#NNPA BlackPress

Bill Cosby: The Fight, The Legacy, The Flowers He’s Earned

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — Six years ago this month, Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison. For some, it was the spectacle of a fallen idol. For others, it was the raw proof that this nation, still drunk on its own lies, can summon racism from the judge’s bench, let it seep into the prosecutor’s chair, and finally stain the jury box.

Published

6 months ago

September 17, 2025

Stacy M. Brown

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

Six years ago this month, Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison. For some, it was the spectacle of a fallen idol. For others, it was the raw proof that this nation, still drunk on its own lies, can summon racism from the judge’s bench, let it seep into the prosecutor’s chair, and finally stain the jury box. What was lost, what was deliberately hidden, is that Cosby—blind, wealthy, eighty years old—could have walked out untouched if he had only bent his back, signed a paper, confessed to a sin he swore he did not commit. He refused. He chose prison over surrender, isolation over capitulation. That act alone, in a country that has always demanded Black men bow their heads, ought to have been recognized as a radical declaration of dignity.

Refusing the Easy Way Out

Cosby remembered, on Let It Be Known, how they dangled freedom like meat before a starving man. “My lawyer came to me and said, the district attorney is offering you to sign a paper saying you did it… and that you wouldn’t have to do prison time,” he said. “I told my lawyer to continue with the trial… I wasn’t signing any papers or anything.” Even when caged, blind, and stripped of freedom, they offered him release if only he would renounce himself. “Sign the paper and go to these classes, and then we will let you go. Well, my signature would be in a sealed envelope, and nobody could open it.” Again, he refused. He could have chosen the coward’s path. He could have lived out his days in comfort. Instead, he chose to carry innocence as a burden, fully believing that he might never walk free again.

A Courtroom Steeped in Racism

Bill and Camille Cosby, at right, arrive at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on June 12, 2017. Cosby is on trial for sexual assault. (POOL PHOTO)

And in those courtrooms, the poison was naked. Black jurors were denied with cynical ease. A Black woman police officer was struck from service, not because she was unfit, but because she had once beaten back a false charge laid against her. At the retrial, when one Black juror was finally seated, a prosecutor spat, “You got your one.” Another juror declared Cosby guilty before hearing a single word and was still allowed to sit in judgment. And the judge—who should have been the steward of justice—was said to have whistled the theme from Kill Bill outside the jury room before the verdict in the retrial was returned.

The first trial ended in a mistrial, the jury grinding nearly 60 hours before breaking. They had leaned toward acquittal, but the judge forced them back. After the second trial ended in conviction, and when prosecutors argued he might flee because “he has a plane,” Cosby exploded once jurors left the room: “He doesn’t have a plane, you a–hole! I’m sick of him!” Never forget that prosecutors across jurisdictions passed on every other accusation. Only one case was carried forward—and even that was not about rape. The alleged victim admitted to bitterness when Valentine’s Day passed without a call. She later dialed Cosby to ask for tickets to his show for her parents. But facts were never the point. The performance of guilt was the only script the court was willing to stage.

With the Media, The Lie had No Rival.

Camille Cosby walked through those halls like a prophetess, entering a place fouled with racial contempt. She smiled, spoke softly to her husband, and left. That smile, quiet yet defiant, seemed to say: I know exactly what is happening here. And the media, hungry and complicit, huddled with the prosecutor’s mouthpiece to make certain every headline sang the same hymn of untruth. With no cameras in the room, the lie had no rival. The mention of Quaaludes covered newspapers and flooded television news, but the case was about Benadryl, 1 and a half tablets. Fiction and made-up lies were the norm at Cosby’s trials. Mainstream media pushed the narrative that Cosby “slipped” drugs into an unsuspecting woman’s beverage. However, no evidence of such was presented at trial.

