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Beyond civil rights
Regressive behavior, lack of jobs, puts victories at risk
By RUDY JOHNSON
First published: Sunday, February 10, 2008

I never actually knew Bill Cosby. But then, like many of the 33,000 students at Philadelphia's Temple University, where he and I were undergraduates in the early 1960s, I did know Bill Cosby, from a distance. He was easily recognizable even then. He was a Big Man On Campus, an acknowledged performer in what was then a rising career in comedy.
     
What I didn't know at the time was just how much we had in common, in light of our respective though mutually modest, working-class origins.
Cosby grew up in a housing project in a not-so-brotherly section of the City of Brotherly Love. My city of provenance was New York and my housing in the inner city was a one-time luxury building turned rundown tenement. Cosby found it necessary to work while in school selling produce, shining shoes, stocking store shelves, as did I, almost identically. And like me, as a high school student, he even managed to fail a term in the 10th grade.
I continued my studies and graduated from high school; he dropped out but earned a GED while serving around the same time as I in the Navy.
And there, with one exception, the comparison ends. Bill Cosby went on to become a megastar of stage and screen, and, as William H. Cosby Jr., proceeded to graduate from the University of Massachusetts with a master's degree and doctorate in education. Still, harking back to earlier days, the young Cosby and I were similar in having had the singular benefit of a father in the home. So it comes as no surprise to me that paternal responsibility has been one of the now-elder Cosby's most persistent themes as he attempts to reverse the regressive behavior of some of today's wayward black youth.
Four years ago this coming May, Cosby presented what now reverberates as his "pound cake speech." He gave the talk at a 50th anniversary celebration of Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark ruling that banned segregation in the nation's public schools. The decision, it should be particularly noted during Black History Month, was undoubtedly the psychological seedbed of the modern civil rights movement, spurred the following year by the refusal of Rosa Parks, a woman of color, to yield her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. The 50th anniversary observance was sponsored by the NAACP at Washington's Constitution Hall, which once barred the African-American singer Marian Anderson from performing.
In his speech, Cosby skewered larcenous young blacks for taking the risk of "getting shot by police in the back of the head for stealing a piece of poundcake." He made the point as part of a broad swipe at those members of the black community who had forgotten the sacrifices the very real blood, sweat and tears of the civil rights movement. He railed in his distinctive way against the kind of bad parenting that failed to instill high morals in children at early ages. He called for absent fathers to own up to filial and other family obligations.
He was particularly critical of certain errant youth, calling them "knuckleheads" for embracing thuggish ways, disdaining the value of education, exalting profane and substandard language, and relishing material goods over material ideals.You know the sort by their street style, including slouchy men with their pants falling down at the waist, with foul mouths and abject disrespect for women, with utter contempt for learning, and worse: young black men casually shooting each other to death for slights real or imagined.
But Cosby himself has come under considerable fire for supposedly not sufficiently emphasizing the systemic bias in society that creates the conditions that lead to antisocial behavior. Yet Cosby, in his recent book, "Come on People On the Path from Victims to Victors," a kind of secular gospel aimed at black people and written with the psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, concedes: "Men need a good steady job that gives them a chance in life; otherwise, they end up back in jail or on the streets. Such men can become permanently alienated from the world, which can be hell on the community and heartbreaking for the children."
He adds: "We can change things we have control over if we accept personal responsibility and embrace self-help."
And is there any doubt that Americans tend to help those who are willing to help themselves?
But how about the things over which "we" no longer have control? Much control, it seems to me, has been lost over the years in a series of quiet earthquakes. Almost imperceptibly, the tectonic plates of social and economic conditions have for decades been shifting to a point that self-help today in the face of technological or outsourced jobs, for example seems increasingly limited among the victims of this radical change. (This is not to say that everyone from the inner city is a victim; many have benefited those in more stable families, for instance from the gains of the movement for civil and economic rights.)
Here's a view of the problem by a public figure who in his speeches, compiled in the book, "A Call to Conscience," extolled the dignity of honest labor and the power of legitimate earnings:
"We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. ... New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.
"(In) work of this sort ..., we are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay."
The black poor, "who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle."
The person who said that was no less a thinker and activist than Martin Luther King Jr.
Rudy Johnson is an Albany writer and a former newspaper reporter.