Movie Critical Review : The Great Debaters

            Starred and directed by Denzel Washington, The Great Debaters is a drama movie set in southern America, Texas in 1935 during The Great Depression. Despite some alteration in setting and characters, this movie is based on a true story written in an article about a historically black Wiley College debate team by Tony Scherman for the 1997 Spring issue of American Legacy. The plot revolves around Melvin B. Tolson, a debate coach for Wiley College Forensic Society in the 1930s who were also a lecturer and a renowned poet, in his effort to help advancing his debate team so that his team can be equal with whites in the American South. His team consisted of James Farmer Jr. (a fourteen years old who would later in real life co-founded Congress of Racial Equality and become one of the civil right movement leader in US), Henry Lowe (a rebellious yet intelligent young man who later become the captain of the team), and Samantha Booke (the only female in 1930 Wiley debate team based on the real individual Henrietta Bell Wells who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the United States and a poet whose papers are housed at the Library of Congress).

 This movie follows the struggle of Tolson and his team in maintaining a winning streak record till finally they are able to beat Harvard University. Since racial segregation was still enacted at that time, the idea of ‘separate but equal’ caused disparity in every aspect of society including education. Though in real life, they actually won against University of South California who were the reigning debating champion, but the fact was altered to portray the height and significance of this event for that era. According to Robert Eisele as screenwriter: “In that era, there was much at stake when a black college debated any white school, particularly one with the stature of Harvard. We used Harvard to demonstrate the heights they achieved."[1]

            . Firstly, I am going to analyze the social construct of Texas at time where Jim Crow Laws[2] were also common and lynch mobs were an omnipresent fear for blacks, using the principles of justice in the book Theory of Justice written by John Rawls in 1971. This movies explores many aspects of social life in 1930’s southern America especially Texas where the very idea and implementation of Jim Crow Laws in itself is against the two principles of justice in Rawls’ book. According to Rawls, first principle of justice is “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others."[3] It is impossible for those black students to go against white college in an official tournament. They are only allowed to go against them in an invitational event. Furthermore, the movie actually omits another reality: even though they beat the reigning champions, the Great Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors because they were not truly considered to belong to the debate society; blacks were not admitted until after World War II.[4] Black debaters at that time were obviously denied their right to their “liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others” which in this case is debating academically in equal footing with fellow white students.

            Second principle of justice according to Rawls is that “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle (the difference principle) and (b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity”[5] In the movie, we can see that many institutionalized segregation especially in education that caused unequal opportunity in debating for black students compared to whites was legitimized by law.

Another thing about justice which was also explored in the movie is the unjust law that lived among society where it was seemingly pervasive to lynch a black slave as punishment (without proper trial of course) and oftentimes for the crime they did not commit.  There is an emotional scene of Tolson and his team witnessed a lynched black slave hung on a tree during their trip to one of their tournaments. Lynching was also done to simply spread fear among slaves to further degrade their status in society. The word “to lynch” itself was coined from the name Willie Lynch. He was a slave master who invented the way to help slave owners who were having troubles in controlling their slaves. His method of ‘Lynching’ sometimes include brutal killing like skinning alive, burning, hanging and other torture techniques. All of them were used to instill fear in slave’s mind. Tolson from the movie also said a quote from him that goes “You don’t kill Negro, you put fear of God in them so they might be useful in the future”. In other words, he kept those slaves physically strong but psychologically weak and only depends on the slave master.

The practice of lynching and other discriminations like insulting on daily basis (as seen in the scene where James Farmer’s dad who were a professor at Wiley had to give up his pay check to pay for a pig that belongs to poor white farmer he accidentally hit. Despite being totally respectful and having offered to pay for the pig, he was still insulted and humiliated in a way that depicts even a respectable black professor would somehow still need to bow down to mere poor and rude farmers just because they are white) and torturing for information to black people (when a local Sheriff tortured two black farmers to fish information about secret meeting conducted by Tolson in his effort to secretly create union of both black and white farmers who unfairly treated by sharecropper) depicted in the movie were even supported by law and no one seemed to actually be against it in society. Tolson was also arrested without proper evidence and trial in suspicion of organizing a farmers union before released by the local police with the help of his fellow colleague Professor James Farmer Sr.  This movie tries to show the real horror behind the unjust law of society in southern America at that time. In the version offered by Rawls, justice is detached from anything that anyone has done and thus may have nothing to do with any idea of what people deserve. [6] Thus, Justice must actually include every individual regardless of their race and other innate quality which the laws and majority of whites in southern America at that time obviously violated.