Not discussed was how prevalent Quaalude use was among both sexes. The pill they called a disco biscuit was never just a drug but a mirror of America’s hunger for escape, a hunger dressed in sequins and sweat beneath the lights of Studio 54. Hugh Hefner reportedly handed them out like candy in his mansion; a promise wrapped in velvet but steeped in surrender. Andy Warhol scribbled about them in his diaries; the artist turned witness to a culture stumbling between decadence and decay. Later, Jordan Belfort made them infamous in a Wall Street gone wild, his intoxication filmed and sold as entertainment. Notably, during the second trial, when the judge stunningly allowed as many as 20 women to testify, an accuser swore she had already ingested a Quaalude before she visited Cosby with a friend in the 1970s. Another witness testified that she left her boyfriend on an exotic island after Cosby called with a job offer in Nevada, only to be miffed about Cosby’s indifference.

Still another wrote glowing words about Cosby in her autobiography, yet completely changed the story on the witness stand. When Cosby’s team wanted to put forth a witness who allegedly was with the primary accuser when the woman had come up with a ruse to “set Cosby up,” the judge refused to allow her to tell the jury. Striking was the one person who seemed, by far, the most credible witness. A chef who worked for Cosby was present on the night of the alleged incident. That chef, a meticulous older man, testified that the visit by the accuser for which Cosby was on trial occurred on his last night in Cosby’s employ. Significantly, it proved that even if something nefarious took place, which Cosby vehemently denied, it happened well outside the statute of limitations. Among other things, the state Supreme Court agreed. The justices said the trial was illegal, should never have taken place, and the verdict was wrong. The justices ordered that prosecutors refrain from going after Cosby again.

Inside Prison Walls

Behind walls meant to break him, Cosby spoke to men the world had abandoned. At SCI–Phoenix, he joined Man Up, blind, in a wheelchair, addressing those whose bodies bore chains. After speaking of his heroes, one inmate told him, “I will be your hero, Mr. Cosby.” He spoke to Men of Valor, too. “I noticed that in the Bible, the parts about Jesus, Jesus never smiled. And I want you, if you are going to do what you say you are going to do in your turnaround, make Jesus smile.”

Pound Cake Then and Now

In 2004, Cosby thundered about a boy shot dead for stealing 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?” He called out the rot of absent parenting. Now, with years and prison behind him, he said again: “They are putting us under siege.” At Phoenix, sagging pants and untied laces were forbidden. To him, these were not fashion, but chains disguised as choice. “They would rather have a picture of a youth doing nothing, not studying, and have his pants lowered.”

Camille’s Strength

It was Camille who preserved him. “My wife, Camille, is not only a very intelligent woman, but she is a woman who saved my mother’s life, and she has saved my life by continuously saying, it’s what you put in your mouth,” he said. “She makes sure that we eat like that, and that’s why, at age 88, I’m cancer-free, and I don’t have any ailments of forgetting things.” From prison, when he phoned, Camille silenced his weakness. “Whenever I called her, I just badly wanted to tell her how I felt,” Cosby said. “And she would say, ‘Just be quiet.’” He had called her strength “love and the strength of womanhood. And you could reverse it, the strength of womanhood and love.”

Giving Back

Cosby and Camille poured more than $200 million into higher education, including $20 million to Spelman College, at that time the largest gift ever given to an HBCU. Those gifts were not simply donations. They were lifelines—scholarships, endowments, futures carved from generosity.

Television and Film Legacy

Cosby broke into I Spy, the first Black co-lead in a drama. He created Fat Albert, a mirror for Black children. He built The Cosby Show, which for five years reigned supreme, showing Cliff and Clair Huxtable as what America insisted could not exist: a Black family whole, professional, and loving. A Different World sent young people surging toward HBCUs. And with Sidney Poitier, he made Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, A Piece of the Action—comedies still treasured in Black homes, still testaments to resilience and wit when Hollywood offered little but caricature. Cosby demanded truth on screen. When told to strip a poster from Theo’s wall—one that read “Abolish Apartheid”—he warned them: “If you do, you can take the show with it.”

The Black Press

Unlike so many others who rose to fame, Cosby never turned his back on the Black Press. His only prison interview was with the Black Press. His first long interview after release was again with the Black Press. In 2014, he said, “I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism, and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind.”

Deserving a Parade

Cosby’s path has been strewn with glory, grief, and betrayal. Yet what remains is a record that cannot be erased. He shattered television’s barriers, poured hundreds of millions into education, gave film and television back to his people, and stood on innocence when it would have been so easy to surrender. Through it all, he was held by Camille, and he never abandoned the Black Press. We say, give flowers to the living. Bill Cosby has earned more than flowers. For what he has given Black culture, he deserves a parade. And somewhere, the ticker tape waits.

