Fat Albert Wisdom

The Lessons of Fat Albert

Hey, hey, hey! A TV cartoon is going to save black America. That was the message of Bill Cosby's doctoral thesis 30 years ago at UMass, a paper that lies at the root of Cosby's rants today.

By John Ridley | April 8, 2007

I remember it vividly from when I was a kid. At the time, and even today, it is the most absurdly nerve-racking image I believe I’ve ever seen. “It” is a photograph. So horrifically brilliant it seems as if the devil himself had done the shutterbugging. The picture, monochromatic. Black and white in every sense. White rage. Black resilience. Mob violence and mindless hate and all the blind racist crap that blacks had been dealing with since the first of us got loaded off the boat from the motherland.

And it is the artifact that most definitively captures the middle years of the 1970s: a black guy sporting a three-piece suit – Ted Landsmark – getting manhandled in broad daylight outside Boston City Hall by a couple of white guys. One guy, Joseph Rakes – white, same as the other aggressors – has got Old Glory on a standard. Seems to be in the act of rearing back to spear Landsmark. To kill him – if he can – with the most sacred symbol of our nation.

This is America. 1976.

For blacks, was there another time that held as much promise and as much peril in equal portions; a second middle passage, from Jim Crow to the larger successes of which we were always capable?

The run-up to ’76 was impressive.

In 1972, Shirley Chisholm made her historic bid for the White House.

In 1973, Maynard Jackson became the first black elected mayor of a major Southern US city, Atlanta.

In 1975, Lee Elder was the first brother to play in the Masters Tournament. Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win at Wimbledon (Althea Gibson took the women’s at Wimbledon back in 1957).

In 1976, Alex Haley’s Roots hit the bookstores, immediately popularizing the African-American struggle.

1976 also saw the inaugural edition of the National Urban League’s “The State of Black America,” which was to become an annual assessment of where we were as a people.

Where we were wasn’t good.

Never mind all the accomplishments black Americans were racking up in the public arena, the Urban League wasn’t having any flowery clack from politicos who were determined to spend America’s bicentennial year singing hymns about the land of the free. League executive director Vernon Jordan held back none as he held forth at a press conference in January of ’76. “Last week the president declared that the State of the Union is ‘better, in many ways a lot better,’ ” Jordan said. “I’m here today to say that the state of black Americans is worse.”

According to the league’s report, citing 1974 stats, the proportion of middle-income black families had dipped in a year from one-fourth to one-fifth of the population. The median income for blacks was 58 percent that of whites. The black jobless rate was at 26 percent.

But the league’s real concern was the quality of education available to blacks and the “substantial issue of whether our schools are providing adequate educations to minorities and the poor.” With declining test scores and increasing dropout rates, the conclusion was obvious to the league: “By any test, the answer is no.”

Education as a means of ascension has been held as a precious ideal by enlightened blacks throughout our history in America. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by the famed escaped slave, Douglass quotes his onetime owner, Master Auld, laying out real plainly the perils of having educated blacks runnin’ around: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.” And one could just about imagine old Auld chewing his cud as he dispensed this gem of a yokelism: “It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

No truer words.

And this prevailing notion of enslavement through ignorance – enforced in subsequent years by acts of law when possible, violence when “necessary” – separated blacks from education right up to the time Landsmark was being attacked by Rakes and his re-purposed American flag.

So, while a bunch of the country was busy trying to will their mood rings to shine bicentennial red, white, and blue, there were some in our community who saw the crisis. They focused on maintaining the educational ascension of black America.

In May 1977, an unlikely doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst – the man who would a few years later become America’s Black Dad – walked across a stage with his familiar smile, shook the hand of chancellor Randolph Bromery, and collected his diploma. And with that, Bill Cosby walked out into the world with a 267-page dissertation that posited an interesting, bold, and ultimately (slightly) controversial way forward for urban education.

Of late, the Cos has been a lightning rod for controversy as much as a source of levity. His views on the failures of some blacks are deemed so extreme that a few in our community have all but excommunicated him from the race. What happened, some wonder, to that rubbery-faced comedian who frequented The Tonight Show? What became of the characters that he transmogrified into the “angry black man” who rarely viewed the world except from behind smoked glasses? What transpired between Cosby then and Cosby now?

Or did anything?

If human nature is a constant, did Bill Cosby simply become more of what he always was?

If there is a source code to the man, it’s likely to be found in words, ideas, and ideals he himself had written 30 years ago in that dissertation. And beyond the illumination it offers to those who believe they know Cosby, the operative question going in is: Does the plan he expressed for black America then hold up to scrutiny now?

By the mid-seventies, Bill Cosby already owned a lot of entertainment real estate. Live stand-up and comedy albums. I Spy on NBC. A grip of Emmys. Costarring in a string of movies with Sidney Poitier.

It may seem kinda odd that a guy who pretty much had the world by a string would even bother going after a doctorate, especially one that was earned and not merely awarded. But the Cos has always been passionate about learned minds. A passion he made public in the (very) controversial May 2004 speech/lecture/rant he gave at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., at an NAACP commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. In the speech, Cosby excoriated “lower economic and lower middle economic” blacks for not “holding their end in this deal.” “The deal” having been forced on the white majority at the end of the civil rights era: a swap of basic rights for the good citizenry and hard work for which blacks had always displayed the capacity.

Instead, Cosby saw a segment of our race that, despite the gains of the civil rights movement, cherished Ebonics over English. The sporting life over raising the babies they made. Anything and everything over education. This address came to be known as the “Poundcake” speech, derived from the following lines delivered by Cosby:

“Looking at the incarcerated [blacks], these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of poundcake! And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the poundcake in his hand?”

Though this was met with wild applause from the assembled, in the following weeks the media – always oddly curious when a black man proves himself to be independent of the throwback groupthink – made much hay of how the speech supposedly outraged black America. I have yet to see any actual statistical evidence that a larger portion of black America disagreed with Cosby than agreed with him.

But the media gave disproportionate attention to the whining of the Old Schoolers and Victim Mongers – those who make a good living shilling to other blacks the snake oil of eternal scapegoating and low expectations – rather than giving full examination to the facts of which Cosby spoke: the need for blacks to refocus themselves on the fundamentals of learning.

Cosby himself had come to education in a roundabout way. Born in Philly in 1937, he favored athletics over academics. Repeated the 10th grade. Quit school altogether to hook up with the Navy. He eventually got a GED by correspondence. Entered Temple University on an athletic scholarship, his aspirations set on being a phys-ed teacher.

But, you know, there was stand-up comedy and TV and fame and fortune and all that.

Still, education remained a strong thread in Cosby’s life. Enough so that when he could have elected to spend his free time kicking it in Beverly Hills, he instead headed to UMass in 1970 in pursuit of his EdD. He built a house and moved to Massachusetts so he could attend classes, but it became clear early on that Cosby couldn’t maintain a regular course schedule because of the mob scene his presence created. An alternative access program was devised where Cosby could study with professors off campus.

“His path was not ordinary,” recalls Dwight Allen, dean of UMass’s School of Education at the time of Cosby’s studies. He is also the coauthor of a book written in 2000 with Cosby, American Schools: The $100 Billion Challenge. “It was highly individualized but intensive.” Allen says Cosby was recruited to UMass through a mutual attraction. “I was trying very hard to increase the range of diversity of doctoral students. There were few people of color from any field. And we were trying to find ways to combat institutional racism at all levels.”

That clearly appealed to Cosby – working on ways to break down a busted system not up to the task of attending to what he considered the unique needs of black children. It is a solution to this issue to which Cosby dedicated his doctoral studies. The culmination of which he believed to be a groundbreaking method of incorporating a new educational tool into the curriculum that would speak to black children with words and images specifically tailored to their unique upbringing. Cosby offered this system in a dissertation that carried the incredible but true title: “An Integration of the Visual Media Via ‘Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids’ into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning.”

Fat Albert was going to save black America.

If the household I grew up inoutside of Milwaukee is used as prime exemplar, I can tell you that for black kids in the ’70s, Fat Albert was “must see” viewing. Not so much for its entertainment value. A cartoon built around “be”-attitudes couldn’t much hold a candle to the Super Friends kicking interstellar ass. But for my parents and millions of other black parents, when their children could watch space aliens and teenage witches and kung fu dogs but pass a Saturday peeping nary a person of color, that alone was reason enough for Fat Albert to exist.

Truth being so much stranger than fiction, Fat Albert and his gang were actually based on real kids Cosby grew up with in Philadelphia. According to his official bio, “Cosby attended Wister Elementary School along with his pals Fat Albert, Old Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Rudy, Nolan, and Weasel.” Years on, as part of an overall deal to keep the hot Cosby at NBC following the conclusion of I Spy in 1968, the network sprang for an animated special based on Cosby’s schoolboy chums: Hey, Hey, Hey – It’s Fat Albert. The special was moderately successful; it got two more airings after its premiere in 1969. But a planned Saturday morning series never materialized. Cosby tried to interest ABC, but it, too, passed. “Both ABC and NBC were not interested in producing an educationally oriented animated series,” Cosby says in his thesis.

He then took Fat Albert to CBS, which, as Cosby writes, saw “something that was worthwhile in this area.” Whether that something was producing an educational Saturday morning show for black kids or merely getting into the Cosby business is dealer’s choice.

Retitled Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and with live-action “wraparounds” featuring Cosby, the show debuted on September 9, 1972. It would run for eight years, and then run another five retitled as The New Fat Albert Show.

But for Cosby, the success of Fat Albert wasn’t to be measured by its longevity but by the unique way the series was created.

“From the beginning, Bill and Lou [Scheimer, one of the founders and principal producers at Filmation, Fat Albert’s production company] said: ‘We have these characters, and we really want to do something good with these characters,’ ” says Gordon Berry. Now professor emeritus at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Berry helped establish the advisory panel that guided the development of each Fat Albert script from an educational standpoint. “The way we framed the series was to say that this was a series that helped children to learn about and explore pro-social messages, values, and later life lessons.” Those lessons include dealing with race relations, gender relations, drug abuse, smoking, bullying, honesty, and even loss. “It was one of the early shows for children to deal with death and dying,” says Berry. In an episode titled “The Shuttered Window,” one of the Cosby kids loses a favorite uncle.

“Look at the subjects we covered,” Cosby tells me through his publicist, David Brokaw. “The conscientiousness was that I was always working in an educational and entertainment mode.”

This is what Cosby put forward in his dissertation as a foundation for helping young black kids with emotional and educational development. Using an entertainment medium – television – and images to which black kids relate – another black child, Fat Albert – to transmit “knowledges, skills and attitudes to children so they may grow to their fullest potential.” The idea being that educational systems are most effective when they do not take the guise of traditional curriculum and when the delivery method most reflects the intended audience.

This approach is hardly radical. By the time Cosby finished his dissertation, the granddaddy of edu-tainment, Sesame Street, had already been on the air for eight years.

But there is an additional element Cosby brings to his dissertation that is both revelatory of the man and powerful in its directive. It is nothing less than using the countervailing image of Fat Albert to displace latent racism from the public school system. And the Bill Cosby of 1977 was not afraid to claim racism was rampant and to invoke the legacy of discrimination as being the reason for lingering black failures in education. In the first 13 pages of his dissertation, Cosby makes direct references to racism 11 times. Among his choicest cuts: Blacks must learn to “combat the insidious nature of institutional racism which our schools perpetuate.” Teachers are “instilled with their own racist attitudes”; there is “inherent racism in American schools”; and blacks have gotta keep an eye out for the “depth and pervasiveness of racism within the white community.” His militant side in full effect, Cosby quotes from two of the most radicalized black men of their day, Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael. Pulling from their book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America: “It [racism] takes two closely related forms: individual whites against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community . . . individual racism and institutional racism.”

Oh, what would the suburban whites who happily snapped up the Jell-O and Coca-Cola hawked by Cosby think today if they knew their beloved product pitchman had, at least back then, resented the “depth and pervasiveness” of their racism?

The 1977 Cosby ideology of failure due to systemic racism provides an interesting insight into his psychology in light of his current detractors. There are the Old Schoolers who themselves blame our travails on all but ourselves. The Victim Mongers among us who often accuse the pro-self-reliance Cosby of being “accidentally black” – that is, having stumbled into race awareness late in life. The incendiary language of his 30-year-old thesis alone proves that is not the case. And such narrow accusations re the authenticity of Cosby’s blackness (or the blackness of any middle-class African-American) collapse under the weight of their own racism: that to be stamped “officially black,” a person of color must conceive and respond only in a prescribed manner or risk excommunication from the entire race. And beyond Cosby’s words, such attacks against him are belied by his deeds. In the 1980s, Cosby and his wife, Camille, donated millions to various historically black universities, including one $20 million gift to Atlanta’s Spelman College.

Cosby would endure a lifetime of hatas claiming he wasn’t doing enough – not at their predetermined level of contribution. His comedy and TV and film roles were too devoid of ethnic awareness. But Cosby, displaying the most precious attribute of ascended blacks, clearly did not care what others expected of him. Intuitively, he understood that success is gained through an appreciation of one’s own personal value.

For Cosby, it’s in this Randian manner that Fat Albert would assist in black educational achievement. “He is a sympathetic hero,” Cosby writes in his dissertation, “that children, especially black children, can empathize with as he struggles with value conflicts and the peer group problems that confront children today.”

Adds Berry: “The interesting thing was, with Fat Albert, we were able to get these messages over because we started with clear educational objectives and wrote toward them.”

Though its goals are laudable, its language emotional, it is in the depth of scholarly research that Cosby’s dissertation falls somewhat short. Discussion of the show in direct relation to school curriculum – a section titled “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: A Vehicle to Transmit Development of Affective Skills in Children” – is limited to nine pages. By comparison, a section on the production aspects of the show runs seven pages, including a detailed examination on “Xeroxing.” The research into how Fat Albert would jump-start fundamentals for school kids consists of a fairly rudimentary questionnaire sent to 225 teachers and administrators, though the results are discussed in a lengthy Chapter Five. But I was reminded by Allen that the expected level of research in a dissertation circa 2007 is far heavier than it would have been 30 years ago. “If this dissertation were done today, the methodology would be much more sophisticated,” he says. “By the same token, Bill’s dissertation was much more methodologically sophisticated than my own, almost 20 years before that.”

Cosby submitted his dissertation, backed with charts and graphs. He advocated for it in a requisite oral defense that by all accounts proceeded without incident. And on May 1, 1977, in the commencement ceremony held in the university’s football stadium, the newly minted Dr. Cosby in gown and mortarboard got paparazzi-snapped accepting his EdD. The Boston Globe ran a headline with the picture – “Cosby Wins His Doctor’s Degree” – and predicted that he would teach at Amherst. Not out of the realm of possibility. Cosby himself once swore he would kick Hollywood to the curb by the time he was 34 and become a full-time educator.

But, you know, there was stand-up comedy and TV and fame and fortune and all that.

Cosby’s doctorate was hardly set aside. In the intervening years, Cosby has whipped around his degree with the ferocity of a ninja throwing star. At an exponential rate of increase, one has been more likely to see the man credit himself as William H. Cosby Jr., EdD, than as Bill Cosby or Cosby or the Cos. No doubt that is a combo of justified pride and a bit of plain hubris. But Cosby earned his doctorate, so why not lay claim to it?

Then came “Poundcake.”

In the tornado-alleylike aftermath of that verbal twister, the Victim Mongers, no doubt feeling exposed as perpetrators of black indolence, looked for any stick to seize upon and give Cosby a flogging. Cosby was hit up with the usual invective reserved for blacks who espouse a way forward that runs counter to the Old Schoolers: Race traitor, he was called. And sellout and Uncle Tom.

And, too, his doctorate was scrutinized. If Cosby was going to question blacks and education, didn’t it make a certain eye-for-an-eye sense that some blacks would question his credentials? The tool most often used to chip away at them was Reginald Damerell.

A former associate professor of education at UMass and the author of the book Education’s Smoking Gun: How Teachers Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America, Damerell was a member of Cosby’s dissertation committee. Having literally signed off on Cosby’s thesis, Damerell was in a unique position to assess Cosby’s finished effort.

