Bill Cosby Fell. Did Black America Have to Erase Him?

By Stacy M. Brown Senior Global Correspondent

An old photograph of Bill Cosby is worth studying now.

Not the mug shot.

Not the courthouse pictures of an old, nearly blind man being guided through a forest of cameras. Not the photographs that accompanied the word “disgraced” so often that eventually his name and the adjective seemed welded together.

Go farther back.

Find Bill Cosby in 1965, wearing the tailored suit of Alexander Scott on “I Spy,” occupying American television at a time when much of the country was still fighting over whether Black people should be permitted to occupy a lunch-counter stool.

Look at him.

He isn't carrying Robert Culp's bags. He isn't polishing his shoes, driving his car, or rolling his eyes for a laugh. Alexander Scott is a Rhodes scholar who speaks several languages, a sophisticated American intelligence agent standing beside a white man as his partner and equal.

This was 1965.

Medgar Evers had been murdered two years earlier. Four little Black girls had been killed in the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The Voting Rights Act was signed the same year “I Spy” premiered. In parts of America, a Black traveler could still wonder whether a motel would give him a bed or a restaurant would give him a meal.

And there was Bill Cosby on NBC.

Look at him, because before America decided what Bill Cosby was, Bill Cosby helped change what America thought a Black man could be.

He became the first Black performer to win a Primetime Emmy for acting and then won again and again. He moved into movies and eventually stood beside Sidney Poitier in “Uptown Saturday Night,” “Let's Do It Again,” and “A Piece of the Action,” two Black men carrying movies without shuffling, apologizing, or waiting for a white character to rescue the plot in deft opposition to the buffoonery that much of Blaxploitation pictures of that era Hollywood tossed down the throats of Black Americans.

Then came Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable.

Thursday nights changed.

A Black obstetrician married to a Black attorney raised five children in a Brooklyn brownstone filled with jazz, African American art, books, grandparents, discipline, foolishness, love, and expectations. The Huxtables weren't asking America to rescue them. They weren't presented as a social problem for white characters to solve.

Millions of Americans simply came into their house every week.

Then Cosby helped open another door.

“A Different World” took viewers to Hillman College and put HBCU life in front of an enormous national audience. Black professors taught. Black students debated apartheid, racism, politics, class, and relationships. They fell in love, screwed up, studied, and graduated. For Black children who had never visited Howard, Hampton, Spelman, Morehouse, or another historically Black campus, Hillman made that world visible.

Cosby didn't merely preach education from a stage; he put it on television, and he put his money behind it.

Bill and Camille Cosby's $20 million gift to Spelman College in 1988 was, at the time, the largest individual contribution ever made to an HBCU. It wasn’t the only generous gift they gave to Black education.

Yes, that Bill Cosby existed and still does.

Which makes what happened next more complicated than the single word America eventually attached to his name.

Because long before sexual-assault accusations swallowed his public identity, something had already fractured between Bill Cosby and the Black America that once embraced him.

The divorce happened over a piece of pound cake.

THE DIVORCE OVER POUND CAKE

At Constitution Hall in 2004, during a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of “Brown v. Board of Education,” Cosby committed what can be an unforgivable offense for a Black celebrity: He criticized Black people in front of everybody.

He talked about parents who weren't parenting, children who couldn't speak standard English, young people throwing away opportunities, and families blaming police after their children committed crimes. He told the story that gave the speech its permanent nickname, questioning the outrage surrounding the shooting of a young man after the theft of a piece of pound cake.

Black America erupted.

To some, Cosby had become the rich old man on the hill wagging his finger at people struggling below. Critics accused him of blaming Black people for structural racism, poverty, bad schools, and neighborhoods hollowed out by disinvestment. Scholars attacked his politics. Commentators attacked his tone. People who had grown up calling him America's Dad wondered when Dad had become so judgmental.

Others heard something different.

They heard an old Black man saying publicly what countless Black mothers, fathers, and grandparents had been saying privately around kitchen tables forever: Racism is real, but so is responsibility.

