Jasmine Guy Hopes Bill Cosby’s Contribution To HBCUs Lives On

Actress Jasmine Guy is hoping that Bill Cosby’s crimes don’t overshadow the work he has completed with HBCUs. 

The “A Different World” star portrayed the function of Whitley Gilbert-Wayne within the “Cosby Show” spin-off. Within the inaugural Cosby sequence, the principle character, Denise Huxtable, whom Lisa Bonet performed, attended the fictional HBCU Hillman School. This grew to become the point of interest of “A Different World.” Each exhibits shined a lightweight on the significance of Black schooling. In line with statistics revealed by Page Six, the exhibits led to a spike in HBCU enrollment. Years later, filmmaker Lena Waithe named her firm “Hillman Grad,” paying homage to the tv college. Guy hopes that attributes akin to these will probably be observed within the drama with the present’s creators. 

“I hope his work survives, the legacy of his work. The reason we’re on an HBCU campus is because of Cosby’s idea. He’s brilliant to set it that way because he’s sending out a message without saying it, or broadcasting it,” Guy shared, referring to the “A Different World” HBCU tour she and her castmates started in February.

Guy’s feedback could ruffle some feathers, contemplating the high-profile circumstances towards the comic. In 2018, Cosby was discovered responsible of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. He was ordered to serve three to 10 years in jail for this. Although his conviction was overturned in 2021 because of a technicality, dozens of girls have sued him for related acts relationship again to the Seventies. One of the most recent lawsuits was filed in February 2024, with a girl accusing Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1986 when she was a young person. The 2022 docuseries “We Need to Talk About Cosby” highlighted a number of of those cases. 

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