[Phrozen1ne]

That was an excellent movie!

THE GREAT DEBATERS. Inspired by a true story, THE GREAT DEBATERS chronicles the journey of Professor Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington), a brilliant but volatile debate team coach who uses the power of words to shape a group of underdog students from a small African American college in the deep south into a historically elite debate team. A controversial figure, Professor Tolson challenged the social mores of the time and was under constant fire for his unconventional and ferocious teaching methods as well as his radical political views.

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Omega Psi Phi) Professor Melvin B. Tolson (center) led the Wiley College debate team to a U.S. championship in 1935 with a win over Harvard University. (Photos courtesy of Wiley College.)
The most memorable Wiley College debate was not with Oxford (or Harvard) It was with the 1935 national champions, the Southern California Trojans. By the time the school year began in 1934, Tolson was at the top of his game as debate coach. Making his second goodwill tour, Tolson and his team of Farmer, Jarrett and Heights scheduled a sojourn through the Southwest. Included on their extended schedule were The University of New Mexico at El Paso, the University of California at Oakland and San Francisco State Teachers College, 5,000 miles in all. The big occasion came the night of April 2, 1935 before an audience of 2,200 at Southern California's Bovard Auditorium. The night before the debate Tolson would not let his team leave the dorm rooms where they were housed, according to Farmer. He was afraid the team would be intimidated because the speech department of the University of Southern California was bigger than the whole of Wiley College. He need not have been concerned.



Both teams, dressed in tuxedos, took the stage, with Wiley on the affirmative side. The Pi Kappa Delta-sponsored question for 1934-1935 was the one concerning the prevention of international shipment of munitions, which was probably the subject of the Southern California encounter. "From the time Floyd C. Covington, who presided, opened the program until its close the vast audience was held in rapt attention by the scholarly presentations of both teams," described Tolson. Farmer, a freshman at the time, was an alternate and observer. His memory of the team and that night was remarkable.


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(Alpha Phi Alpha) Hobart Jarrett, the intellectual junior from Tulsa, Okla., was described by Farmer as "a polished, dignified, cultivated young man wearing rimless glasses." Height's college career had its ups and downs "He kept getting expelled for drinking," said Farmer, of Tolson's most charismatic debater. "When Heights stood up to give his rebuttal he would say, 'When I was a boy in Wichita Falls, Texas, I noticed something about those jackrabbits. The jack rabbit never runs in a straight line; he jumps from one side to another' - and then he gave a little hop. Then he turned round slowly and looked at his opponent, and the audience roared.'" Using what became known as "the mighty Tolson method," the Wileyites were victorious. Tolson spent a lot of time training his debaters in the tactics and strategy of arguments. "He drilled us on every gesture, every pause," Jarrett wrote in an article for the May 1935 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. "Our debate squad reads hundreds of magazine articles and scores of books on government, economics, sociology, history and literature. We are taught to be prepared for anything."





One of the young men on the debate team was Civil rights leader, author, labor organizer, and teacher, (Omega Psi Phi) James Leonard Farmer, Jr. who was born on January 12, 1920, in Marshall, Texas. He earned degrees from Wiley College (1938) and the Howard University School of Divinity (1940). Farmer went on to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) which played a key role in the Civil Rights movement, particularly in launching the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. These bus rides tested the federal interstate transportation accomodations at bus terminals. Combined with other CORE non-violent acts, the Freedom Rides led in part to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and to the Civil Rights Voting Act the following year. Farmer is widely recognized as one of the Civil Rights movement's "Big Four," along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.


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In 1998 President Bill Clinton awarded Farmer the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Farmer died on July 9, 1999