Film | The Great Debaters

My friend and I caught an evening show of Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, a movie inspired by a true story that took place in the south during the 1930s. It revolves around the efforts of debate coach Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington) at historically black Wiley College to place his team on equal footing with whites in the American south during that time, when lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws abounded. The Wiley team eventually succeeds to the point at which they are able to take part in a debate with Harvard University.

Although there is no evidence that the debate with Harvard ever happened, characters depicted on the debate team are based on real individuals. As the story unfolds, it centers around James L. Farmer, Jr. , who was on Wiley’s debate team at 14 years old after completing high school. He would later on in life go on to co-found the Congress of Racial Equality. Another character on the debate team, from whom the film digresses into a romantic twist, is Samantha Booke. The role is based on the real individual Henrietta Wells, the only female member on the Wiley team who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the United States. She became an attorney of law after Wiley.

The film looks more than just a montage of cloned clippings of underdog dramas. It represents an important, and unforgettable, period of America when African Americans were lynched for no reason other their being black. One of the critics comments, “There may be little here we haven’t seen before, but rarely has it been executed this expertly.” Yeah, there might be clichés dotting here and there, but they are rather gratifying. That a school, predominantly and traditionally black, breaks away from a redneck country, in the impoverishment during the darkest days of depression, and to take on an all-white debate team in Harvard, is no ordinary story. That endemic racism has ravaged and culminated into public lynching off the road would not fail to put a lump in anyone viewer’s throat.

Perhaps the success of the film doesn’t hinge on the the filming technique or the amplifying of a little-known incident in African American history, but how it hits the right button to inspire and to educate. On this regard the film has done a great job. But consider the edgy political times, and that Tolson was also an activist in the wider community, risking his neck by trying to organize the region’s sharecroppers of both races, the film is a bit too well scrubbed.

Pictures from Rotten Tomatoes.