"The Great Debaters" A Courageous Film Undertaking
Arguably, "The Great Debaters" is the finest movie ever made about the American Dream.
At a time when Hollywood producers are dipping for content into the gutters of gore, director Denzel Washington has
created an electrifying message of nonviolent reform that once again lifts the motion picture art to the stars.
Based on a true story set in Marshall, Texas, in 1935, Robert Eisele's screenplay captures the degradation of racial
segregation as few films ever have done. Using the example of segregated Wiley College's debate team, the script shows
how African-Americans had to claw their way inch by inch toward social inclusion. The team struggled for the opportunity
to debate white schools and, finally, based on their incredible string of victories, to debate and to defeat Harvard
while a national radio audience listened in. (In fact, Wiley debated national champion University of Southern
California, and the fact that the producers put in the bunk about Harvard for dramatic impact is a cheap fabrication
unworthy of the overall production.)
Even so, "The Great Debaters" bears comparison with the best American pictures including "Citizen Kane" and "The
Godfather." In the Orson Welles masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a young man that has inherited a fortune, creates a
newspaper chain of unrivaled influence based on sensation and scandal. Charles Foster Kane, however, had wealth and
privilege to begin with, yet loses his bid for political power when rival newspapers expose his own scandalous conduct
using the very methods he created. In "The Godfather," Vito Corleone, an immigrant that had nothing to begin with, rises
to power as a Mafia don by violence---only to see the sons of his crime family destroyed by it. Both of these classics
are morality tales.
"The Great Debaters" is also a morality tale, yet it is very different. Its message is that there is another way; that
hard work, enterprise, preparation and perseverance pays off. It shows how "the system" can be changed without resorting
to Mafia methods. The inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi is cited. The film's script speaks eloquently against violence in
the scene where the motoring Wiley College debaters accidently come upon a lynching and are lucky to escape from the mob
with their lives. (In some years, during the height of the Klan terror in the 1920s, as many as 1,000 Negroes were
lynched.)
Without sermonizing, the script portrays the poverty and ignorance of many dirt poor white folk that had nothing of
their own except the mistaken belief the color of their skin elevated them to superior status. There's an electric scene
in which James Farmer Sr., portrayed by Forest Whitaker, (whose performance rivals Brando's award-winner in "The
Godfather,") runs over a white farmer's pig and is faced with summary execution for this "crime" but talks his way out
of it.
The role of the Wiley College debate coach, Melvin B. Tolson, played brilliantly by Denzel Washington, gives American
moviegoers a glimpse of a Communist as an idealist, a man who strove to do the right thing for his people. Given a
century of historic demonization of Communism and Communists in this country, this is a rare and remarkable achievement.
Yes, as it happened, Wiley's debate team had a coach that was a Communist, and one team member resigned because of it.
The others debaters saw through the label to recognize that Communists are also human beings, even if they believe in a
different economic approach to organizing society. Although Negroes overwhelmingly rejected Marxism then and now, the
few that embraced it, such as Tolson, did so largely because the Great Depression revealed tragic flaws of unbridled
capitalism and they sought a better system to ameliorate the lot of the underclass.
So it happened that some American Communists in the Depression played a constructive role by their denunciation of
racism and by their efforts to organize sharecroppers in rural areas such as Marshall and labor unions in the cities---a
fact never acknowledged by Congressional probers themselves guilty of sitting on their hands in the face of the
appalling poverty of Negroes and poor whites.
The idea persists, of course, to this very day that professors who are Marxists should not be allowed to teach in
universities or in public schools lest they sway students to believe as they do. It is as though the communist ideology
is so powerful a siren song it will captivate every mind. Nothing gives this nonsense the lie better than the young
James Farmer---a star of the Wiley College debate team who would go on to organize the Congress of Racial Equality.
Farmer never embraced Marxism no matter what Tolson thought, nor did any of the other key black civil rights leaders of
the Sixties advocate this philosophy.
If anything, the Wiley debaters showed they could think for themselves. "The Great Debaters" is a movie that could not
have been made during the McCarthy Era of the Forties and Fifties. So rigid was societal thought control of the time
that the producers and actors would have been forced out of their profession if they dared to portray a Communist as a
human being. (Tolson went on to become an internationally recognized poet, his political philosophy not withstanding.)If
only Americans had recognized the legitimate right of others to think differently and of other nations to organize
themselves under different economic systems, the Cold War, with its trillions of dollars wasted on military spending,
might have been averted. President Nixon, for example, might not have ordered the criminal overthrow of the elected
government of Chile.
Again, Americans were so frightened of Communism they believed that if Viet Nam went Communist, all Asia would follow.
This "domino theory," of course, proved to be what college debaters call "fallacious." As "Business Week" reported,
within days of the end of the Viet Nam war, U.S. oil companies were dickering with the new Communist regime for offshore
drilling rights and, to my knowledge, no oil company president was ever accused of guilt by association. And China, of
course, is looking more capitalist every day.
The idea that all capitalists are good and all communists are evil is simplistic beyond childishness. Maybe what "The
Great Debaters" suggests is that there are two sides to every question; that no one economic system has got all the
answers; that no one race and no one nation is superior, and that, over time, a sophisticated analysis of all aspects of
a situation by inquiring minds may generate an understanding about, and a tolerance for, divergent viewpoints and lead
to workable accommodations.
What this country needs are more debate teams like that of Wiley College and more think-for-themselves leaders like
James Farmer. Give this movie four stars for excellence and five stars for courage.
# Disclosure: the author once was a member of the University of Miami varsity debate team and is a strong believer in the benefits
of scholastic debate.
Sherwood Ross is a free-lance writer and public relations consultant and Director of Anti-War News Service. He was host
of a radio talk show in Washington, D.C., reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a regular columnist for
several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodr1_AT_yahoo_DOT_com
ENDS