Wiley College Debates: Movie Analysis

The Truth: In the early and mid-twentieth century, the debate team at Wiley College was extremely successful. Led by Melvin B. Tolson, the team consisted two main debaters and one “anchor man” who memorized both the affirmative and negative arguments for each topic. At one point in the debate team’s history, 14 year old James Farmer Jr. played this role. He was already an experienced public speaker when he enrolled in Wiley College, after winning scholarships based on oratorical contests, despite his young age. He contributed to the success of Wiley College’s debate team and later went on to co-found the Congress of Racial Equality, an organization that worked to challenge racists. Another member of the debate team at one point was a woman

named Henrietta Bell Wells. She was the first female member of the debate team and Tolson, the coach, said he was eager to work with a woman. In 1930, she and junior Harry Hines participated in the first interracial debate against the law students at the University of Michigan. Later that year the pair participated in the first interracial debate in the South, against the University of Oklahoma City. They won both of these debates. The coach of the team, Melvin B. Tolson, was infamous in his training methods. He was known to play devil’s advocate when coaching his team and made his students argue ideas against opposing views which students credit their success to. During this time period, the Pi Kappa Delta fraternity chose the topics and dictated the policies for all debate teams. The fraternity was also segregated, so Tolson was shut out from it. In response, he created his own speech and debate fraternity named Alpha Phi Omega, which served black colleges. Tolson’s work as a professor and debate team coach was so influential that Langston Hughes named him “the most famous Negro professor in the Southwest”. Tolson’s team once debated students at the University of Southern California and were victorious. This event is believed to have been the inspiration for the movie.
Place and time: The debates that inspired the film took place during the mid-twentieth century. The debate team belonged to Wiley College which is located in Marshall, Texas. The film is chronological.
Background: The movie and the real life event the movie is based on take place in America, more specifically the South. Since Wiley College is a historically black college, the debate team and their coach are black. They face many setbacks because of their location and race. Young adults play the most substantial roles because it takes place at a college, but there are also a few adults.
Comparison and Evaluation: The film is quite historically accurate, with some characters in the movie being real people and others based loosely off of real people.

For example, the character Samantha Booke is based off of Henrietta Bell Wells, while Melvin Tolson and James Farmer Jr. were both real people with the same name. One discrepancy between the real life event and the movie is the Harvard debate. In the movie, the climax occurs when Wiley College debates Harvard University, something Tolson has been trying to schedule throughout the entire movie. Wiley College struggles against Harvard but eventually wins the debate. Most people familiar with the debate team’s history claim that this debate never even occurred, and even Tolson’s son has said “If Dad’s team had debated Harvard, I would know it”. The real life inspiration of this debate seems to be when Wiley College debated the University of Southern California and were victorious. There is another scene in the movie when the team is on their way to a debate and comes to a mob that is blocking the road. The team sees a colored man being lynched and immediately turns around, but the mob follows the car. The team eventually gets away but are visibly shaken and ride in silence for the rest of the way. This event appears to have actually taken place when the team was on their way to Memphis. In the real life version, though, Tolson is driving and instructs a mulatto that was on the team take the wheel when he sees the mob. The rest of the team is darker colored so they duck down and hide. The mulatto salutes the mobsters and the team successfully gets away from the

mob.
How has the film furthered student knowledge of the history portrayed?: The movie can open the audience’s eyes to the brutality and racism that African Americans faced during the early and mid-twentieth century. It shows how many more setbacks the debate team faced solely because of their race. It is brutally honest and doesn’t back away from topics such as lynching and racial slurs that were painfully familiar to colored people. It shows the struggles that Tolson faced when attempting to find a white college to debate. It shows how segregation and racism were so prominent during this time period and how strongly people felt about them, strong enough to move the team to tears when debating about them. Most importantly, it shows that sometimes these setbacks can make an individual stronger, like when Farmer includes his personal experiences with racism in the team’s victorious debate against Harvard University. Great Debaters is honest even when it hurts and does not shy away from things that some directors of similar movies do.