Cosby has avoided public life, but has been active in her husband's businesses as a manager, as well as involving herself in academia and writing.

[3] Cosby's father was a chemist at Walter Reed General Hospital and her mother worked at a nursery.

They did what all educators should do, that is, convey the knowledge of wide-ranging possibilities, and, more importantly, give a stamp of self-value for every single student.

[12] Cosby supports African-American literature, and has written forewords for several books: in 1993, for Thelma Williams' Our Family Table: Recipes and Food Memories from African-american Life Models;[13] in 2009, for Dear Success Seeker: Wisdom from Outstanding Women by Michele R. Wright;[14] and in 2014, for The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women, a book by Edward Lewis of Essence.

[18] Together, Cosby and Renee Poussaint edited A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak in 2004.

[19] In 2001, Cosby was a co-founder of the National Visionary Leadership Project, a group whose mission is to "develop the next generation of leaders by recording, preserving, and sharing the stories of extraordinary African American elders".

In September 1989, CSU held the "Camille and Bill Cosby Cleveland Football Classic" in honor of their contributions to the school.

[1] In April 2005, Cosby donated $2 million to St. Frances Academy, a Black Catholic high school in Baltimore.

"[30] On December 9, 2015, attorney Joseph Cammarata subpoenaed Cosby to give a deposition in a defamation lawsuit filed against her husband by seven women.

[31] Cosby's support of her husband has been questioned; in The Progressive Revolution, author Ellis Washington wrote: "...I am transfixed by the slavish complicity and psychotic denial of Camille" positing that she may be "the greatest sexual sociopath sympathizer in history".

[32] After her husband's conviction for sexual assault on May 3, 2018, Cosby released a three-page statement defending her husband, in which she compared his conviction to the racially charged killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was lynched after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store.

Cosby also called for a criminal investigation into the Pennsylvania prosecutor behind the conviction and argued that her husband had a "binding agreement" with Bruce Castor that he would not be charged in the case.

[37][38] Authors Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom wrote that they believed Cosby's article was "misguided despair ... [that] threatens further progress" in the development of race relations in the United States.

[39] Cosby's daughter Ensa died February 23, 2018, of renal disease while awaiting a kidney transplant at the age of 44.

[40] In 1982, Cosby joined the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his wife Jacqueline Jackson, congressman William H. Gray III, and historian Mary Frances Berry to meet Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, where the group was pictured with the pope.

[45] In December 1981, Cosby purchased Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Thankful Poor at Sotheby's, and gave to her husband for a Christmas gift.