Next month will mark the third anniversary of a seismic event that remains under discussion - often heatedly - to this day. Some would refer to it as a "civil rights speech," long overdue. Some would dismiss the remarks as simply the incoherent maundering of a shameful apostate, a quisling to his race. Some would prefer to debate the contents of the speech (ideally, with a large media audience) and launch into a grandiose academic analysis of the speaker’s motives and intents. Columnists, pundits, talking-heads, and the various schools of intelligentsia have dissected and parsed the content of the speech as if it were the Gettysburg Address, the State of the Union, and "I Have a Dream" all rolled into one.

After all the semantic gyrations, cortical gymnastics and redundant flagellations, the speech will be indisputably declared to be either dead-on correct or the ravings of a lunatic- depending, of course, on the "expert's" personal agenda. It seems there is no middle ground for the original oratory. Even at this late date, the words of this speech (or sermon, delirious diatribe, cry for help, or geriatric schizoid moment - again depending on your viewpoint) continue to be discussed. It has even been the subject of at least 2 books of which I am aware. Even more frequently, the commentary is referred to in a larger cultural/societal context.

On May 17, 2004, Bill Cosby officially went off the reservation.

The setting: the NAACP’s gala, black tie, invitation-only 50^th Anniversary celebration of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education judgement the DAR Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. Cosby and his wife, Camille, were being presented with an award for their long service and support of the NAACP. His acceptance speech turned into the "speech that shook the world." It has since been ingloriously dubbed the "Pound Cake Speech." [You can read the entire text and hear audio excerpts here.]

The fallout was not immediate. In fact, I was as if all the reporters were trying to decide whether the story should be reported or not. Sparse details appeared in the Washington Post, primarily in the "Reliable Source" columns of Richard Leiby, in the equivalent of the Post’s "gossip column." NAACP Executive Director Kweisi Mfume reportedly said he agreed with "most of what Cosby said" and hugged him after the speech. "He said what needed to be said," Mfume said. Charles Ramsey, Chief of police for Washington (who had made a plea earlier in 2004 for more community involvement in crime prevention) and Jesse Jackson made approving comments over the first few days after the event. However, as more newspaper and broadcast media began airing the story with excerpts from the speech, a critical decision appeared to have been made. And, predictably, the Empire struck back.

First, it was a single light saber in the form of a Washington Post editorial by Theodore Shaw, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In this opening salvo from the Empire, Shaw outlined his objections to Cosby’s call for black self-improvement as the solution to all the ills of the ghetto. He cited continued racism (with a case of a lying police office in Texas causing the incarceration of innocent blacks) and other "structural" causes to black poverty. He did, however close with:

"Following a recent conversation, Cosby and I agreed on this much: To the extent that he is frustrated and angry about the failure of people to be responsible parents, and about senseless crime and violence, I stand with him; to the extent that we continue to be challenged by the systemic issues of race and racism that the Legal Defense Fund has confronted since the days of my predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Cosby stands with me. There is no either/or for anyone who truly works in the interests of African Americans and our nation."

But, from this trickle, came a flood of ink in Biblical proportions. As the plaudits for Cosby arose from the right, criticism began to flow from the left. Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was one of the kinder early shots, He only said:

"Assuming that Dr. Cosby's riffs on black slang and the criminal justice system were digressions from what was an otherwise balanced speech, one has to wonder why he didn't direct some of his righteous indignation toward the children of the black middle class who have even less excuse for not performing as well as whites on standardized tests.Besides throwing out the dubious statistic that half of poor blacks drop out of high school, (the actual rate is 13.1 percent), Dr. Cosby's reluctance to indict under-performing African Americans who have benefitted the most from civil rights legislation and affirmative action looks self-serving."

