The Purge- (Bill) Cosby Kids

Pt 3-The Purge:Cosby's Kids & The Talented 10%-ers

In the early 1900's, W.E.B. Du bois called them "The Talented Tenth"- a small group (10% of the entire black American population) who were obligated by duty, God, and Natural Order to lead the other 90% of black America. Most of the Talented Tenth were light skinned or claimed mixed heritage like Du bois and Fredrick Douglass.They had good educations and nice incomes with dubious connections to white families and associates. A few were successful, dark skinned, black men with fair skinned wives who glowed like light towers or tavern laterns in the murky darkness of early black and white photographs.

Du bois  coined the moniker "The Talented Tenth". Much later, Bill Cosby would reincarnate them as the blacks who were "holding up their end" of the social bargain (unlike poor blacks and blacks with "funny names" who "stole poundcake" and raised little theives).

All was not perfect with The Tenth, though. Du bois was a notoriously arrogant black man who destained dark skinned blacks as stupid, violent, and hard to train in the art of social grace. Fredrick Douglass was also arrogant; refusing to take the illiterate, dark skinned wife who had assisted him out of slavery  into the tony, salons of the rich, white families who giddily invited him to tea. Douglas also traveled making speeches for which he was showered with praise and admiration, but not money. His black  wife, Anna Murray, kept Fredrick's secret by taking work in order to partially pay for Fredrick's clothes and the middle class family home. Fredrick Douglass cheated on her frequently. When she died in 1882, Douglas waited barely one year before marrying a much younger white woman (a suffragette from a family of wealthy descendants of the Mayflower)  named Helen Pitts. Miss Pitts had moved into a home next door to Mr. and Mrs. Douglass just two years before Anna Murray Douglass's death. Pitts was alleged to have been one of Fredrick's mistresses.

 After marrying Pitts, he installed his white wife in his  mansion in the "whites only" wealthy neighborhood of Uniontown in Washington DC. Over 100 years later, the neighborhood, now called Anacostia, is a black slum. The sort of place Douglass and Du bois would never have deigned to live in. A place that Bill Cosby, torch bearer for the Talented  Tenth, would avoid when travelling to DC to lecture on morals, values,and upward black mobility at the historically black Howard University.

These Talented 10%-ers had lost their footing in the late 60's and 70's when blacks decided they did not want to be told what to do by whites or their half-breed and college degreed proxies. But there were still those successful dark skinned black men, with latern-light wives who believed in black heirachy, in class, and the social obligations of those in the privileged ranks to steer the ship. Bill Cosby was one of them. So was Wilt Chamberlain and even James Brown. There were many more. Bizarrely conservative, sexually ferocious, intelligent,  but unstable behind closed doors, they perfectly reflected the Talented Tenth and hinted at the causes of their failure to uplift the majority.

It was widely thought that Bill Cosby's scandalous fall would put an end to the concept of "superior" blacks diagnosing and treating  the "black problem". But the Talented Tenth lived on and even, picked up speed and  respectability- ABC (After Bill Cosby). All this, in spite of their seemingly schizophrenic concepts of race and class and unsettling personal behavior......even their crimes.

By 2025, The Tenth no longer avoided invoking Cosby's name or his race/class theories. They embraced his "imperfections" and their own. No longer did they hide their ugly sides.They stopped denying when questioned. They are proud of who they are, what they do, and who they do it to.........especially once a year, on the night of The Great Purge.