Stacy M. Brown

Posts by Stacy M. Brown

Up Next

A Question of Lynching in Mississippi

Don't Miss

Turning the Tide: Unity, History, and the Future of College Football in Mississippi

Stacy M. Brown

Click to comment

#NNPA BlackPress

Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

3 days ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

#NNPA BlackPress

Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

#NNPA BlackPress

PRESS ROOM: NBA Hall of Fame Nominee Terry Cummings Joins 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to Launch Victory & Values Initiative

NNPA NEWSWIRE — NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

admin

Cummings becomes an honorary member, joining other role model sports stars

NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings has officially become an honorary member of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County, marking a powerful new chapter for the 100 Black Men and youth development across the region.

Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th. The moment signified more than membership — it marked the launch of the organization’s transformative new platform, the Victory & Values Initiative.

The Victory & Values Initiative is a groundbreaking youth development program designed to empower elementary and middle school students through a dynamic blend of sports, mentorship, and STEM exposure. The initiative focuses on building health, discipline, character, leadership, and access to opportunity — creating pathways for long-term academic and personal success.

“This is about more than sports,” said Cummings during the ceremony. “It’s about using the platform of athletics to teach life lessons, create access, and build the next generation of leaders.”

The induction ceremony also featured notable guests including NASCAR’s newest Star Driver, Lavar Scott and NASCAR Director of Athletic Performance, Phil Horton, who joined Cummings for a powerful Victory & Values Town Hall discussion. The Town Hall was moderated by renowned Sports Emcee John Hollins and focused on leadership, resilience, discipline, and the importance of mentorship in shaping young lives.

A “Day at NASCAR” for 75+ Youth

Cummings wasted no time getting to work. On his first full day as an honorary member, he joined his new brothers of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to host a “Day at NASCAR,” escorting more than 75 youth to a once-in-a-lifetime experience at EchoPark Motor Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway).

The youth participants received behind-the-scenes access including: an exclusive tour of Pit Row, access to the Garage Area and exploration of the interactive Fan Zone.

The experience culminated with a surprise meet-and-greet and Q&A session with NASCAR Superstar Bubba Wallace, who shared insights on perseverance, preparation, and breaking barriers in professional sports.

The day served as a living example of the ‘Victory & Values’ Initiative in action — exposing youth to new industries, expanding their vision for the future, and connecting them directly with high- level mentors and role models.

Building Leaders Through Access and Mentorship

The 100 Black Men of DeKalb County – a chapter of the largest, national mentoring organization in the county – continues to expand its footprint with programs focused on academic excellence, economic empowerment, leadership development, and health & wellness.

The launch of ‘Victory & Values’ represents a strategic expansion of the organization’s impact

intentionally integrating athletics and STEM to engage youth at an early age while reinforcing core principles such as integrity, accountability, teamwork, and perseverance.

“Our mission has always been to mentor the next generation,” said Vaughn Irons, President-Elect of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County. “With Terry Cummings joining the brotherhood, along with partners in NASCAR and professional sports, we are creating unprecedented access and exposure for our youth. Victory & Values is about turning inspiration into structured opportunity.”

By connecting elementary and middle school students to professional athletes, executives, STEM professionals, and community leaders, the initiative aims to:

Increase youth exposure to careers in sports business, engineering, and performance science
Strengthen mentorship pipelines
Promote physical wellness and mental resilience
Build character-driven leadership at an early age

Open Invitation to Youth and Families

All youth are invited to participate in the Victory & Values Initiative, along with the other countless, impactful programs offered by the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County.

Parents and guardians seeking mentorship, leadership development, academic enrichment, and transformative exposure opportunities for their children are encouraged to connect with the organization.

As NBA Legend Terry Cummings’ induction demonstrates, Victory & Values is more than a program — it is a movement designed to build champions in life, not just in sports.

For more information about the Victory & Values Initiative or to enroll a student, contact: 100 Black Men of DeKalb County at Phone at 404.241.1338, info@100bmod.org or Tee Foxx at 404.791.6525,