AND COSBIER:

The Lessons of Fat Albert: Hey, hey, hey! A TV cartoon is going to save black America. That was the message of Bill Cosby's doctoral thesis 30 years ago at UMass, a paper that lies at the root of Cosby's rants today (John Ridley, April 8, 2007, Boston Globe)

In May 1977, an unlikely doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst - the man who would a few years later become America's Black Dad - walked across a stage with his familiar smile, shook the hand of chancellor Randolph Bromery, and collected his diploma. And with that, Bill Cosby walked out into the world with a 267-page dissertation that posited an interesting, bold, and ultimately (slightly) controversial way forward for urban education.

Of late, the Cos has been a lightning rod for controversy as much as a source of levity. His views on the failures of some blacks are deemed so extreme that a few in our community have all but excommunicated him from the race. What happened, some wonder, to that rubbery-faced comedian who frequented The Tonight Show? What became of the characters that he transmogrified into the "angry black man" who rarely viewed the world except from behind smoked glasses? What transpired between Cosby then and Cosby now?

Or did anything?

If human nature is a constant, did Bill Cosby simply become more of what he always was?

If there is a source code to the man, it's likely to be found in words, ideas, and ideals he himself had written 30 years ago in that dissertation. And beyond the illumination it offers to those who believe they know Cosby, the operative question going in is: Does the plan he expressed for black America then hold up to scrutiny now?

By the mid-seventies, Bill Cosby already owned a lot of entertainment real estate. Live stand-up and comedy albums. I Spy on NBC. A grip of Emmys. Costarring in a string of movies with Sidney Poitier.

It may seem kinda odd that a guy who pretty much had the world by a string would even bother going after a doctorate, especially one that was earned and not merely awarded. But the Cos has always been passionate about learned minds. A passion he made public in the (very) controversial May 2004 speech/lecture/rant he gave at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., at an NAACP commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. In the speech, Cosby excoriated "lower economic and lower middle economic" blacks for not "holding their end in this deal." "The deal" having been forced on the white majority at the end of the civil rights era: a swap of basic rights for the good citizenry and hard work for which blacks had always displayed the capacity.

Instead, Cosby saw a segment of our race that, despite the gains of the civil rights movement, cherished Ebonics over English. The sporting life over raising the babies they made. Anything and everything over education. This address came to be known as the "Poundcake" speech, derived from the following lines delivered by Cosby:

"Looking at the incarcerated [blacks], these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of poundcake! And then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the poundcake in his hand?"

Though this was met with wild applause from the assembled, in the following weeks the media - always oddly curious when a black man proves himself to be independent of the throwback groupthink - made much hay of how the speech supposedly outraged black America. I have yet to see any actual statistical evidence that a larger portion of black America disagreed with Cosby than agreed with him.

But the media gave disproportionate attention to the whining of the Old Schoolers and Victim Mongers - those who make a good living shilling to other blacks the snake oil of eternal scapegoating and low expectations - rather than giving full examination to the facts of which Cosby spoke: the need for blacks to refocus themselves on the fundamentals of learning.

Cosby himself had come to education in a roundabout way. Born in Philly in 1937, he favored athletics over academics. Repeated the 10th grade. Quit school altogether to hook up with the Navy. He eventually got a GED by correspondence. Entered Temple University on an athletic scholarship, his aspirations set on being a phys-ed teacher.

But, you know, there was stand-up comedy and TV and fame and fortune and all that.

Still, education remained a strong thread in Cosby's life. Enough so that when he could have elected to spend his free time kicking it in Beverly Hills, he instead headed to UMass in 1970 in pursuit of his EdD. He built a house and moved to Massachusetts so he could attend classes, but it became clear early on that Cosby couldn't maintain a regular course schedule because of the mob scene his presence created. An alternative access program was devised where Cosby could study with professors off campus.

"His path was not ordinary," recalls Dwight Allen, dean of UMass's School of Education at the time of Cosby's studies. He is also the coauthor of a book written in 2000 with Cosby, American Schools: The $100 Billion Challenge. "It was highly individualized but intensive." Allen says Cosby was recruited to UMass through a mutual attraction. "I was trying very hard to increase the range of diversity of doctoral students. There were few people of color from any field. And we were trying to find ways to combat institutional racism at all levels."

That clearly appealed to Cosby - working on ways to break down a busted system not up to the task of attending to what he considered the unique needs of black children. It is a solution to this issue to which Cosby dedicated his doctoral studies. The culmination of which he believed to be a groundbreaking method of incorporating a new educational tool into the curriculum that would speak to black children with words and images specifically tailored to their unique upbringing. Cosby offered this system in a dissertation that carried the incredible but true title: "An Integration of the Visual Media Via 'Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning."

Fat Albert was going to save black America. [...]

When examined from the perspective of potency of message, the "quality" of Cosby's dissertation is to a degree inconsequential. So, too, is the issue of whether or not Fat Albert in the classroom would have really been of benefit to "at-risk" kids or amounted to little more than a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. What matters most are the ideals expressed. For all the questioning of Cosby's blackness - the ugly echoes of which we hear now with Barack Obama - in 30 years' time, the consistency of Cosby's message has remained the same: self-reliance, self-determination, education as a means to ascension. The very ideals that gave us passage from slavery to a failed Reconstruction on through Jim Crow past the civil rights era. That's 200-plus years of black singularity.

It's that message that MLK had abandoned by the end, becoming an enabler for the Mau-Mauers, tragically.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2007 9:56 PM