FOR STRUGGLING BLACK COLLEGE, HOPES OF A REVIVAL

Topic 1.2

CARER, KEEPER…

CLASS 3

1. Look at the photo featuring a teacher with his students. What do you think they are doing?

2. Watch an episode from The Great Debaters. Say why the teacher could be proud of his students.

3. Watch again and analyze the arguments put forward by the debaters. What makes them strong (or not so)?

4. Read an article telling the story of Wiley College described in the movie The Great Debaters. Was Mr Tolson really an outstanding teacher? Please, explain.

FOR STRUGGLING BLACK COLLEGE, HOPES OF A REVIVAL

By LAURA BEIL

MARSHALL, Tex.

When the light at University Avenue is green, drivers can pass Wiley College without a glance. There was a time, however, when this small black liberal arts college here caught the attention of a nation: in the 1930s, Wiley’s polished team of debaters amassed a series of victories over white competitors that stunned the Jim Crow South.

The 1935 debate team at Wiley College won the national championship, but the victory was not officially acknowledged.

The college would go on to groom civil rights leaders like James Farmer Jr. and Heman Sweatt, whose lawsuit against the University of Texas Law School in the 1940s helped pave the way for public school integration. Yet Wiley itself, like many black colleges, has struggled for survival ever since, and even reached the brink of collapse. This year, professors and staff members accepted unpaid furloughs. One employee could not share a recent report with trustees because his department could not afford copy paper.

Now Wiley is looking for a Hollywood ending.

On Dec. 25, “The Great Debaters" will appear in theaters with Denzel Washington as its director and star, and Oprah Winfrey as producer. The film depicts Wiley’s most glorious chapter: 1935, when the black poet and professor Melvin B. Tolson coached his debating team to a national championship.

No one knows whether the story will raise the college’s fortunes, but Wiley, which has not been able to support a debate team for decades, is suddenly feeling the glow of celebrity. Enrollment has soared past 900 for the first time in at least 40 years. The administration building was given a face-lift, compliments of the moviemakers, who also manicured the campus with new greenery. There are hopes to revive the debate program, and in a movie tie-in, Wal-Mart is to endow a Melvin B. Tolson Scholarship Fund with $100,000.

Today, callers to the institution are greeted with a cheery recorded reminder: “Home of the Great Debaters.” Jamecia Murray, a junior from Logansport, La., has joked to prospective students that “you could wake up in the morning and see Denzel Washington out your window.”

Movies can have an impact on schools that lingers for years. Garfield High School in Los Angeles, made famous by “Stand and Deliver” in 1988, was able to recoup quickly when its auditorium burned last May. By October, the school had received more than $100,000 in donations, largely from those who remembered the film. “Garfield itself has become synonymous with the movie,” Nadia Gonzales, a school district spokeswoman, said.

In many respects, Wiley’s story is the larger narrative of historically black institutions whose graduates lived to see landmark achievements in the 1960s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But after securing the opportunity for bright young students to attend any institution they wanted, many black colleges stalled.

Texas had 11 black colleges in 1954. Three are now gone, another is on probation for academic and other problems, and a fifth operated during most of the 1990s without accreditation.

Wiley’s woes reflect 130 years of racial and economic tumult. The Methodist Church founded Wiley in Marshall, in the northeast corner of the state, which has always aligned with the Deep South more than the Old West. Harrison County, home to Wiley, once held the largest slave population in the state, and antebellum culture cast a shadow on race relations well into the 20th century.

By the time Mr. Tolson arrived in 1923, Wiley had emerged as an elite institution for the black middle class. The son of a Missouri preacher, Mr. Tolson had a soul fed by the Harlem Renaissance. He was both feared and loved, inspiring, as one biographer wrote, “devotion bordering on adulation in many who knew him well.” He remained at Wiley 24 years, publishing his most heralded work of poetry a year before his death in 1966.

Wiley’s 1935 victory over the University of Southern Califronia (the opponents in the film are from Harvard) inspired people long denied dignity in white society. But the film omits one reality: even though they beat the reigning champions, the Great Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors because they did not belong to the debate society, which did not allow blacks until after World War II.

The most renowned member of the debate team was a teenage James Farmer Jr., who would go on to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. He would later use his Wiley-honed skills in debates against Malcolm X, an unflinching orator. “I debated Malcolm X four times and beat him,” Mr. Farmer told an interviewer in 1997. “I’d think, ‘Come off it, Malcolm, you can’t win. You didn’t come up under Tolson.’”

5. Work in small groups. Find out what the following phrases from the article mean and who the people are. There is one concept not mentioned in the article but used in the movie. Does this knowledge help understand the article better?

• Melvin Tolson
• Liberal arts college
• The Jim Crow South
• Civil disobedience
• A Hollywood ending
• Antebellum culture
• James Farmer, Jr.
• The Deep South
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Malcolm X

6. Work Debate the problem of whether it is absolutely necessary, for a teacher, to obtain a perfect command of the language, both native and foreign.