To the generation that came of age in the 1980s, Bill Cosby is best remembered as the beloved paterfamilias of the Huxtable family on The Cosby Show, which ran for eight seasons on NBC. With his permanently bemused expression, deadpan one-liners and signature bright patterned sweaters, Cliff Huxtable became America’s iconic TV dad for almost a decade. The Cosby Show, which featured an upper-middle class African-American family living in Brooklyn, New York, was TV’s biggest hit in the 1980’s. It is one of only three TV shows that have been rated #1 in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons (along with All in the Family and American Idol). Despite generally avoiding the issue of race directly, the Huxtable’s were a portrayed as an unashamedly black family, with strong extended family ties and a penchant for Ray Charles.

In recent years however, Bill Cosby has elicited his fair share of controversy, most famously with his “Pound Cake Speech” at the NAACP’s 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision which ended race-based segregation in public schools. Instead of following in the footsteps of the feel-good speeches which proceeded him, Bill Cosby took the opportunity to inveigh against perceived social ills within the African-American community, including the prevalence of single-parent families, materialism, lack of responsibility and the use of black vernacular speech instead of proper English.

Cosby also contrasted the bravery and hard work accomplished by African-American’s during the Civil Right’s Movement, to his perception of the current trend towards apathy and aimlessness within the community. It is referred to as the “Pound Cake” speech because of the following memorable lines:

“But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, 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 pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘if you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ Not ‘you’re going to get your butt kicked.’ No. ‘You’re going to embarrass your family.’

After this speech, many members of the African-American community criticized Cosby for betraying his race, cultural elitism and fuelling anti-black sentiment amongst Conservative whites. Others defended him for his candor and willingness to address controversial truths and flout political correctness.

Cosby remained unmoved by the hail storm of criticism, and made the following statement in defense of his speech:

” I think it is time for concerned African-Americans to march, galvanize, and raise awareness about the epidemic, to transform our helplessness, frustration, and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action.”

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