The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters produced by Denzel Washington, shows identity formation in the form of constructing their own reality through education. The film The Great Debaters is based upon a true story of a debate team at Wiley College, who on their journey to the final debate, encounter racial inequalities, segregation, and witness a lynching. The film takes place during the 1930’s in Texas and under the Jim Crow’s separate but equal segregation laws. In an effort to strive in their education under the racist conditions, the debate team use their learnings to form a new identity for African Americans during the progressive era. Education served as a tunnel for the team to work their way out their educational and social restrictions because they were able to voice their own realities and speak out to both black and white audiences of the injustice done to African Americans. The team which consisted of fourteen year old James Farmer Jr., Samantha Booke; the only female on the team, Henry Lowe, Hamilton Burgess, and their debate coach Melvin B. Tolson, are part of the making of the New Negro. The making of the New Negro, that consisted of ideologies taken by the scholar W.E.B. Dubois “to gain equal access for black Americans within Americas existing economic, political, and social framework” (Carson, 359-60). Their education at Wiley College allowed them to learn of black scholars such as Dubois, even though the campus was segregated, it still allowed for them to attain the best education they could offer, in a supremacist community. An example of how the team used their voices to speak out against the injustice are seen when Samantha speaks out on desegregating class rooms and schools at their first debate against the all white college of Oklahoma City. Several white members of the audience walk out in the middle of her debate because they do not agree that there should be racial integrity in the education system. To them, it is still socially unacceptable for African Americans and whites to be socially integrated. Her opponent, a white male, argues that African Americans should not go to the same schools as whites, he says, “Yes a time will come, when Negros and whites walk on the same campus, and share the same classrooms. But sadly that day is not today” (The Great Debaters). Samantha is a powerful character because she is also representing the struggle of the black woman in the segregated south and essentially a physical demonstration of everything that the National Association of Colored Women (NAWC) stood to fight for. In chapter 13, Carson writes that the NAWC was inspired by Ida Wells Barnett, a black feminist scholar who's ideologies for the organization were to improve the lives of African American women by providing education, discipline and better hygiene, all to create “the new intellectual black leadership” (Carson, 323). Black leadership which is a form of identity formation because it is recreating a new identity for black women that is different form the social construction of black womanhood created by white society.