Bill Cosby's Lonely Crusade

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There is an edge to this humor. It is not like Cosby. He is going somewhere with this. Something seems to be bothering him. Now the hurt that critics have laid on Cosby starts to show, even with the shades covering his eyes. Not two minutes into this speech he gets highly defensive.

"I'm not denying systemic racism," he explains, striking out at all the civil rights leaders and intellectuals who say he is closing his eyes to the power of a racist system by calling on poor black people to take more personal responsibility for their neighborhoods, their children and schools. "I'm not denying that [systemic racism], never have. I've lived it. I don't need to show you a card about what has happened to me."

Then he does a U-turn. Cosby connects attempts to make him a pariah in the black community, with his earlier riff about the history of the government abandoning black people. The souls of black Americans have long been abandoned, he begins. Black people are taught not to believe in themselves, and told they can't be the hero in the movies. He talks about children being abandoned. They are abandoned by being left at risk in neighborhoods where there is gunfire; children are abandoned in schools that are no good; abandoned at home because parents are absent. Suddenly, Cosby returns to his experience of being abandoned after speaking out. He is talking back to the critics.

For Bill Cosby it's now all about education.

"You don't tell me that I've made a lot of money, and I've become a multi-millionaire and I forgot where I came from," he cries out as the crowd begins to give him sustained applause. "You don't tell me I'm a billionaire who is making fun of poor people. If I didn't like you, I wouldn't say a damned thing."

Now the audience is standing, giving Cosby a standing ovation.

"I mean isn't that fair? If I didn't love you, I'd say, ‘Keep on doing what you're doing, you're doing just fine...' and next year I'd see 86 percent of you dropping out of school, ‘cause you are doing a wonderful job."

The audience, still standing, is now laughing and clapping.

"But if I love, if I love you, I'm crying, I'm in pain," he says, and now the audience is giving up "Amen" and "Hmm-Hmm." It is call and response, like a church testimonial, a prophet coming in from the wilderness.

Cosby revealed a glimpse of the pain a few weeks earlier in Springfield, Massachusetts. He told that big crowd not to be taken in by his critics. "Please don't let some fool sell you [that] Bill Cosby doesn't like people," he said. "I'm talking about all these fakes, and you know who they are. All these fakes and the people who are propping them up and taking a little cut [of the government money for poverty programs]."

At an event in Pittsburgh, he cut through the pain and defended himself by calling on black legends: "You teach your child that this message that is coming today with Bill Cosby...teach your child that Malcolm X said it 42 years ago! Marcus Garvey said it some 60 or 70 years ago! DuBois said it! Bethune said it! Education."

These bursts of anger at his critics opened the curtains on Cosby's true feelings about the intense pressure on him once he took a leap into a sharp, fast-spinning debate about race, class and politics in black America.

He was not going to knuckle under to bullying or add credibility to the critics by going head-to-head with them. He later gave the L.A. Times his private assessment of his critics: "What they are yelling about has to do with the pain that comes with having the covers pulled off and responsibility put in its proper place."

Cosby intended to be a catalyst for change. He wanted his daring words to set the stage for a new era of civil rights activism aimed at strengthening black America through stronger families, better education, and a can-do, self-reliant attitude that rejected the view of black people as weaklings waiting for somebody else to save them.

The funny man is way beyond comedy now. It turns out his legendary career was just stage one in launching a serious blast for racial justice. He used the laughter to get everyone's attention, and now he really has something to say.

It is a hall-of-fame performance.

Juan Williams' latest book, ENOUGH -The Phony Leaders, Dead End Movements and Culture of Failure That are Undermining Black America & What We Can Do About It was recently released by Crown Books, a division of Random House. Learn more about the book at www.randomhouse.com.