"I’m saying Brown Vs. Board of Education. We’ve got to hit the streets, ladies and gentlemen. I’m winding up, now , no more applause. I’m saying, look at the Black Muslims. There are Black Muslims standing on the street corners and they say so forth and so on, and we’rere laughing at them because they have bean pies and all that, but you don’t read “Black Muslim gunned down while chastising drug dealer.” You don’t read that. They don’t shoot down Black Muslims. You understand me. Muslims tell you to get out of the neighborhood. When you want to clear your neighborhood out, first thing you do is go get the Black Muslims, bean pies and all (laughter). And your neighborhood is then clear. The police can’t do it .
I’m telling you Christians, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you hit the streets? Why can’t you clean it out yourselves? It’s our time now, ladies and gentlemen. It is our time (clapping). And I’ve got good news for you. It’s not about money. It’s about you doing something ordinarily that we do—get in somebody else’s business. It’s time for you to not accept the language that these people are speaking, which will take them nowhere.
What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?"
Bill Cosby, The Pound Cake Speech
"In the aftermath of the rash of fires at black churches, and with the strong support of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Church Arsons Prevention Act of 1996. With bipartisan sponsorship by Reps. Henry Hyde and John Conyers and Sens. Edward Kennedy and Lauch Faircloth, it enhances federal jurisdiction over and increases the federal penalties for the destruction of houses of worship. And Congress and the Administration provided $12 million for a federal investigation of the church fires. In addition, the Act gives a continuing mandate to the Hate Crime Statistics Act.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) has undertaken a project to produce radio public service announcements on discrimination and denials of equal protection of the law. The first PSA "Discrimination: Just Out of Tune with America," was recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter and began running in January, 1996. The next PSA which will be recorded by Bill Cosby will carry the theme "Teach Children the Need to Be Tolerant and to Value Differences."
In Washington, D.C., where drug wars have turned our national capital into the world`s murder capital, the most effective anti-drug unit has turned out to be an unusual bunch of volunteers who call themselves ``the dopebusters.``
They have no official connection to the police, the FBI or drug czar William Bennett.
They are Black Muslims, members of Minister Louis Farrakhan`s controversial Nation of Islam.
Armed with walkie-talkies, they patrol certain apartment buildings and housing developments in characteristic Muslim duds: Conservative suits, bow ties, white shirts and clean-shaven heads.
They began patrolling Mayfair Mansions, an all-black, formerly middle-class apartment development, last year after residents invited them to try their luck against local drug dealers.
The results were immediate and decisive. After a few confrontations with Muslim-style rough justice in Mayfair and the Paradise Manor apartments next door, local drug dealers took their trade elsewhere.
Local crime went down. Drug-related killings stopped. Though the District of Columbia police chief criticized the Muslim patrol as vigilantism at first, the support of some District council members brought cooperation. Residents breathed easier. Children again played outdoors. Senior citizens walked in peace.
Requests for more Muslim aid poured in from neighborhood, civic, tenant and religious groups throughout the Washington area. Just as criminal activity feeds on itself, so does community crime-fighting.
Yet the Muslim success has received little coverage outside the D.C. area. We are reluctant to take the Black Muslims seriously, it appears, even when they are making a serious dent in a serious problem.
By ignoring such grass-roots, community-based efforts, we may be cheating ourselves of information that can lead us to more effective solutions, with Muslims or without.
Like others, I have reservations about the use of Muslims as irregular volunteers in the anti-drug war. Their recent history has been riddled as much with controversy as their earlier days were riddled with bullets.
Take their regard for constitutional rights, for example. When a local television camera crew recorded about 10 Muslims meting out their special brand of rough justice on a man wielding a shotgun, the Muslims beat up the camera operator, too.
Then there are the charges of extortion. One apartment building manager said a Muslim representative told her that the Muslims would appreciate a
``donation`` of, say, $5,000 in exchange for dopebusters` security work.
Granted, the Muslims` clean-shaven bruisers can seem intimidating. Then again, good security costs. Public demand has outstripped the Muslims` ability to bear all costs themselves. What price safety?
