The Great Debaters (2007) on Netflix
At Wiley College in 1935, professor Melvin B. Tolson coaches the school's first debate team. Samantha Booke and fourteen-year-old James Farmer Jr. are on it, facing Jim Crow Texas.
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Trailer
Plot summary
At Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, Melvin B. Tolson teaches in the 1930s and works quietly as a union organizer, drawing on the Harlem Renaissance as he coaches the college's debate team. The team has four members, among them Samantha Booke and James Farmer Jr., who is fourteen when he enters Wiley. James Farmer Jr.'s father, Dr. James Farmer Sr., also teaches there. Wiley is a historically black college, and Jim Crow laws shape daily life for the debaters. Sexism greets Samantha as a woman on the team, and the threat of a lynch mob hangs over them. Tolson wants his students on equal footing with white colleges in the American South.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Great Debaters (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film depicts the Wiley debate team beating Harvard College in the 1930s, but the real Wiley team instead defeated the University of Southern California, the reigning debating champion; Wiley was not allowed to call itself champion because Black people were not admitted to the debate society until after World War II.
- On December 19, 2007, Denzel Washington announced a $1 million donation to Wiley College so they could re-establish their debate team, and after completing filming at Central High School in Grand Cane, Louisiana he donated $10,000 to that school.
- The character Samantha Booke is based on Henrietta Bell Wells, an acclaimed poet and the only female member of the 1930 Wiley team, who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the US.
- The key line of dialogue, used several times, is a famous paraphrase of theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, "An unjust law is no law at all", which Martin Luther King Jr. later made the central thesis of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail".
- To prepare for their roles, director Denzel Washington sent the actors to Texas Southern University for a "mini camp" on how to debate with the accomplished TSU debate team and its founding coach, Thomas Freeman.
- The songs for the soundtrack to the film were hand-picked by Denzel Washington himself, chosen from a pool of over 1,000 candidate recordings.
