Begin the New Year at the Peace Center of Delaware County
with The Great Debaters!
Friday, January 1, 2010, 7p.m. - The Great Debaters (2007)

123 minutes, PG-13 (strong thematic material including violence and disturbing images, language and brief sexuality)
Directed by Denzel Washington
Starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Jurneee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker

Before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, before the marches in Selma and Montgomery, before the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., there was Melvin B. Tolson and the Debate Team of a small African American college. 1930's, Texas, the African-American student voice of the Wiley College debate team became a voice of justice and radical challenge to the racism of the Jim Crow south, amidst the violence of lynchings and the daily intimidation and threats against African-Americans.

Marshall, Texas, described by James Farmer, Jr. as "the last city to surrender after the Civil War," is home to Wiley College, where, in 1935-36, inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and his clandestine work as a union organizer, Professor Melvin Tolson coaches the debate team to a nearly-undefeated season that sees the first debates between students from white and black colleges.

Directed by Denzel Washington,The Great Debaters stars the two time Academy Award winner as poet, organizer, professor, and debating coach, Melvin B.Tolson. Tolson is the kind of educator who truly recognizes the remarkable power of knowledge. Tolson recognizes that his young debate students possess the spark of a new generation. Convinced that they could invoke great change if given the confidence and tools needed to do so.  The educator implores his students to take responsibility for the future while furtively attempting to protect them from his clandestine role as an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Chief among Tolson's promising young students is a 14-year-old prodigy named James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), who would later go on to co-found C.O.R.E., the Congress of Racial Equality, and become one of the chief figures in the history of the civil rights movement. Farmer's father, James Sr. (Academy Award winner, Forest Whitaker), is a renowned scholar and an important presence in the black community. Yet despite his formidable reputation, James Sr. has not yet learned how to truly harness the power of knowledge through action and assertion. James Jr. has seen the raving effects of racism all around him, and longs to live in a future where no one must be in fear simply because of the color of their skin.

James Farmer, Jr. from the debate on civil disobedience featured in The Great Debaters :

"In Texas they lynch Negroes. My teammates and I saw a man strung up by his neck and set on fire. We drove through a lynch mob, pressed our faces against the floorboard. I looked at my teammates. I saw the fear in their eyes and, worse, the shame. What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung without trial in a dark forest filled with fog. Was he a thief? Was he a killer? Or just a Negro? Was he a sharecropper? A preacher? Were his children waiting up for him? And who are we to just lie there and do nothing. No matter what he did, the mob was the criminal. But the law did nothing. Just left us wondering, "Why?" My opponent says nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral. But there is no rule of law in the Jim Crow south. Not when Negroes are denied housing. Turned away from schools, hospitals. And not when we are lynched. St. Augustine said, "An unjust law in no law at all.' Which means I have a right, even a duty to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter."