The Great Debaters and the Harlem Renaissance

(Academy Award Winners Forest Whitaker and Denzel Washington)

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all. THE GREAT DEBATERS corrects both oversights by giving us an extraordinary portrait of poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966) portrayed with convincing restraint by Denzel Washington, who also directed the movie. At the same time, it delivers an exciting story filled with the creative intellectual genius that characterized the Harlem Renaissance, the thrill of youthful romance, and the painful loss of innocence.

Tolson, historically, is known largely as the celebrated author-poet of “Rendezvous with America” (1944); “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia” (1953); and “Harlem Gallery” (1965). But we meet him in The Great Debaters, prior to his literary fame, as a professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. By day he teaches and guides his students through the passion-filled topics of the era: labor rights, race relations, public welfare policies, and personal ethics. By night he is a labor organizer who runs the risk of imprisonment or getting lynched when he meets with Whites and Blacks to convince them to organize unions to protect their rights as laborers. His efforts cause him to become branded as a communist, and therefore distrusted as a threat not merely to labor laws (or the lack of any significant ones at the time) but to American democracy.

Nate Parker as Henry Lowe, Jurnee Smollett as Samantha Brooke, and Denzel Whitaker as 14-year-old James Farmer, Jr. all give inspired performances in their roles as Tolson’s brilliant student debaters who endure challenge after challenge before earning an invitation to debate the team at Harvard. With the odds stacked solidly against them, they nevertheless pull off an historical win. Just as significant as the final team’s triumph, is the footnote identifying these students as future community leaders and history-makers in their own right. Henry Lowe would go on to become an influential minister, Samantha Brooke a lawyer, and Farmer a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Much has been made of the fact that The Great Debaters is the first major film project on which media empress Oprah Winfrey (one of the film’s producers) and two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington have worked together. Of equal significance, if not greater, is the fact that in addition to Washington the movie features powerhouse Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker as Dr. James Farmer, Sr. How many movies are there, after all, in which two Academy Award-winning African-American actors play characters of historical consequence like Tolson and Farmer? More important than the novelty is the contrast between the two, somewhat like the classic divergence noted later between Martin Luther King Jr.’s political philosophies and those initially espoused by Malcolm X. The differences between Tolson and Farmer, however, appear more subtle and that very likely is due to Robert Eisele’s amazing screenplay.

The hype and buzz surrounding The Great Debate sometimes comes across as a bit over the top. Despite that, the movie is actually far more excellent than anything you’ve likely heard about it.

by Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of “The Bridge of Silver Wings”
and "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance"