Cosby, Bill

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Cosby, Bill

July 12, 1937

Comedian and philanthropist William Henry "Bill" Cosby Jr. was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to William and Annie Pearle Cosby. After a stint in the Navy (1956–1960), Cosby studied at Temple University in Philadelphia but dropped out to pursue a career as a stand-up comic.

During the 1960s Cosby worked in network television as a comedian featured on late-night talk shows. In 1965 he became the first African-American network television star in a dramatic series when producers named him to co-star with Robert Culp in I Spy (1965–1968). Cosby's character, Alexander Scott, did not usually address his blackness or another character's whiteness. As with other forms of popular entertainment with black characters at the time, Cosby's character was portrayed in a manner in which being black merely meant having slightly darker skin. He won Emmy awards for the role in 1966 and 1967.

From 1969 through 1971 Cosby appeared as Chet Kincaid, a bachelor high school coach, on the situation

comedy series The Bill Cosby Show. Cosby portrayed Kincaid as a proud but not militant black man. The series was moderately successful. A few years later, Cosby and CBS joined forces in a television experiment, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972–1977), a cartoon series for children. The series set the course for television in the vital new area of ethics, values, judgment, and personal responsibility. By the end of its three-year run, Fat Albert had inspired a number of new directions in children's television.

In 1972 and 1973 Cosby starred in The New Bill Cosby Show, a comedy-variety series. Cosby's Jemmin Company, which he had recently established, produced the shows, allowing him to have more control over the productions. As he did in all his television series, Cosby made great use of other black artists who had had few opportunities to practice their craft elsewhere.

For a few months in late 1976, largely because of his success as a regular guest on the PBS educational series The Electric Company, where he demonstrated great skill at working with and entertaining youngsters, ABC hired Cosby to host a prime time hour-long variety series oriented toward children, Cos. It did not catch on with viewers, however, and was canceled after a few months.

In the fall of 1984 The Cosby Show began on NBC, featuring Cosby as Cliff Huxtable, an obstetrician living with his wife and four children in a New York City brownstone. Their fifth child, away at college most of the time, appeared sporadically in featured parts. The show put black images on the screen that many people admired. The characters on The Cosby Show represented a real African-American upper-middle-class family, rarely seen on American television. Cosby sought black artists who had not been seen on network television in years for cameo roles (Dizzy Gillespie and Judith Jamison, for example). He also included black writers among his creative staff, and by the third year, he insisted on using a black director for some of the episodes. In its first year, The Cosby Show finished third in the ratings; from the second season through the fourth season, it was the number-one-rated show in the United States.

Conscious of the need to lead the networks toward more equitable treatment of African Americans, Cosby used his position to require that more doors be opened. He had a presence in almost every area of television programming: He was a mass volume spokesman and star presenter for advertisements and public relations image campaigns that included Jell-O, Coca-Cola, Delmonte, Kodak, and E. F. Hutton. He appeared in drama, action-adventure stories, comedies, and children's programs. In 1992 he also entered into prime-time syndication with Carsey-Werner Productions with a remake of the old Groucho Marx game series, You Bet Your Life. The show lasted only one season. That same year, however, Cosby made public his bid to purchase the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC-TV), a television network worth $9 billion. Cosby was determined to call attention to the proliferation of negative images of black people and the titillation of viewers with sex and violence. All television viewers, he argued, were diminished by the spate of "drive-by images" that reinforced shallow stereotypes. In 1995 Cosby produced another unsuccessful syndicated series, The Cosby Mysteries. In 1996 he began a new hit series, Cosby, in which he played a working-class man from Queens, New York.

Throughout his career Cosby appeared at highly popular concert performances across the United States. His comedy focused on his own life as a reflection of universal human needs. He also produced more than twenty comedy/musical record albums, many of which won Grammy awards, including Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow (1963), I Started Out as a Child (1964), Why Is There Air? (1965), Wonderfulness (1966), Revenge (1967), To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With (1968), Bill Cosby (1969), Bill Cosby Talks to Children About Drugs (1971), and Children, You'll Understand (1986). Cosby has written many best-selling books, including The Wit and Wisdom of Fat Albert (1973), You Are Somebody Special (1978), Fatherhood (1986), Time Flies (1987), and Love and Marriage (1989). He has served on numerous boards, including those of the NAACP, Operation PUSH, the United Negro College Fund, and the National Sickle Cell Foundation.

Cosby, who in 1993 was listed in Forbes magazine as one of the four hundred richest people in the world with a net worth of more than $315 million, has been one of the most important benefactors to African-American institutions. In 1986 he and his wife gave $1.3 million to Fisk University; the following year they gave another $1.3 million to be divided equally among four black universities—Central State, Howard, Florida A & M, and Shaw; in 1988 they divided $1.5 million between Meharry Medical College and Bethune-Cookman College. In 1989 Bill and Camille Cosby announced that they were giving $20 million to Spelman College, the largest personal gift ever made to any of the historically black colleges and universities. In 1994 the couple donated a historic landmark building in downtown Washington, D.C., to the National Council of Negro Women to help them establish a National Center for African-American Women. Cosby himself has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (1985). He holds an M.A. (1972) and a doctorate (1976) in education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1976 he also finally received a B.A. from Temple University. Cosby, who married Camille Hanks in 1964, has lived in rural Massachusetts since the early 1970s.

In 1997 Cosby's life was shattered when his son Ennis was robbed and murdered in Los Angeles. (Mikail Markhasev, a Russian immigrant, was convicted of the murder in 1998.) In the fall of 1997 Cosby was the target of an extortion plot by Autumn Jackson, an African-American woman who threatened to reveal that Cosby was her father unless he paid her. At Jackson's extortion trial, Cosby was forced to admit to an extramarital affair with Jackson's mother, but he denied he was Jackson's father. After Cosby's assertion was confirmed by DNA testing, Jackson was convicted. In 1998 he began a new television series, Kids Say the Darnedest Things.

In addition to his stand-up comedy, Cosby has produced movies, including Men of Honor (2000) and Fat Albert (2004), as well as numerous television shows. At the 2003 Emmy Awards, Cosby received the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.