When his men roughed up the TV crew, Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, the black physician who heads the Nation of Islam`s D.C. mosque, apologized. You have seen us at our worst, he pleaded to news media; now come back and see us at our best. Perhaps we should.
Robert Woodson, the black conservative who heads the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, is dismayed that, as federal officials call for more police and beefed-up security in public housing, they overlook grass-roots crime-fighting efforts like the Muslim ``dopebusters.``
``We would rather risk failure with people with whom we are comfortable than risk success with those who hold unorthodox views,`` Woodson said.
It has become axiomatic among black commentators to wax nostalgic about the old days when those of us who grew up in black neighborhoods (they were not called ``ghettos`` then) looked out for each other, helped each other through hard times and disciplined each other`s children when they misbehaved. Our wealth was in our spirit and our moral network, woven too tight for social decay to eat its way through.
Back then, the Muslims were generally regarded as a quaint, if eccentric, group, selling their newspapers, philosophy and fresh fish door to door. No one would have guessed that now, in an age of unprecedented progress for black Americans, we would be looking to these same Muslims for a semblance of law and order.
Yet, today, with desegregation and upward mobility, our old support network is frayed and tattered, and the black poor find themselves more isolated than ever.
Although whites still outnumber blacks among those whose household income falls below the poverty line, Census Bureau data show most white poor live integrated with better-off whites while almost all black poor live in `poverty areas,`` the ghettos.
In those areas, we find less to fear from the Ku Klux Klan and other threats of the past than we do from what Woodson calls ``the enemy within,`` a social decay that has mothers trading children for drugs and youngsters wielding Uzis in urban drug wars.
The Muslims are trying to tell us something. Maybe we should listen.
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16— Ennis William Cosby, the only son of Bill Cosby, was shot to death early today on a Los Angeles freeway ramp in what the police said might have been a robbery attempt as he changed a flat tire.
He was one of five children of the most popular television father of the 1980's, a hugely popular entertainer and best-selling author whose rollicking comedic routines draw heavily on the frustrations of fatherhood.
Ennis Cosby, a graduate student at Columbia University, was in Los Angeles to visit friends. Another motorist discovered his body, police investigators said, next to his dark green Mercedes-Benz sports convertible on the side of the road, its emergency lights blinking and its tire-changing equipment out.
Mr. Cosby, 27, had been shot in the head and was sprawled on the ground in a pool of blood on the passenger side of the car, the door there ajar.
He was due back on Tuesday at Columbia, where he was working toward a doctorate in special education, after graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1992 despite dyslexia, and making plans to set up a school for youngsters with learning disabilities.
''He was my hero,'' his father, 59, said outside his Manhattan apartment after learning of his death.
The woman who found Ennis Cosby's body reported seeing a white male near the scene as she pulled her car to a stop behind Mr. Cosby's convertible, the police said.
''There is a female who saw at least a portion of this and we are interviewing her,'' Comdr. Tim McBride of the Los Angeles Police Department said in a news conference this morning at the crime scene, its periphery aswarm with reporters, camera teams and satellite trucks. ''It is her description that we have a male white suspect.''
Commander McBride added that although robbery might well have been the motive of the shooting, an initial inspection of the car and Mr. Cosby's body showed nothing missing. The police commander also said, but did not elaborate, that Mr. Cosby might have made a cellular phone call just before being shot and might have been followed by his killer.
''It is unknown whether he was followed at this time or not,'' he said. ''I think that's a good probability. But it may have been a chance opportunity that somebody took, robbery being a possible motive.''
Mr. Cosby was killed shortly before 2 A.M., the police said. He was driving on the city's western side, headed north on Interstate 405 through Sepulveda Pass, when the tire went flat.
Family friends said Mr. Cosby might have been going to visit one of his many friends in the San Fernando Valley. They described him as a down-to-earth young man, little affected by his father's fame, and they said that while visiting Los Angeles he liked to drop in on his friends for late-night talks.
Mr. Cosby's father and his mother, Camille live in Manhattan and were notified of their son's death in a call from Commander McBride. Having lost a 16-year-old daughter in a hit-and-run accident, the officer spoke with the couple for an additional 20 minutes about coping with the death of a child.
