the great debaters

Director: denzel washington

Actor: denzel washington,forest whitaker,kimberly elise,nate parker

Data Published: Tue Dec 25 2007

Genres: Biography,Drama,Romance

Key Words: student,debate,debate team,professor,black american

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427309/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Debaters

Description: The Great Debaters is a movie starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and Kimberly Elise. A drama based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College Texas. In 1935, he inspired students to form the...

Plot: Based on a true story, the plot revolves around the efforts of debate coach Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington) at Wiley College, a Historically Black College, to place his team on equal footing with whites in the American South during the 1930s, when Jim Crow laws were common and lynch mobs were a fear for blacks. The Wiley team eventually succeeds to the point where they are able to debate Harvard University. This was their 47th annual debate team. The movie explores the social constructs in Texas during the Great Depression including not only the day-to-day insults and slights African Americans endured, but also a lynching. Also depicted is James L. Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), who, at 14 years old, was on Wiley's debate team after completing high school (and who later went on to co-found C.O.R.E., the Congress of Racial Equality). According to the Houston Chronicle, another character depicted on the team, Samantha Booke, is based on the real individual Henrietta Bell Wells, the only female member of the 1930 debate team from Wiley College who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the United States. Wells also happened to be an African American poet whose papers are housed at the Library of Congress. The key line of dialogue, used several times, is a famous paraphrase of Augustine of Hippo: "An unjust law is no law at all." Another major line, repeated in slightly different versions according to context, concerns doing what you "have to do" in order that we "can do" what we "want to do." In all instances, these vital lines are spoken by the James L. Farmer Sr. and James L. Farmer, Jr. characters.