The Great Debaters
Based on a true story set in Marshall, Texas, in 1935, The movie captures the degradation of racial segregation. 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.
“The Great Debaters” is also a morality tale
(an archetypal narrative that is fundamentally didactic or prescriptive and relies heavily on both a morality (a conception of what is good or right), which is usually implicit, and a didactic moral, which is usually explicit.),
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.
The movie 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. 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, 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.
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. 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” 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.