Who Are We To
Lie There And Do Nothing?
Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debaters” is a must see.
By Malcolm Shore
Texas. 1935. Four Black
Americans-three males, one female -are enjoying a peaceful late-night drive on
a country road. The two back-seat passengers
are sleeping. The two front-seat passengers are playfully arguing over
directions as they look at a map. There is an air of simple, innocent joy. But
those even remotely familiar with American history know better, just from
reading the first three sentences of this article.
Suddenly,
the driver’s face forms a frown, and the car crawls to a stop. Dead silence. Dead stares. In view, a dead
body. Hanging, lifeless, and literally charred. Fearing a similar vicious fate,
the two backseat passengers-now startled awake-hide on the floorboards for fear
of being discovered by the thick hatred of the night.
Before
long, the four are discovered. “There’s niggers in that car!” a
murderer’s voice shrieks. As the burned body falls from a tree and crumbles,
the driver frantically places his foot on the gas and eventually steers the
vehicle, and its four occupants, to a narrow escape. For now. But they will
never escape the image, nor its implication, nor the sense of constant terror
that each of them produces.
“You”re
never gonna forget what you saw!” one of the men will tell another later that
night.
And
who are we to just lie there and do nothing?
“
The
particular scene being described is from the new film “The Great Debaters,”
directed by Denzel Washington. The movie is based on the real-life story of the
debate team at Wiley College, an all-black school in Texas who won a national championship in
1935 and, as the credits at the end of the film indicate, went undefeated for a
period of ten years. But lest readers catch themselves breathing a sigh of
relief to find that the scene described above is “only a movie,” they might be
quickly sobered by the truth on which the fiction is based. It is, of course,
far worse than the fiction.
Worse,
because in real life, this scene did not only happen once. It was replayed
thousands of times.
Worse,
because, more than seventy years after the period chronicled in the film,
nooses were hung in Jena, Louisiana. And then in South Carolina. And then in New York City.
Worse,
because on January 4, 2008, in Lima, Ohio, a SWAT team murdered 26-year-old
Tarika Wilson and wounded her 14-month-old infant. Yes, 14-months-old.
Yes, they were Black. And no, they weren’t armed.
Worse,
because a few weeks after that, on Martin Luther King Day, white supremacists
were allowed to march in Jena
with guns.
Worse,
because during a debate held later that night before the Black Congressional
Caucus, none of the three leading Democratic presidential candidates
were even asked to condemn this march.
And who are we to just lie there and do
nothing?
The movie
follows the team’s four members -Samantha Booke, played by Jurnee Smollett,
Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams), James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) , and
Henry Lowe (Nate Parker)-and their coach, Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington)- as
they travel the country passionately delivering meticulously-researched
positions on the key social issues of the era. Among the topics the team is
shown debating are the responsibility of government to provide for the welfare
of its citizens; the right of Black students to attend state universities; and
the morality (or immorality) of the prison system.
“The
Great Debaters” is a tale of revolt against both the physical oppression and
the mental enslavement to which Black Americans were subjected in the Jim Crow
South. In an early scene in which Tolson and the debaters are getting
to know one another, he leaves them speechless as he schools them in the
origins of lynching: He tells them the brutal practice is named for the slave
trader Willie Lynch, who instructed masters to single out the strongest,
toughest slave, and, in front of men, women, and children, subject him to
horrendous torture ultimately resulting in death. First the slave would be viciously
beaten, then tarred-and-feathered, then tied to a tree, with the master beating
his horses hard enough to literally pull the victim’s body apart. Finally, the
slave would be burned alive. Next, the slaves who had been forced to witness
this atrocity would be pulverized to “within an inch of their lives,” but not
past the brink of death. The purpose,
from the point of view of the slavemaster, was clear: To psychologically
decimate the slaves, to terrorize them in order to further facilitate their subordination. “Keep the body, take the mind.”
Tolson’s
calling, he tells the debaters, is to help them reclaim their minds.
In fact,
over the course of the movie, the minds of the Wiley College
students become weapons of resistance to the physical and psychological attacks
directed against them by the dominant society.
In this society, the mere act of Black students arguing positions in
bold and uncompromising fashion, before an audience-especially putting forth
these positions against white debate teams and/or speaking before white
audiences- was an act of courage and defiance. Speaking out in this way was a
challenge to a system based on notions of the supposed inferiority of Black
people; notions, which of course included the idea that Blacks were intellectually
inferior to whites. As the Wiley
College team keeps
winning, and winning, and winning, their confidence grows to further challenge
this entrenched system of relations and beliefs.
Along the
way, of course, the debaters and their coach are consistently confronted with
the price to be paid when Black Americans refuse to remain “in their
place.” A dominant theme throughout the
film is the moral necessity to act against atrocity and outrage; put simply, to
do what is right even at the price of tremendous risk and sacrifice. For
instance, as the debaters discover that Coach Tolson is an organizer of
sharecroppers who has Communist leanings-and as it becomes clear to them that
his life and career, and by extension theirs, is vulnerable as a result-they
arrive at several crossroads where they must either press forward or retreat.
One night, Farmer follows Tolson through the woods to a barn where, crouching
just out of view, he observes his coach playing an organizing role at a secret
meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Suddenly, swarms of police
officers burst through the barn, brutalizing the sharecroppers and setting the
barn ablaze.
