Special black history lecturer

Jet, Feb 23, 2004

Comedian Bill Cosby, 66, speaks to 500 ninth-graders at Manhattan's Riverside Church about the importance of education. The recent event was hosted by Columbia University's Teachers College, where Cosby's late son Ennis was a doctoral student. His talk reflected on this year's National Black History Month theme: Brown v.

Board of Education of Topeka, 50th Anniversary. The landmark lawsuit permanently dismantled segregation in public schools when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the "separate but equal" legal doctrine upheld in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case was unconstitutional. The late Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, argued the case.