Columnist Gregory Kane retells a by-now infamous Malcolm X story. The civil rights leader, standing outside of a black housing project, asks his followers how many reference books and dictionaries they'd expect to find if they searched every apartment therein.

"Enough to fill a trunk of this car? Enough to fill a suitcase?"

That the question was worth pondering betrays its answer — not many. Certainly not enough.

"Malcolm was saying," Kane explains, "that being black and poor didn't absolve poor black folks of their responsibility to 'hold up their end of the bargain' in education. If there are no reference books, dictionaries, and other reading material in poor black homes, then who's to blame?"

Since deciding, in 2004, to speak out on the social ills that mar the black community — violence, illegitimacy, and miseducation chief among them, Bill Cosby has been branded with the scarlet letter of elitism.

But Cosby's latest effort, Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, a collection of testimonials from Cosby's Call-Outs from the last several years, overlaid with Cosby's own commentary, seeks to clear the air.

There's a thin line between tough love and outright contempt, and Cosby's critics, led by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, believe he's crossed it.

Dyson, who could not be reached in multiple attempts, is author of the 2006 bestseller Is Cosby Right? and self-styled defender of black Americans "left behind" after the civil rights revolution.

Cosby's critics claim the entertainer's interest in the black community is new-fangled. That Cosby, for decades, never spoke about race, preferring "universal themes."

But the notion that Cosby's roots with the black community are only three and a half years deep is laughable. Since co-starring in I Spy, 42 years ago, Bill Cosby has been consistently put his fame and talents to use in the black community.

Cosby's epic $20 million donation to Tuskegee University in 1989 kept the historically-black college's doors open. Spike Lee's epic Malcolm X wouldn't have seen theaters but for Cosby's largesse. And according to Poussaint, Cosby has sent scores of black youth to college over the years, and sought neither credit nor publicity. Perhaps that's why Cosby's critics are so foggy on his record.

Indeed, Cosby wouldn't have met his co-author but for his work in the black community. The two met, over 30 years ago, at a BlackExpo event at which Cosby was performing. Cosby the entertainer made fast friends with Poussaint the doctor.

Astute readers will remember Poussaint as a consultant on The Cosby Show, a partnership that's persisted into other ventures, including The Cosby Show's spinoff, A Different World, based in fictitious historically-black Hillman University.

"Part of my job was to make sure that the show wasn't stereotypic, and that it was psychologically believable," said Poussaint, now director of the Judge Baker Children's Center at Harvard University. Poussaint's work at Judge Baker involves troubles children with emotional problems and the impact of sexualized media on young girls.