By Patrick Dobyns, Editor
Last Thursday, the Student Activities Board put on a showing of the 2007 film, The Great Debaters, a film apt to round out Black History Month. The audience for the movie was somewhat scarce, but that’s not what mattered, as Dr. Sharon Couch, hostess of the evening’s entertainment, told us before the movie started. It was a message I didn’t fully understand until we had finished the movie.
As the audience arrived, classical jazz filled the room to set the mood for the film’s 1930’s setting while popcorn, sodas and snacks were provided, giving the feeling of a genuine cinematic experience. When the time came for the movie to start, Dr. Couch introduced Student Government Assembly board members Joseph Collette and Paula Fattouh to participate in a short mock debate. Once the audience was settled in, and the decision was made that pineapple does, in fact, belong on pizza, the movie began.
The main plot of the film is based on the true story of the 1935 debate team at Wiley College, a historically black university in Marshall, Texas. Professor and Poet Melvin B. Tolson (played by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film) leads a team of four students- Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams), Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), and James L. Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) as they quickly rise to prominence defeating multiple other local (historically black) colleges.
Despite their success, things quickly escalate when the team is invited to face off against Oklahoma City University, one of the first times in America that a “Negro College” was allowed to participate with an “Anglo-Saxon” college, as Tolson describes them. Although Burgess drops out because of Tolson’s politics, Samantha Booke and Henry Lowe become an unstoppable force, decisively winning the debate over the topic of whether white colleges should accept African American students.
The movie then reaches its climax with a monumental match-up; because of an undefeated season, the students of Wiley College are invited to compete against Harvard University. Tolson, unable to leave the state because of a prior arrest and the conditions of his bail, places Lowe in charge of the team. Although Tolson’s team had easily delivered arguments they prepared for the debate, Harvard changed the topic at the last minute.
Lowe decided to have James Farmer Jr. lead the debate, the topic then being the merits and morality of civil disobedience. James finishes the debate with the powerful words of St. Augustine of Hippo that were later used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “An unjust law is no law at all.” As could only be expected, Wiley College were declared the victors.
There are many other twists and turns that the Wiley College team face throughout the film- dramatic love triangles, team dropouts, arrests by the Texas Rangers, and, as painful as it was to watch, lynch mobs. The team, forced to go on without the man who inspired them, found their own leadership and inspiration within one another and the people around them.
Everywhere the team competed, they espoused the virtues of equity, generosity, and social justice using their own experiences in Jim Crow’s South. In our current time of confusion, fear, and anger, there are many lessons that can be taken from this story and applied to our lives 90 years later.
Like Dr. Couch said, the audience was scarce, but that wasn’t what mattered. Just like it hadn’t mattered that Wiley College ultimately triumphed over Harvard’s Ivy League debate team. What mattered was that they made it there.
Almost three decades before the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a historically black college was hosted at one of the most prestigious educational institutions of the time. What mattered that evening, to Dr. Couch and everyone in attendance, was that the story of real figures of the Civil Rights movement, Melvin B. Tolson and James L. Farmer Jr., was told; what mattered was that their story got to inspire all those who attended.
