By In “The Great Debaters,” a cast led by Oscar-winning actors Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker tells the story of a college debate team and how it prevailed in the face of the Jim Crow South in the early 1930s.
The film recreates the challenges the debate team of an all-black college in Marshall, Texas, faced during a time of racial segregation. Directed by Washington and written by Robert Eisele, “The Great Debaters” is inspired by the true story of Melvin B. Tolson and the Wiley College debate team.
Tolson (Washington) is an English teacher who introduces a new way of dealing with adversity to a group of competitive black college students as they cope with life in the South.
He teaches his students to use debate as combat, and to use their words as weapons. He trains them to use their vocabulary as their artillery while challenging the law.
James Farmer Sr., a college professor at Wiley College played by Whitaker, aids Tolson as he prepares his students to be “great debaters.” Whitaker also plays the father of one of the star debaters, James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker, no relation to Forest)
As the two come together to fight against injustice, the team’s biggest challenge arises as the four students that make up the team fight for the chance to debate the national undefeated champions with their close-to-perfect record. The challenge is that the champions are from Harvard, and they are from an all-black college at a time long before the civil rights movement.
The town also unites in support of these four students as they push to change barriers that forced them to live in an unjust society.
Tolson teaches the students to use their brilliance and passion to fight the division between black and white in east Texas at the time. What he developed was not only a great team that lashed out on their struggles with words, but also a team who one day would become leaders who used these words to create change.
James Farmer Jr. exerts such leadership. As the youngest of Tolson’s four debaters, he enrolls in college at the age of 14.
One of the other debaters is Nate Parker (Henry Lowe) a formerly wild, rebellious student who uses his intelligence to combat his past. His relationships with his teammates as well as his professor stir up conflict, but he later pushes them closer together as he becomes the leader of the debate team.
While Tolson’s debate team discovers ways to argue for and against segregation, his risky life as an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union cannot be saved by his words.
As his team gains success, his reputation falls apart as his story unfolds, exposing him as a threat facing punishment of imprisonment or worse. His students use his struggles as a platform to challenge inequality in their arguments, calling for the immediate end of segregation and injustice. As they fight for the chance to debate against Harvard, they discover even more evidence to abolish segregation.
In addition to Tolson introducing his students to a new way of fighting against racial segregation, he introduces them to a new way to look at and understand life.
As you watch the film, you forget that you live in 2007 and drift off to the 1930s. Washington particularly does a great job at taking the audience back to the past to revisit history.
Not only is “The Great Debaters” a story inspired by actual events, but the movie will surely inspire the current generation to go back in history and find stories from the past that helped inspire historical change.
“The Great Debaters” will be released in theaters Christmas Day.
