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�THE GREAT DEBATERS� A COURAGEOUS FILM UNDERTAKING

Written by Sherwood Ross

Thursday, 10 January 2008

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.

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dahlakislands

| 67.204.198.xxx | 2008-01-11 04:15:34

i went to theater to watch "great debators" with my cousin. i love Danziel Washington, he is a great actor, a great director and a great black american. i was truely inspired by his acts and directing ability. Danziel is great and a great BLACK MAN. As blacks and africans, i suggest all eritreans to go watch it.

almaz - To dahlakisland

| 67.162.3.xxx | 2008-01-11 09:51:41

I feel thesome way you feel I am not a movie goier in general ,but this movie was great. try to find and read the book as well you will enjoy it . by the way I love your comments on u-tube and other fourms, so keep it-up my brother/sisiter

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