The argument became bitter because both subjects were real.

And something between Cosby and Black America never completely healed.

That matters more than people may realize because when the accusations came, the cultural jury was not beginning deliberations with an empty notebook.

There was already resentment in the room.

Then came Gloria Allred and the parade of accusers. Then came the number that eventually seemed to require no evidence.

Sixty.

Then came the jokes.

Then came the fleeing institutions.

Then came Black entertainers who discovered that Bill Cosby, once one of the most protected figures in American culture, had become one of its safest targets.

Eddie Murphy could return triumphantly to “Saturday Night Live” and turn Cosby's ruin into the punchline of who was now America's Dad. Other comedians followed the cultural current, ignoring that they built their careers on Cosby’s shoulders. The laughter was easy because by then everybody understood whom America had designated the villain.

Yet Black America has always been remarkably complicated about whom it permits to come home.

O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in criminal court and later found liable in civil court. Michael Jackson endured perhaps the most sensational celebrity criminal trial of his generation and was acquitted on every count. R. Kelly was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. Dr. Dre publicly pummeled an innocent Black woman journalist but remains celebrated as one of hip-hop's foundational figures. Snoop Dogg traveled from a murder charge that ended in acquittal and the terror of Death Row Records' heyday to becoming one of America's most recognizable and marketable personalities.

Good.

Human beings should be allowed complexity.

But why did complexity become unavailable when the name was Bill Cosby?

Why did accusation become identity, and why did “60 women” begin functioning linguistically like “60 convictions” when nothing remotely resembling 60 criminal convictions existed?

More troubling, why were Black Americans, heirs to a history littered with accusations treated as verdicts, so willing to forget the difference?

THE TRIAL AMERICA DIDN'T SEE

I was in that courtroom.

Most of America wasn't.

There were no cameras.

That may be one of the most important facts in the entire Bill Cosby story.

Millions saw the courthouse circus. They saw Cosby arriving with lawyers and supporters. They saw Gloria Allred. They saw accusers. They saw reporters standing beneath television lights explaining what had happened inside.

But America never actually entered the room.

I watched the fight over the jury, including defense accusations that prosecutors were improperly excluding Black prospective jurors. Prosecutors denied that race drove their decisions, but it was so much so that the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the time not a huge fan of Cosby, released a statement to a Black journalist condemning what was happening during the process.

During that process, I heard those words with my own ears. After a Black juror was permitted to remain, a prosecutor remarked:

“You got your one token.”

Imagine that sentence captured by a courtroom camera during the prosecution of Bill Cosby.

Imagine it replayed on cable television.

Imagine the panels discussing what “token” meant when the defendant was an elderly Black man whose liberty would soon rest in the hands of that jury.

America never saw it.

There was no camera when, during the trial, I and others heard the judge whistling music associated with “Kill Bill” outside jury deliberations.

Kill Bill.

At the trial of Bill Cosby.

Perhaps someone else could hear that and shrug.

I couldn't.

Neither moment by itself establishes that the proceeding was fixed or that the judge and prosecutor conspired against Cosby. But anyone familiar with the history of Black defendants in American courtrooms should understand why such moments matter, particularly when the country receiving the sanitized version outside never got to witness the atmosphere inside.

Something else bothered me.

I have spent a career around reporters. Competition is our bloodstream. We chase what the reporter beside us doesn't have and guard information that might put our byline ahead of somebody else's.

Yet around Cosby's trial I watched journalists from major organizations congregate with the prosecution's press representative. Information moved among supposed competitors with an ease I found extraordinary. If somebody from one mainstream organization missed something, another might happily fill that reporter in.

Maybe they considered it collegiality.

I had rarely seen anything like it.

The prosecution had a story to tell every day, and America heard it.

The evidence complicating that story did not always travel with the same velocity.

ANDREA CONSTAND AND THE QUESTIONS AMERICA STOPPED ASKING

Andrea Constand accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her at his Pennsylvania home in 2004. It was a grave accusation that deserved serious investigation.

