen saw something else.

“He’s genuinely an intellectual — an educator, who happens to be a comic,” said Allen, who now teaches at Old Dominion University and has remained friends with Cosby.

“At that particular time there was a tremendous glass ceiling for all minorities in all professions,” he said. “Bill had lots of trouble in high school, he never finished college and he was a victim of that syndrome. His self-image was a bit second-rate. Despite his financial and career success, he had a void academically and that was extremely important to him.”

“He came to study,” Allen said. “Anybody who thinks it wasn’t a full rigorous program doesn’t understand either Bill or the program.”

Cosby, who got a waiver from the university to enter the graduate program without a bachelor’s degree, got a masters in education in 1972. And he kept going. Five years later he had his doctorate, also in education. Friends remember the millionaire star carrying his books on the plane and studying as he traveled to performances.

His dissertation was on the use of comedy to systemically combat racism. The title: “The Integration of Visual Media Via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids Into the Elementary Schools Culminating as a Teacher Aid to Achieve Increased Learning.” For a while Cosby thought about becoming a teacher.

But, instead, to the unsuspecting joy of a generation of youngsters, the thesis evolved into a long-running Saturday morning television cartoon series featuring Cosby’s most famous character, Fat Albert, with the tag line “if you’re not careful, you may learn something.”

“It’s a mark of his character that he decided he was not going to just deal with racial prejudice, but all kinds of prejudice,” Allen said. “It’s part of his genius that the hero of his comedy not just black, but fat.”

Despite the recent headlines, Cosby’s activism is nothing new, Allen said. “He uses his wealth and position as nudges for people,” Allen said. “It’s just that we’ve been laughing so hard that we haven’t noticed.”

Cosby has done more than talk here. After reading in The Republican newspaper about two Springfield teens living on their own and making honor roll grades, he agreed to finance their education at Hampton University and that of two friends, including the son of a black couple who had watched over the teens.

Shortly afterward he began meeting with a group of community leaders in this city of 160,000 people, including Sheila Shepard, whose twin sons, 19, were gunned down in separate shootings this summer. And in October he raised $1.5 million for scholarships at the University of Massachusetts with a benefit performance and dinner.

The scholarship program will begin tracking young nominees from schools in western Massachusetts’ poor cities and rural communities in elementary school and provide them with full scholarships at the state university if they are still doing well after high school.

Over the years Cosby and his wife, Camille, have given millions to black colleges and black cultural institutions and hundreds of thousands to schools, cancer research, urban renewal and even earthquake relief following the 1989 California quake.

But until now western Massachusetts and his Franklin County home had been a retreat, a place where he wasn’t on stage.

When asked why he is speaking out here now, Cosby, 67, says children in his adopted home face the same risks as in communities nationwide.

“It’s not just Springfield, or Baltimore or Newark,” he said.

“It’s everywhere,” he said, pointing out that this summer a 14-year-old boy was charged with beating a 16-year-old to death with a baseball bat in the small town of Turners Falls in the first murder in the rural county in two years.

“Yes, there are systemic problems, but I also feel that nobody can control things better than a mother or a father who wants to protect that child — to put the time in,” Cosby said. “I don’t think you can find a tougher person than that person.”

 

 

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