The Great Debaters was a very powerful and inspirational movie. Watching Denzel, known as Mr. Tolson, lead his debate team to such high success in a time and place where black success was so heavily denied inspired my own academic success. The ability for a group of young children to be victimized by such racism and such denial of basic freedoms and have the capability to rise above and succeed against not only fellow black colleges, but white colleges as well. It was truly a movie of motivation to show how desire, dedication, and perseverance can prevail even in the toughest of times and the toughest of circumstances. During the time, Negro hate and racism was heavily practiced particularly in the state of Texas where Wiley College existed. Not only was the government enforcing unjust laws, they were denying any sort of freedom of speech which all Americans have the right of. In a country where we are all born as free men and are all granted rights as citizens, Blacks were an exception. Is this not unjust? Is this not a crime violating the constitution of this country? In the state of Texas, negroes were being lynched and tortured because of the rise against the status quo, and here we had a group of college students civilly disobeying the law. How can a man born in the U.S by law being given rights granted by the constitution be lynched and burned on the stake with no justice? These men have the same rights as any other white man and this group of students that joined together on a debate team spread these very same ideas across the nation. It was a simple idea, in a time that was not so simple. Mr. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College, was an exceptional teacher of those students. He had such spirit and determination to change the state’s conventional lifestyle and challenge the status quo of Blacks in American history. He knew that education was the key to