The assessment he gives is not real good.

Damerell believes Cosby to be nothing more than a trophy student for the UMass school of education, brought in to enhance the image of the then scandal-tainted university. Damerell sees UMass as nothing but a “diploma mill.” Cosby’s assertions of systemic racism were “standard rhetoric of the school’s administration and faculty, as well as much of the national black community,” writes Damerell, who is white. Cosby merely “regurgitated that rhetoric without thorough examination.”

The bottom line of Damerell’s book is that Cosby’s EdD does not attest to “genuine academic achievement.” That Cosby’s doings are “empty credentials.” Those lines quoted ad nauseam. Repeated by the enablers of our race – whom I will not give credence to by name – same as an urban legend that survives for its entertainment value rather than its basis in fact. Repeated without reference to the fact Damerell’s actually speaking of several individuals and not just Cosby when he makes that statement. Also missing is reference to Damerell’s own credentials. Or lack thereof. A former advertising copywriter who moved to teaching partly because he was fed up with being a hidden persuader, Damerell confesses to me that he doesn’t have a doctorate. Merely a BA in English. Has only taken a single college-level course in education. Prior to Cosby’s, he’d never read a doctoral dissertation. Damerell, to me, sheepishly, defensively: “But I have a good idea what was substance and what’s not.”

Also questionable are Damerell’s own views on race. If there were truly racism in America, “it is difficult to imagine how he [Cosby] and other black entertainers and professional athletes have come to be as popular as they are,” Damerell writes in his book, as if he has no idea where a black person in the mid-’70s woulda come up with the notion of discrimination.

I guess Damerell missed that photo of Rakes attacking Landsmark.

The entire preceding civil rights era.

And a little thing called slavery.

How queer it is that anyone, and blacks in particular, would use the words of an underqualified, umm, bigot to assail a black man whose only crime is to chide the rest of us to do our best. And clearly having done so without reading Cosby’s work. It speaks more to the desperation of some to obfuscate the real issues that face black America than it does of Cosby’s dedication to the advancement of his race.

And that is perhaps the greatest insight to be gained from Cosby’s thesis; what changed with Cosby the comedian in the last three decades? Not much. And not much change should have been expected. Human nature is a constant. Over time people do not alter. They simply become more of what they truly are.

When examined from the perspective of potency of message, the “quality” of Cosby’s dissertation is to a degree inconsequential. So, too, is the issue of whether or not Fat Albert in the classroom would have really been of benefit to “at-risk” kids or amounted to little more than a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. What matters most are the ideals expressed. For all the questioning of Cosby’s blackness – the ugly echoes of which we hear now with Barack Obama – in 30 years’ time, the consistency of Cosby’s message has remained the same: self-reliance, self-determination, education as a means to ascension. The very ideals that gave us passage from slavery to a failed Reconstruction on through Jim Crow past the civil rights era. That’s 200-plus years of black singularity.

Allen sees Cosby’s dissertation as one of the most influential of that last 50 years. “Whereas most dissertations count their impact by the number of times a few of its copies are checked out or cited,” he says, “Bill Cosby’s dissertation lives even today in the minds and hearts of the many adults who, as children, enthusiastically volunteered each Saturday morning to receive, live, and applaud its messages of unity, responsibility, and good will.”

So, the question going into this was: Do these concepts retain their worth?

Though not all of any race aspire to them, I do not believe that, in the 30 years since Cosby wrote his dissertation, those values have become passe.

It is worth reading. As an artifact of an era. As a documentation of principles.

Cosby’s work on stage and screen is meant to be enjoyed. His opinions on the direction of black America are meant to be endured, as well as endure. “At the age of 70, UMass and the awareness of teaching and aiding and entertaining continues to be my purpose,” he tells me in another part of his statement.

That others dismiss Cosby’s stands on education, particularly given his dissertation, and would rather remain antagonistic than open to discourse on the ideals of advancement that are the very real legacy of the civil rights movement. . . Man, for me, that some in our race choose to remain intellectually timid carries a frightful sadness.

Very much similar to one I felt years ago, as a kid, when I first saw Rakes having at Landsmark with that American flag.

© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company