Bill Cosby, whose current hit television show is titled ''Cosby,'' then briefly spoke with reporters outside his apartment, calling Ennis ''my hero'' and then, his eyes puffy, his face drawn, returning inside.
Mr. Cosby's comedic stock in trade -- for eight years on ''The Cosby Show'' -- was on-screen interaction and antics between him and members of his television family, particularly the children. Much of that material, as well as his stand-up appearances and several books, was undoubtedly drawn from life with his five real-life children. Among his books that touch on child rearing are ''Fatherhood,'' ''Time Flies'' and ''Childhood.''
Later today he and Mrs. Cosby issued this brief statement through his office: ''We have every confidence in the Los Angeles Police Department. Our hearts go out to each and everybody who has suffered a loss like this. This is a life experience that is truly difficult to share.''
In his book ''Fatherhood,'' Mr. Cosby described the difficulties his son experienced as a student: ''Whenever you asked him how he was doing in school, he always said, with simple eloquence, 'No problem.'
''And, of course, his answer made sense: there was no problem, no confusion about how he was doing. He had failed everything; and what he hadn't failed, he hadn't taken yet.'' --------------------
CNN Apology on Pictures
(The Associated Press) -- CNN apologized yesterday for broadcasting filmed images of Ennis Cosby lying in a pool of blood.
The film, taken from a helicopter by KTLA-TV, showed a Mercedes, its emergency lights still blinking, by the side of the freeway. The camera then moved in to a close-up of Mr. Cosby's body.
After the film was broadcast at 2:02 P.M., there was an ''immediate negative reaction'' from the CNN staff in the Atlanta newsroom and hundreds of calls of protests from the public, said Steve Haworth, a network spokesman.
When the CNN anchor Bobbie Battista came on the air from a commercial break at 2:28 P.M., she said: ''There was some tape that aired that showed a closeup of Ennis Cosby, and it was inappropriate to air that. We apologize for that, and to his family as well.''
KTLA did not broadcast the film because it has a policy against showing graphic scenes, said Fernando Lopez, the news operations manager.
Photos: The Los Angeles police removed the body of Ennis Cosby, son of the comedian Bill Cosby, yesterday after he was found shot to death next to his car. ''He was my hero,'' Mr. Cosby said of his son, a dyslexic who was working toward a doctorate in special education at Columbia University. (Associated Press); Ennis William Cosby in a 1987 photo from his school yearbook.
LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- The only son of entertainer Bill Cosby was found shot to death early Thursday morning lying next to his car, which was parked along a major freeway in the affluent Bel Air area of Los Angeles.
Police said they were seeking a white male suspect.
The body of Ennis William Cosby, in his 20s, was discovered by a motorist passing by about 1:40 a.m., police said. The dark green Mercedes-Benz convertible, with emergency flashers blinking, was parked near the Mulholland Drive off-ramp of the San Diego Freeway.
"We were notified about 1:40 a.m. by the California Highway Patrol that a (murder) had occurred at the location," Officer Helen Lloyd said.
Bill Cosby appeared stern and flushed when seen outside his apartment on Manhattan's upper East Side Thursday morning.
He shook his head and, when condolences were offered by a reporter, said, "He was my hero" before going inside the building.
Earlier Cosby released a statement through his publicist which said, "We have every confidence in the LAPD. Our hearts go out to each and every family that has suffered such an incident. This is a life experience that is truly difficult to share."
The unidentified passerby, a woman, told police she was driving by and noticed a man lying by the side of the road, investigators said. She stopped to help and discovered he was dead.
"We are questioning the witness," Lloyd said.
Cosby and wife Camille also have four daughters: Erika, Erinn, Ensa and Evin. Each of the children's names begins with the letter "E" to represent excellence.
Bill Cosby, executive producer of "Cosby," stars as Hilton Lucas, a husband and father in the midst of corporate downsizing. The popular comedian has also authored the books "Fatherhood," "Time Flies" and "Childhood."
He was sprawled on the ground in a pool of blood next to the hunter green convertible. Its passenger door and trunk were gaping open, its emergency lights were blinking, a tire jack was beside the car, and lug nuts were strewn across the ground.