Secondly, this movie also brings up the idea of social equality. The concept of social equality is broad and it widens extensively in society. It includes civil rights, freedom of speech, property rights, and equal access to social goods and services. However, it also ranges from the concepts of health equity, economic equality and other social securities to equal opportunities and obligations. In the opening scene of the movie during one of Tolson’s lecture, he was stating few quotes from poems written by black poets and ask his student to tell him who wrote the poem and one of them was lines from Gwendolyn Bennet. A student mistakenly states the year she was born and Tolson then proceeded to joke about how black people in Bennet’s era could lie about their age because in most States, Black people were denied birth certificate. It was clearly a painful reality for Black people to be born without record. Having a birth certificate is like part of your mark in the world; the legitimate proof of your very existence. Being denied this right is almost like asserting the idea that your existence isn’t worth enough to be granted the record. As if black people were not allowed to have record of their own life history. According to Russell Blackford, social equality requires the absence of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the absence of discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of a person's identity.[7] This very idea was actually the one that was fought for by Civil Right Movement leaders to forever abolish institutionalized discrimination and inequality among races in United States.

The concept of Ontological equality, one that states everyone is created equal at birth is the being sought after and challenged by main characters in the movie and in real life during civil right movement era. United States’ Declaration of Independence has this type of equality from the very beginning. It clearly states that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights".[8] Yet, in the 1930s, Jim Crow Laws existed and violated that very value. These laws also allowed prejudices, poor treatment and discrimination against black people while enhancing white people’s upper hand and sense of superiority over their race.

Lesley A. Jacobs in his book Pursuing Equal Opportunities: The Theory and Practice of Egalitarian Justice, talks about equality of opportunity and its importance relating to egalitarian justice. He states that “at the core of equality of opportunity... is the concept that in competitive procedures designed for the allocation of scarce resources and the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life, those procedures should be governed by criteria that are relevant to the particular goods at stake in the competition and not by irrelevant considerations such as race, religion, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or other factors that may hinder some of the competitors’ opportunities at success”[9]. This concept highlights factors like race, gender, class etc. that should not be considered when talking about equality through this notion.

One last memorable scene from the movie is when Tolson was confronted by his student during debate practice to share the story of his father and family. He then continued to tell the horrible tale of his father, a slave whose body was torn apart by the brutality of white folks who owned him. He said something noteworthy afterward about how he and other professors at Wiley College try to help young Black generation to regain their mind to fight against such brutality, injustice, and inequality through education. Mind is such powerful thing that if it is being taken from you no matter how strong your body is, will leave u lifeless and degraded.  In time of Jim Crow South, Wiley College Debate Team was part of the fight against racial injustice and inequality through education especially in the form of academic debate. This college has produced some of the best mind of Black intellectuals whose work and struggle helped eradicating major institutionalized discrimination against African- Americans and achieving the goals of racial equality during Civil Rights Movement

REFERENCES

Rawls, John. “A Theory of Justice”. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Blackford, Russell. “Genetic enhancement and the point of social equality". Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies,  2006.

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[2] Jim Crow laws :  State and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in states of the former Confederate States of America. This body of law institutionalized a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States, while Northern segregation was generally de facto — patterns of housing segregation enforced by private covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory labor union practices.

[3]  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice Revised Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 53.

[5] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice Revised Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 302.

[6] Laurence W. Mazzeno, Summary Critical Survey of Literature for Students. eNotes.com, Inc. 2010 eNotes.com 1 Jan, 2016

[7] Russell Blackford, Genetic enhancement and the point of social equality, (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 2006).

[9] Lesley A. Jacobs, Pursuing Equal Opportunities: The Theory and Practice of Egalitarian Justice, (), p. 10.