Sylvester Brown Jr., columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote "Like a surrogate grandfather, Cosby took America’s youth to the woodshed. Unfortunately, he did it publicly where such acts are often misunderstood." Barbara Ehrenreich of the NY Times Op-Ed’d (from abstract) "prompted by Bill Cosby's recent attack on poor of his race, especially youthful poor, for range of sins; recalls that during buildup to welfare 'reform' in 1996, it was fashionable to beat up on the black poor; says members of think tanks such as Heritage Foundation routinely excoriated poor black women and poor black youth; says demonization of welfare recipients was not based on reality, since only minority of them are black; says elderly rich like Cosby must have fun beating up on people too young or too poor to fight back"

Occasionally, support would come from unlikely sources. Spike Lee told People magazine that "We have to get back to stressing education because this gangster rap stuff is taking us down the wrong area. We have young black children growing up thinking that if you get straight A's, act intelligent and try to get good grades, that somehow they're acting white or that they're a sellout. But if you're on the corner drinking a 40, smoking a blunt and holding your nuts, then you're black. Something is wrong." In the same issue, Phylicia Rashad (a.k.a. Mrs. Huxtable) said "What (Bill's) addressing specifically, and this is true for our nation, is that education is not valued the way it needs to be for the sake of our young people and our nation. And I think he's right about that. Teachers are not held in the same regard as they were when I was in school. He's not wrong about that, and he's right for asserting that parents have to advocate for their children."

But the chorus of dissenters grew...and grew. On a PBS roundtable, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who had written two scathing editorials of Cosby in The Village Voice) said "The solutions to those problems don't lie in attacking the way people dress, they don't lie in attacking the way people talk, they certainly don't lie in attacking what people name their kids, as Bill Cosby did. My name is Ta-Nehisi, my son's name is Samari, my partner's name is Kinyata; my best friend's son's name is Kamati... all these people are God fearing honest people who want the same thing that any other American would want. And when Bill Cosby points us out because of the way we talk, the way we name our kids as opposed to sticking with the reality, have you to wonder how much of this is actually about reality and how much of it is actually about appearance." She went on to say in the same discussion "When you say that young black people are anti-education, there's really nothing to talk about, because you've clearly made up your mind about young black people, Cosby has clearly made up his mind about young black people. It's not the sort of dialogue that seeks to ask questions. It's a dialogue that comes at us having already formed conclusions. And, you know, far as I'm concerned that's not a dialogue."

Eric Michael Dyson, on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, condemned Cosby’s comments as evidence of "classist, elitist viewpoints...that only reinforce suspicions about black humanity." [Dyson thought Cosby's crimes against black humanity were so great that he wrote an entire book on the subject. I have read and, hopefully, can review "Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Their Minds?" soon.]

As the ink continued to flow, left and right (so to speak), perhaps the best summary was from Gregory Clay, writing for the Nightrider/Tribune News Service wrote: "Cosby openly chastised some black people for our dirty, little secrets. We are exposed...Cosby broke the black code...Give Cosby some credit for having the guts to voice his displeasure at such a regal event..Some have said Cosby is pitting lower income blacks against middle- and upper-class blacks. That’s silly. Cosby’s essential theme simply was this: Better parenting and educational achievement are in black people’s best interest, and some have failed miserably. Don’t let the Brown [Supreme Court Case] die on the vine. We have to admit this; it’s about survival."

Cosby never backed down. He held interviews and town hall meetings all across the United States, from Newark, NJ to Seattle, WA. Then something very odd happened. In a sequence of events that could only come from an Oliver Stone movie, Bill Cosby was accused of drugging an fondling [not rape] a young woman at his Philadelphia home. Then, even more alarming, another woman came forward - a white California lawyer - held a press conference to say she was similarly assaulted in the 1970s.

Suddenly and dramatically, Cosby’s town hall meetings were unceremoniously canceled in January, 2005 just as they were beginning to gain momentum. The Montgomery County District Attorney declined to press charges after an investigation that took less than a month. But the damage was done. Cosby was muted. All the media was interested in thereafter was the sexual misconduct charges and the extremely old news that Cosby had fathered a child from an extramarital affair many years ago. How could Cosby criticize the sexual practices of poor blacks when he, himself, was a philander? How dare he?

Regrettably, the public debate that Cosby courageously began out of, I believe, the best of intentions, ended. Not with a whimper but with a thud. Now, the issues of black poverty, single black parenthood, gangsta rap, black-on-black crime, and education shortfalls have receded to where they were pre-Cosby. Namely, backyard cook outs, church sermons, and Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam.

It’s too bad. The spotlight, which started so brightly, had so many people talking. And that’s where solutions to problems always start: discussions and debate.