The witness told police she saw a white male fleeing the scene, and police believe she arrived seconds after the attacker fired a single shot at Cosby.
It took police until mid-morning to locate and notify Bill Cosby on the New York City set of his situation comedy show, Cosby.
Looking stricken, with sadness etched onto his expressive face, Cosby made only one brief comment to reporters gathered outside his Manhattan townhouse, before he disappeared inside.
``He was my hero,'' said Cosby, who built a career around playing a loving father who maintains a wry calm in the face of crisis.
Cosby, who was born and raised in Philadelphia, left his Manhattan home last night with his wife. They were expected to fly last night to Los Angeles, where the family also maintains a home about six miles from the interchange where Ennis Cosby was fatally shot.
Police yesterday sealed off the Tudor-style family home where Ennis Cosby was apparently staying and were combing it looking for anything that might help. Family members were not being allowed in.
A statement his publicist released on behalf of Cosby and his wife, Camille, added: ``Our hearts go out to each and every family in which such an incident has occurred. This is a life experience that is truly difficult to share.''
At Temple University in Philadelphia, where Bill Cosby graduated and is a trustee, Richard J. Fox, chairman of the Board of Trustees and President Peter J. Liacouras said: ``The entire Temple University family is in mourning today. Temple students, faculty, staff, trustees, and alumni throughout the world extend our deepest sympathy to the Cosby family.''
Ennis was the Cosby's only son. The couple also have four daughters.
Los Angeles Police Commander Tim McBride, who lost a daughter in a hit-and-run accident, said he had notified Cosby of his son's slaying and spoke to him for about 20 minutes. He described him as composed, but in ``significant grief.'' McBride said Cosby appealed to police to locate and prosecute the gunman. Cosby's statement expressed his confidence in the Los Angeles police.
McBride told reporters at the crime scene yesterday morning that Ennis Cosby was driving from an apartment in West Los Angeles to visit a friend in the San Fernando Valley. McBride did not identify the friend or the purpose of the middle-of-the-night visit.
The usually bustling San Diego Freeway, or Route 405, is the major north-south highway on the west side of Los Angeles. But the Mulholland Drive exit ramp Cosby took was all but deserted when he stopped along a short access road just off the exit ramp named Skirball Center Drive. Nestled in the hills and canyons nearby are the posh mansions of Bel Air where many celebrities reside.
Police have determined that Cosby made one telephone call from his car's cellular phone shortly before the attack, but McBride would not say to whom it was made or whether Cosby gave any indication he was in peril. There was no phone call made to the 911 emergency number, suggesting Cosby was shot without warning and died almost immediately.
He apparently had already replaced the front left tire with the spare from the trunk of his $130,000 car, and was in the midst of tightening the lug nuts when he was hit by a single bullet.
McBride said it did not appear that any property had been stolen from the vehicle, which is registered to Cosby Enterprises. Nevertheless, he cited attempted robbery as the presumed motive. He said it was a ``good probability'' that Cosby was followed off the freeway. ``But it may have been a chance opportunity that somebody took,'' he added.
Nor was there any initial evidence of a struggle, and McBride said Cosby ``may have been taken by surprise.''
Police interviewed the witness through the day to glean more details of what she had observed.
Los Angeles television station KCBS reported yesterday that the witness was the person Ennis Cosby was driving to visit and whom he had called for help after his tire went flat. They withheld her name but said she was the offspring of an icon in the entertainment industry.
Cosby was a 1992 graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta. He earned a master's degree at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York in 1995 and was working toward his doctorate in special education.
He was the model for the son, Theo, in the fictional Huxtable family of The Cosby Show, a situation comedy popular throughout the '80s. Bill Cosby said he drew from his relationship with his son in crafting scenarios and dialogue for the show.
In his current role, Bill Cosby is crotchety Hilton Lucas, a husband and father forced into early retirement by corporate downsizing.
Cosby tapes Thursdays at 4 and 7:30 p.m. in front of an audience at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, N.Y.
Yesterday's tapings were canceled and everyone was sent home, said a CBS spokeswoman, Liz Josephson. Next week, the show was to to be on hiatus anyway, she said.
Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Entertainment, said yesterday: ``This is a sad day for me personally and everyone at CBS. As a parent, and a friend of Bill and Camille, I am deeply saddened by this unthinkable tragedy. All of us at CBS Entertainment offer our condolences and support to the Cosby family.''
Peter Lund, president and CEO of CBS Inc., said in a statement: ``The Cosby family has suffered a tragic loss, and all of us at CBS extend our deepest sympathy, our love and our prayers.''
Throughout his successful TV and less successful movie career, Cosby has never abandoned standup. He regularly appears in Atlantic City, and on March 29 he is scheduled to play two shows at Camden's Waterfront Entertainment Centre.
Details:
On January 16, 1997, twenty-seven year old Ennis Cosby, the son of comedian and actor Bill Cosby, was on his way to visit a friend, Stephanie Crane, when he recieved a flat tire on his Mercedes Benz and turned off Interstate 405 in Los Angeles to try and fix it. Cosby called Crane who came a few minutes later and shined her car lights on Cosby's car so he could fix the tire. Then, an unknown assailant came up to the driver's side window of Crane's car and pulled a gun on her. She then drove away from the scene and about a minute later came back to see if Cosby was alright, but the unknown assailant had already shot him in the head and killed him by the time she returned. Crane then saw the man running down the street away from the scene. He has not been identified. Police believe that the killer may have tried to rob Cosby, but instead killed him because he was not fast enough in giving the killer money.
Suspects:
Crane could tell that the killer was a white man between the ages of 25 and 32 in a light-knit colored cap who resembled Sean Penn, a character from the movie Dead Man Walking.
Mikail Markhasev - The Patsy
The chances that the CIA, by the 1980s notoriously inept, could have managed such an endeavor are slight to say the least, and the notion of officials in Washington openly devising, endorsing, and putting into action such a blatantly racist policy strains credulity, seeming no more likely than white doctors injecting blacks with AIDS.
Yet a great many blacks find such ideas plausible nevertheless, and assume (with many whites) that the editor of the Mercury was simply caving in to coercion from the Powers That Be. For the sake of argument, let's say that the CIA was actually guilty as charged.
The first problem is that if they did this, they were throwing a match into a blaze that had been raging for decades — the inner city was created through the confluence of white flight, deindustrialization, and the expansion of welfare benefits. The first of these factors, white flight, was racism but hardly directed from Washington, and made possible by a general suburban expansion which was indeed encouraged on the Federal level, but for financial reasons unconnected with racial concerns. The second, deindustrialization, has been a matter of faceless economics (no one would argue that corporations have moved to the suburbs and overseas to escape black people). The third, the expansion of welfare, can only be interpreted as benevolence. Even if the CIA were caught red-handed, this would not indicate that the horror of the inner city was a deliberate creation of racists in the U.S. government.
Second, even if the CIA had channeled crack into South Central, how do we explain the same inner-city horrors in all of the other American cities, like Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Oakland, and dozens of others? Unless we believe that the CIA also funneled crack into each and every one of these cities, then the question arises: If conditions got to the point they did in all of these other cities, then what makes it necessary or even worth pondering that South Central resulted from CIA intervention?
And finally, even if with great effort we could somehow find a smoking gun proving the implausible scenario of the CIA devoting its overextended energies to carefully funneling crack into just the black communities of over a hundred American cities, then what would that do for the people suffering in South Central today? Wouldn't Maxine Waters be better serving her constituency by focusing on concrete efforts to better their lives? The aimless obsession with this is a waste of precious energy, but it makes sense as yet another demonstration of how addressing racism constructively has taken a backseat to simply crying racism to savor whites' humiliation.
Importantly, however, no one has ever proven that the CIA funneled crack into South Central or anywhere else, not Maxine Waters, and not even a reporter who spent months searching for such proof, whose reputation hung on the case, and who could resuscitate his reputation by at last finding the smoking gun. If the issue were something black people had done, we can be sure that the case would long ago have been considered closed in the black community, with any efforts to revive it signs of racism (can we say "O.J."?). Victimology, however, will ensure that even educated and successful black Americans like Bill Cosby will continue to trace the crack epidemic to the CIA."