Serious investigation, however, does not mean evidence favorable to the accused becomes indecent to discuss.

The defense confronted Constand with evidence of extensive contact between her and Cosby, including calls she initiated after the encounter she described as an assault. Records introduced during the proceedings documented continued communication, and she called Cosby twice on Valentine's Day after the alleged incident, demanding his attention on a day for lovers.

Constand explained the calls.

The defense challenged the explanations.

That is what a trial is supposed to look like.

Then there was Connecticut.

Constand traveled to Foxwoods Resort Casino, where Cosby was performing, and went to his hotel room. Testimony explored the circumstances surrounding that visit and the two being around his bed. Constand was aggravated because Cosby tried to dissuade her from coming and then didn’t pay her enough attention.

They continued to be in contact afterward, including Constand seeking tickets to a Cosby performance so members of her family could attend.

She offered explanations for those actions too.

Perhaps jurors believed every explanation and ignored perhaps the most credible witness put forth in the trial, an old Black man who worked as a chef for Cosby and who was present on the night when Constand, admittedly agitated about a major decision on the horizon, accepted one and a half Benadryl tablets offered by, not forced, from Cosby, who assured her that it would calm the pacing, growingly conflicted Constand.

But reverse the names.

Imagine Cosby repeatedly calling Constand after an encounter she considered sexual assault, traveling late at night to where she was staying, entering her hotel room, and later asking her for something.

Would anybody have declared those facts irrelevant?

Or would they have been repeated on television until every American knew them by heart?

Evidence doesn't become illegitimate because it complicates the preferred story.

Nor does asking about it constitute an attack on women.

A woman who reports sexual assault deserves to be heard and treated seriously. A man accused of sexual assault retains the right to confront the evidence against him and the presumption of innocence.

A justice system unable to hold those two thoughts simultaneously isn't justice.

It is a popularity contest.

THE MAGIC NUMBER

By then, however, Cosby wasn't facing one accusation in the American imagination.

He was facing a number.

Sixty.

“Sixty women” became one of the most effective phrases ever attached to a celebrity scandal because after hearing it enough times, people stopped asking the next question.

What was proved?

There were not 60 criminal trials.

There were not 60 guilty verdicts.

There were not 60 criminal convictions. In fact, one accuser boasted that she had taken a Quaalude on her own “before” arriving to meet Cosby in Nevada. Jimmy “JJ” Walker and other celebrities said the 1960s and especially the 1970s were a time when it was popular for men and women to introduce Quaaludes into a sexual encounter. Disco Biscuits is what they were called in the unadulterated era of Studio 54.

Just about all of the allegations against Cosby described conduct said to have occurred decades earlier, and statutes of limitation prevented criminal prosecution of numerous old claims. Laws later opened or expanded opportunities for some older allegations to proceed through civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower than the criminal requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The new laws are why Michael Jackson’s estate has still paid out settlements or made agreements long after the King of Pop died and continues to fend off strange allegations. It is also why Russell Simmons sits in Bali, with much less wealth than when he left.

Civil cases have produced findings against Cosby, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging them. He has denied wrongdoing and continued fighting claims, while insurers have settled some cases over his objections.

Those facts belong in the record.

So does this one:

The avalanche of accusations did not become an avalanche of criminal convictions.

Gloria Allred became one of the most visible figures in the campaign surrounding Cosby's accusers. She staged news conferences with women accusing him and publicly offered $100 million if Cosby would waive applicable statutes of limitation and face accusers in court.

Whatever one thinks of Allred's tactics, the media machinery was breathtaking. Another woman meant another news conference, another headline, and another addition to the number.

Eventually America didn't need to know a name.

It had 60. Cosby once told me to think about why they came up with that number.

But also that numbers are not evidence merely because they are large.

Black America ought to understand that better than anyone.

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT CHANGED THE RULES

One criminal case did send Cosby to prison.