Just as
officers encroach towards Farmer, Tolson grabs him and the two run away to
safety. Tolson makes his student swear that he will not reveal to anyone what
he has seen. It is a promise Farmer keeps, even though by doing so, he
infuriates his father, James Farmer Sr. , who demands to know why his son has
returned home so late that night.
And
who are we to just lie there and do nothing?
Later,
Burgess informs Tolson that his father is concerned about Tolson’s radical
political beliefs. “When I came here today,” Burgess tells his coach, “I saw
the Sheriff outside watching your house.”
He goes on to say that his father had phoned the dean of Wiley College
to inquire why the school was employing a Communist. “I came here to be
educated,” Burgess says. “Not investigated.”
He then begs Tolson to assure him that he is not, in fact, a Communist,
but Tolson refuses, simply repeating that his politics are his own
business. Burgess subsequently quits the
team. But when Tolson offers the remaining debaters a chance to do the same,
they decline.
Ultimately,
Tolson is yanked out of his classroom by armed Texas Rangers and hauled off to
jail. Though the elder farmer helps negotiate his release on bail, the coach’s
livelihood continues to be disrupted and threatened. In one scene, he tells his
students that Southern Methodist University has cancelled their debate with
Wiley, and that Georgia
may soon do the same. The reason? Tolson has been blacklisted because of his
radical politics. But Tolson tells the debaters to press on. In stressing the
importance of greeting repression with increased determination, he references
the Greek wrestler Antaeus who, upon falling to the ground, would always get
back up even stronger. He proposes a
plan that is ultimately successful: To continue debating Black colleges, and to
keep winning, in order to garner an invitation from Harvard University.
It is
when the debate team is driving through rural Texas,
on their way to debate Howard
University at Prairie
View A&M, that their lives are forever changed: They witness the lynching
described at the beginning of the article. Later that night, Lowe tells Farmer
that, often, lynchings are even more brutal than what they had seen; sometimes,
he tells his teammate, Black victims were castrated, skinned alive, or
dismembered. Farmer, who at 14 is the youngest member of the team, struggles to
process the horror he had seen up close, and wonders aloud what the victim must
have done to invite his fate.
“He
didn’t have to do nothing, James! He didn’t have to do nothing!” Lowe responds.
“In Texas,
they lynch Negroes.”
The
debaters are so traumatized by witnessing the lynching that they subsequently
lose to Howard-the only Wiley
College loss shown in the
film
“And
who are we to just lie there and do nothing?”
In the
face of the terror and subordination heaped upon Black Americans, the film stresses
the need to act boldly, to demand justice immediately, and to act outside
conventional wisdom and politics. When Wiley College
takes on Oklahoma City
University, a white
school, the debaters argue in favor of admitting Black students to state universities.
Many white audience members leave as soon as Booke begins her arguments, but
the team perseveres. The Oklahoma City
team puts forth the position that, while racial unity might be a nice idea one
day, white southerners simply wouldn’t accept it, and the result would be
greater violence and hatred.
(How often have we heard some variation of
this logic in modern times? Indeed, it is the very same logic Barack Obama used
in explaining why he would not have challenged laws against
interracial marriages had he been running for office in the 1960s.)
But Wiley College
is victorious after passionately arguing for what is right over what is
popular.
“No, the
time for justice, and the time for freedom, and the time for equality is
always-is ALWAYS-right now!” Booke says near the end of the debate.
This
theme of demanding what is right, even before the majority of society has
caught up to that demand, hits home powerfully in relation to the current
political and social landscape, and the horrific Bush agenda with which the
country is confronted. And the point is
returned to again, in dramatic fashion, in the film’s climactic scene. Wiley College
has traveled to debate Harvard
University, the first
time that university has debated a Black college. The suspense is heightened by
the fact that the showdown is being broadcast for a national radio audience.
Farmer’s family, and students back at Wiley College,
listen intently, as do the thousands who pack the Harvard auditorium. The topic
at hand is whether or not civil disobedience is a moral weapon in the fight for
justice; Wiley argues the affirmative.
From the
beginning, the debate takes shape as a battle between law-and-order (Harvard)
and the people’s obligation to do fight injustice (Wiley). “Non-violence is the
mask civil disobedience wears to conceal its true identity; anarchy,” one of
the Harvard debaters insists. The Harvard team also argues that what is right
must be determined democratically, not by the whims of one or a small group of
individuals.
“Majorities
do not decide what is right or wrong,” Booke counters. “Your conscience does.”
“Nothing
that erodes the rule of law can be moral,” Harvard retorts, to boisterous
applause. “No matter what name we give it.”
And then
Farmer takes the stage. After a
sustained pause, he begins. “In Texas,
they lynch Negroes.”
He
proceeds to recount how, driving to the debate with Prairie View A&M, he
and his teammates witnessed a man hanging by the neck and set on fire. How
nothing whatsoever was done to stop, or to punish, this crime. “There is no
rule of law in the Jim Crow South,” Farmer says. He further recalls witnessing the fear, and
the shame, in the eyes of his colleagues that night.
“And
who are we,” Farmer wonders, ” to just lie there and do nothing?