When Fulton Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington got mad, an icon listened.

On Thursday, Bill Cosby headlined a "fireside chat" with Arrington and Atlanta-born comic Chris Tucker at Benjamin E. Mays High School. The packed auditorium held mostly at-risk high school students and their parents — the people Cosby is trying to reach with his message of tough love for the African-American community.

Mikki K. Harris/AJC (ENLARGE)

Bill Cosby joins Judge Marvin Arrington for a, "Up the Path of Success" discussion Thursday at Benjamin E. Mays High School.

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"I'm blunt, and I'm going to stay blunt," he said, drawing cheers from the crowd. Cosby's approach has its critics, but he's unbowed.

Barack Obama says "Yes, we can." Cosby's message: "Yes we should."

"The man from Nigeria comes here, he's here two months, and what does he do?" he asked. "He goes to community college. He's learning a second language while he drives the cab. What are our children doing? Practicing a first language that only they can understand."

Arrington has become a recent convert to Cosby's unflinching gospel of personal responsibility. The judge's tipping point came earlier this month after he surveyed yet another round of mostly African-American perpetrators awaiting sentencing.

"I was tired of being sick and tired," he said.

He responded by asking the white people in attendance to leave so he could speak frankly to the 50 or so young, black defendants. Arrington said he was following his grandmother's admonition not to air the community's dirty laundry in front of whites, but apologized soon after for a "bad judgment call."

He's since reconsidered, as reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, Arrington said. Cosby was among those cheering.

"This man cleared the courthouse because he was embarrassed," the television trailblazer said. "The problem we have is apathy."

He contacted Arrington, telling the judge he wanted to come to Atlanta "to help you in your fight to turn these young people around."

Thursday night's event was organized within a matter of weeks. Cosby called Tucker, who is currently filming a movie in Los Angeles, and asked him to appear with them.

"It's dangerous to not have a passion," the graduate of Columbia High School in Decatur told the young audience. "I wouldn't do certain things that would mess up my dream."

And he didn't want to let his mother down, he said. "She always told me I'd be living with her, and now she's living in the $4 million house I bought for her," said Tucker, who vowed to assist Cosby and Arrington in setting up a mentoring program for the approximately 600 students attending Thursday's forum.

"This is only the beginning," Arrington said. "We are not going away."

Cosby wouldn't let them. His crusade began with a speech in Washington at a May 2004 Howard University event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education.

He denounced petty criminals, low-income blacks who choose athletic shoes over education, and rappers who dwell on ignorance and vulgarity. He demanded that people start taking personal responsibility for their lives.

Cosby's homilies remain passionate and unsparing.

"We've got to believe our children who are raising children and who were raised by children don't know what love is," he said. "They're waiting for the grown people to take their rightful place."

The statistics can't be ignored, Cosby said, noting that blacks make up a quarter of the prison population.

"I've got two judges here [Arrington and Fulton Juvenile Court Judge Belinda Edwards] who are saying they're tired of seeing us before them," he said. "There was a time when 'us' meant Joe Louis knocking out somebody. Us meant Althea Gibson. Us meant Marian Anderson. Our people climbed and did stuff they said we couldn't do."