Andrea Constand's.

Cosby was convicted in 2018 of indecent aggravated assault, not the r-word that many still erroneously believe. He was led away in handcuffs, an 81-year-old, nearly blind Black man with no criminal record suddenly known to Pennsylvania not as Alexander Scott, Cliff Huxtable, philanthropist, or entertainer, but as inmate NN7687.

America celebrated.

The celebration obscured a remarkable history behind the prosecution.

Former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor had declined to prosecute Cosby years earlier. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later concluded that Castor had made a commitment upon which Cosby relied when he surrendered his Fifth Amendment protection and testified in Constand's civil case.

A successor prosecutor later used that testimony against him.

Strip away the celebrity names and consider what that means.

The government tells a Black man he won't be prosecuted. Relying upon that commitment, he gives testimony he otherwise has a constitutional right to withhold. A later prosecutor comes along, reverses course, uses that testimony, and sends him to prison.

If the defendant were an anonymous Black teenager from North Philadelphia, would Black America call that justice?

Or would we be screaming for the Innocence Project?

Pennsylvania's highest court ultimately ruled that Cosby's due-process rights had been violated, vacated the conviction, and barred another prosecution on the Constand charges.

The court did not release him because he was famous, old, or blind. They released him because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had violated his constitutional rights. They, like the previous prosecutor, said he should never have stood trial in the first place.

That distinction apparently became too inconvenient for much of America.

People still casually describe Cosby as though he remains a convicted criminal.

He does not.

The conviction that put him in prison is gone; the state should pay him restitution even as the accusations bankrupt him.

THE DEAL HE WOULDN'T TAKE

Another part of Cosby's story complicates the caricature.

He rejected opportunities to resolve his criminal exposure without enduring the prison sentence that ultimately followed because he refused to admit to a crime he maintained he did not commit.

Call that arrogance if you wish.

Bill Cosby has never suffered from a shortage of stubbornness.

But consider the choice.

Admit something you insist you didn't do and preserve your freedom, or refuse and risk losing what remained of your life.

Cosby chose the risk, and if he were a rapper, they’d give him a handful of street cred.

There is an echo, though certainly not an equivalence, of Nelson Mandela's famous refusal to accept conditional freedom at the price of abandoning his principles. Cosby is not Mandela, and Cosby's circumstances should never be confused with Mandela's struggle against apartheid.

But the question about conditional freedom remains recognizable.

What is freedom worth when its price is confessing to something you maintain you did not do?

Cosby chose prison.

Then Pennsylvania's Supreme Court opened the door.

WHO GETS TO COME HOME?

That should have produced a reckoning in Black America.

It didn't.

The jokes largely survived the conviction.

The stigma survived it.

The cultural sentence survived the legal one.

And that brings us back to Eddie Murphy, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and R. Kelly, because their stories expose how casually America blurs enormously different legal histories when Black celebrity becomes scandal.

Jackson was acquitted.

Simpson was acquitted criminally and found liable civilly.

Kelly was convicted.

Snoop Dogg was acquitted.

Dre apologized publicly for violence against women.

Cosby's conviction was vacated.

These are not interchangeable outcomes.

Yet Cosby remains frozen in a cultural prison from which others, including men with complicated histories of their own, somehow found exits.

Nobody owes Cosby absolution because of “I Spy.”

Nobody has to disregard an accuser because he donated $20 million to Spelman or more than $200 million to higher education.

Philanthropy doesn't purchase innocence.

Neither does celebrity purchase guilt.

And Black entertainers ought to be particularly careful about participating in cultural executions conducted under rules they would never want applied to themselves.

Who gets grace?

Who gets rehabilitation?

Who gets complexity?

Who gets to become Uncle Snoop?

Who gets invited back to the Super Bowl stage?

Who gets his music celebrated despite an ugly past?

Who gets an acquittal treated as an acquittal?

And who remains condemned after the criminal conviction itself has disappeared?

