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Washington, DC The Jester always gets away with making fun of the King. The whole idea of satire is to speak truth and reveal wisdom through comedy. From Redd Foxx to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and Bill Mahr, the power of their comedy pulled you along laughing with the cutting social commentary. Bill Cosby was never in their company. He never used profanity. He never used the N-word. His comedy was family-friendly. His comedy was daring because he crossed racial lines to create racial common ground even when the streets raged with race riots. So when Cosby, America's favorite black jester, drops the comic mask and speaks with the passion of a warrior, he forces us all to take a second look even as we are laughing. For more than two years now, Cosby has abandoned the safety of his "Cliff Huxtable" and Jello-salesman persona to risk taking on the crisis of drop-outs, early pregnancies and celebrations of criminal behavior among America's poor, especially poor blacks. The effort has led to some not-so-funny charges against him. The critics say he is a multi-millionaire who is ashamed of poor black people; he is blaming the victim; he is an entertainer who has no idea of the power of systemic racism and institutional racism to weigh down poor people of any color. This new face for Cosby emerged on the 50th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision – May 17th, 2004. Cosby was selected to speak at a black-tie gala in Washington, D.C. celebrating the day when the Supreme Court ordered an end to legal school segregation. Cosby went way off script. Instead of making a couple of inoffensive jokes, he started asking some pointed questions that made people laugh but also squirm about the state of black America: - "People putting their clothes on backwards...hats on backwards, pants down around the crack... Are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something being wrong when she has got her all the way up to the crack?"
- "Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua...all that crap and all of them in jail."
- "Five or six different children – same woman, eight, ten different husbands... you could have sex with your grandmother... you keep those numbers coming...I'm just predicting."
Those in the audience laughed, stomped their feet and gave him a standing ovation. The seriousness of the speech was apparent, but his examples were drawn so large that they invited pained laughter. The bottom line from Cosby that day was that poor people are not taking advantage of the Brown decision and the doors it opened for people of color to compete in American society.  No laughing matter: Bill Cosby finds nothing comic in the state of the nation's black and poor youth. No offer to advance his message came from the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus, the churches, the major black colleges and universities. No one picked up on his call for marches against teen pregnancy and dropping out of school. Later, Cosby told me in an interview that several black leaders, such as former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, told him in private that he was right. But Young and the others did not offer to stand by his side and offer Cosby a full-throated defense. Cosby was told they didn't want to "be thought of as old fuddy-duddy." "You know Hip-Hop and Boondocks established that older black people are not to be taken seriously," he said. "Even if Andy Young and Julian Bond [the NAACP chairman] speak out, if you don't know who they are, if you don't know history, it doesn't make any difference to you. And these people don't know history, they don't know about who faced down bigots to help them. This stuff is so big that Andy and Julian feel they can't stop it." The rule among the leading voices in racial discussions is to sing from the same hymnal even if a change in seasons brings new ideas, issues and personalities. Black America has seen tremendous development in the last 50 years, but the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. That message is basically that black people are victims of the system and the government needs to increase social spending. Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders. To the contrary, it is to be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed and perpetually victimized. Any break with that official message leads to charges of being an Uncle Tom and a sell-out. That is why it takes Cosby, the court jester, to bring the bad news. Almost a year to the day after his May 17, 2004 speech in Washington, Bill Cosby continued his lonely crusade on stage in Houston. His celebrity attracted another full house for one of the free town-hall meetings he has held in poor black neighborhoods since saying that today's poor people are not "holding up" their end of the long fight for equal rights. James Campbell, an editorial writer for the Houston Chronicle, introduced Cosby as a man in pain, a man who grimaced when he whispered privately to Campbell that all he is trying to do is give black people a "wake-up call." The audience gives Cosby a standing ovation as he comes on stage wearing dark glasses. At nearly 70-years-old Cosby, who never apologized for what he said in Washington, is still on fire. He starts out telling people not to wait for any more government programs to lift them out of poverty. "How many government programs have you waited for, and when they arrived nothing happened?" How far down hill will public schools have to go before you realize that you have to do something," he shouts. The funnyman is in no mood for laughs tonight. He tells the mostly black audience they've been abandoned by a government that "took you from your homeland to build a better place – for them."
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