By Victor C. Kirk
For a Black man it was rather painful reading the news reports and subsequently snippets from the trial. Bill Cosby provided me with my firsts jokes to try on others as a kid. He scared the crap out of me with the monster under the bed routine with his little brother Russell at the bunt of his funny but quirky discourse. During my formative years, he gave me and countless other Black men in my poor neighborhood a sense of pride – a father figure no, but a well-dressed and successful Black man that was not a favored teacher or family preacher. Standup comedy routines while dressed to kill and interviews in Jet Magazine and Ebony all evidence of being famous and successful. By the time he was on television I had lost the album I swore would forever remain with me among my budding collection. I had Nipsey Russell, Mom’s Mabley, Redd Fox, Flip Wilson, and a few others my mom did not know about. We had no way of knowing how to secure a Playboy magazine or Hustler but heard about them and wondered when the day would come when we would have either our own or one to affirm the rumors about their contents.
Bill Cosby and the Cosby kids – especially Fat Albert adorned a T-shirt I had. The Huxtables as a family were a refreshing peek into a Black world, I knew nothing about. Upper upper middle class Black children aspiring to attend Howard University or to become doctors and lawyers living in a brownstone. I became aware that I was surrounded by role models once I got to J.S. Clark Elementary. My grandmother, Cassie Williams, Hilton, Johnson, Strange sold life insurance with her second husband who, at the time, owned Good Citizens Life Insurance Company. My father was her driver. Early on we lived in one of my grandmothers rent houses and my mother’s brood was plenty. From my home we took a short walk along the railroad tracks to J.S. Clark Elementary School. We lived not too far from the Ritz theater and not too far from downtown. Our neighborhood was overshadowed by the large lumber yard off Grandmont Street. The Cosby show gave no mention of natural barriers to getting to school or railroad tracks or even a lumber yard. For the Cosby family everything they dreamed was possible and seemed somewhat assured.
My adulation for Bill Cosby began a steady decline after he decided to admonish Black parents and Black men and Black youth. Bill Cosby was to me a comedian not a soothsayer. I loved what the family represented not an expectation to be shamed if I did not follow in his footsteps. When his only son was killed by a racist while he stopped at the side of the highway to change a flat on his Mercedes Benz 280 SL, I felt what the family and the rest of America felt – saddened and a great sense of loss – a child with so many opportunities waiting on him to choose. A life cut short by a jealous bigot who only saw the Black Man with a White Woman dressed in her mink coat standing near their Mercedes 280 SL that had stopped along a California highway.
The stories about the rapes stunned me. I presumed, at that time, that if you had money and a station in life and fame and fortune, only a rancid personality stood in your way of acquiring and earning all of life’s “pearls”. An old friend of mine once said to me that “the only difference between the woman you want and the one you have is the money in your pocket” – the things we once believed in our youth. But the front page of Vogue displayed the victims of a most devious quest, a sick mind drunk with success and fame and turning to “short cuts” and having acquired over time a deep disregard for the impact of a dismissive posture.
He was found guilty of only one of the crimes and began serving his time. Too much time had passed for the courts to consider other charges but most assuredly victim impact statements had their roll in assuring that a degree of justice would be served – confronting the accused and letting the world take a peek within the perverted mind and soul of the man who had become “America’s father figure”.
A constitutional provision guaranteeing us all a fair trial also upheld the prosecutorial discretion to force a disclosure of past crimes in a civil suit in exchange for a “get out of jail card” for charges whose prosecution timeframe had passed. The first victim settled for millions because of this discretion.
Bill Cosby walked out of prison the way he walked in – a broken man torn from the fabric of an American consciousness as someone held in regard. He will eventually be forgotten but never forgiven.
