He made us so proud. I was too young to see him on late-night TV in those first years, and my family didn’t buy comedy albums; but I heard them at the homes of negro friends where they were proudly displayed, at a time when the howlingly funny but raunchy standup comedians Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley were adult- and black folks-only pleasures half-hidden from the children. Articulate and relaxed, suave and sophisticated, Bill Cosby, even more so than our beloved Temptations, was what we called “ready”. That was, ready not just for integration, but ready to succeed in the white man’s world. Bill Cosby wasn’t just ready: he was killing it.
Dissolve a few years, and my suburban teenage world was rocked to its core by the barrier-smashing spy show I Spy. Inspired by Cosby’s character Scottie, I resolved to James Bond my way out of the racially constrained doldrums of Fairfield County, Connecticut. Television became less of a thing during university years dominated by battles for black liberation, but Bill Cosby was very much there. Not just with us, he was again breaking ground with a militant documentary, Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed, that ripped mainstream cultural exploitations of black people to shreds.
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