Camille Cosby

MANY THANKS to John D. Stees of Glencoe and Martin "Mitch" Tullai of Lutherville for weighing in on the "U. S. Grant as slaveholder" debate.Stees wrote that Grant and his wife owned two slaves whom they didn't free until after the 13th Amendment was passed."

The smart money says that Sun readers are smarter than the paper's writers. In last Saturday's column, I challenged Camille Cosby to cite sources to support her charge that our 18th president, U.S. Grant, owned slaves.Two callers, Bill Larson and Martin McKibbin, called to report that Grant did indeed own slaves. Larson said Grant's wife, Julia Dent of Missouri, owned slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free her slaves, Larson said, because Missouri was a border state loyal to the Union.

The early 19th-century notion of a Catholic woman of piety was one reserved for white women. So for Elizabeth Lange, a Haitian refugee living in Baltimore, driven by what she felt was her life's calling to be a nun, there was nowhere to study and few places to turn for guidance. She would wait 10 years to divulge her convictions to a white Sulpician priest named James Nicholas Joubert. And with his help, in 1829 she and three other black women would start the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first order of black nuns in the nation.

RACIALLY, our country is not America the Beautiful of legend and lore. Camille O. Cosby recently reminded us yet again of this fact in a poignant article July 8 in USA Today, where she charged that "America taught my son's killer to hate blacks." She was referring to Mikail Markhasev, the Ukraine-born young man convicted in the shooting death of Ennis Cosby on a California highway last year.The article provoked responses as emotional as her accusation and represented a contribution to the dialogue on race called for by the president.

The wife of Bill Cosby -- a man often credited with helping to erase stereotypical images of black Americans on television -- told a black service sorority to be on guard for the perpetuation of such damaging images in the future.Camille Cosby, addressing the national convention of Delta Sigma Theta sorority in Baltimore yesterday, used research from her doctoral thesis in ez ducation to bolster her contention that blacks are damaged by their portrayal in popular entertainment.Dr. Cosby said she considered a number of topics for her dissertation, "But the one topic that wouldn't let me go was the influence television images had on our young adults' perception of themselves."

Congratulations, you've survived another sweeps month. We now return you to our regular programming."Picasso Electronic Fieldtrip" (9 a.m.-10 a.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) -- Maryland and Washington students get to visit the National Gallery's "Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906" exhibit without ever leaving their classrooms, as interactive technology (e-mail, phone and fax) will enable them not only to see the artist's works, but also question museum officials, conservators, educators and art historians.

The inspiration for this column came from a local newspaper article I read about a "girl" with whom I went to high school for two years at St. Cecilia's Academy in Washington, D.C.   This woman, whom I haven't seen since then, has always kept a low profile over the years, even though she is married to a very prominent man.  I have never seen photos of her in magazines, so it was good to see a photo of her along with the article I read....

Artist David C. Driskell had been painting and teaching college art courses for 20 years when he got a call one day in 1976 from television star Bill Cosby. The celebrated actor and his wife, Camille, had recently read a book Driskell had written about African-American art, and Cosby wanted Driskell to help choose some artworks for the couple's collection. At first, Driskell thought it was someone's idea of a joke. "I had a brother-in-law and we used to call each other up and pretend we were celebrities in different voices," Driskell recalled.

You won't find the names of Moe Brooker, Camille Billops, Nora Mae Carmichael or Margo Humphrey listed anywhere in Janson's History of Art, the standard introductory text for college undergraduates in the field. Does this mean that these artists, all African-Americans whose works are on display in a marvelous exhibition at Morgan State University, somehow don't count, that they deserve the invisibility conferred upon them by academic art history? Last year's big retrospective of Romare Bearden at Washington's National Gallery of Art, a first for a black artist, brought new visibility to a whole tradition of African-American art-making that previously had been mostly overlooked by mainstream scholars, critics and museum curators.

HEY, DON'T shoot the messenger. I couldn't make this stuff up. But you just have to hear some of the names being bandied about as to who should be the next president and chief executive officer of the NAACP now that Kweisi Mfume has resigned effective Jan. 1 of next year. Don't you pine away for those days when what was then called the NAACP's executive secretary was selected from someone who had toiled anonymously but effectively within the organization for years? But the era when a James Weldon Johnson would be replaced by a Walter White, who would be replaced by a Roy Wilkins, seems long gone.