Those aren't comfortable questions.

Pound Cake wasn't comfortable either.

Perhaps that's why the divorce remains unresolved.

DON'T ERASE THE MAN

Another reason this matters now.

America is again fighting over Black history itself.

President Donald Trump has directed federal institutions to change how portions of American history are presented, including ordering the removal of what his administration calls “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums and objecting to presentations it says portray American history excessively through racism and oppression. His administration describes the effort as restoring accuracy and national pride. Critics contend it sanitizes painful chapters of the country's racial history. Trump has also fired Black generals and Black commissioners simply because they’re Black.

Black people should understand the larger danger better than anyone.

History becomes dishonest when somebody decides the uncomfortable parts can simply be removed.

And if we object when government decides which portions of Black history deserve preservation, what are we doing when we take an eraser to Bill Cosby?

You cannot honestly tell the history of Black television without “I Spy.”

You cannot tell the history of Black Hollywood without seeing Cosby standing beside Sidney Poitier.

You cannot tell the story of Black family representation on American television without the Huxtables.

You cannot tell the story of HBCUs entering American popular culture without “A Different World.”

You cannot tell the history of Black celebrity philanthropy without that $20 million Spelman gift.

You cannot tell the story of Black America's argument with itself over personal responsibility without Pound Cake.

And you cannot tell the history of Bill Cosby honestly if your story ends with the handcuffs.

Because history continued.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his conviction.

That happened too.

Go back now to that photograph.

Look again at the young Black man in the tailored suit.

Alexander Scott.

Bill Cosby.

Look at where he was standing in 1965 and remember what America looked like outside the television studio.

Then follow the journey.

Follow him from “I Spy” to Sidney Poitier, from Thursday nights with the Huxtables to Hillman College, from a $20 million check to Spelman to Constitution Hall and the piece of pound cake that helped fracture his relationship with Black America.

Follow him from America's Dad to America's defendant, from a courthouse without cameras to a prison cell, and from that prison cell through the doors Pennsylvania's highest court ordered opened because constitutional protections still had to mean something even when the prisoner was Bill Cosby.

Remember the accusations too.

Remember Constand.

Remember the women.

Remember the civil judgments.

Remember every ugly and uncomfortable part.

That's what history demands.

But remember all of it.

America took Cosby's shows off television. Institutions stripped away honors. Hollywood recoiled. Comedians laughed. His name became shorthand for disgrace. Pennsylvania took an old, blind Black man's freedom until its own highest court concluded that the prosecution had violated his constitutional rights.

Black America does not have to restore Bill Cosby to the pedestal.

Pedestals were always a lousy place to put human beings.

But neither should we help bury a living Black man's history because defending his right to complexity has become socially expensive.

We have watched America bleach Black people from textbooks, minimize our suffering, appropriate our inventions, rename our accomplishments, and discover our heroes only after they were safely dead. We have fought too long to force this country to tell the whole story of Black America to start mutilating that story ourselves whenever one of its characters becomes inconvenient.

Bill Cosby is part of that story.

The magnificent parts.

The infuriating parts.

The accusations.

The courtroom.

The constitutional violation.

The overturned conviction.

All of it.

So look at that photograph one last time.

Before the mug shot.

Before “disgraced.”

Before Pound Cake.

Before the courthouse.

Before the cell.

There stands a Black man on American television in 1965, dressed as he belongs there because he knows damned well that he does.

History cannot tell us what happened inside every private room Bill Cosby ever entered.

But history can tell us what happened in public.

And it can tell us what happened in that Pennsylvania courtroom.

Black America has spent centuries fighting people who wanted to write our history in pencil, deciding which achievements counted, which injustices could be forgotten, and which Black men could conveniently be reduced to the worst thing anybody ever said about them.

We cannot spend another generation demanding that America put down the eraser while keeping one hidden behind our own backs.

Whatever history ultimately writes beside Bill Cosby's name, write the whole damn thing.

And this time, don't let anybody erase it.