Is it okay to promote a stereotype or false assumption if you are black?

That is the question that the movie The Great Debaters indirectly asks. Two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington directed and led a cast that included Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker in what is a moving story about the kind of odds faced by a small black school, Wiley College, in the deep south when the Jim Crow laws were in effect.

In Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Production movie, the team has their greatest moment when they travel north to debate with the Harvard team. Harvard is presented as the bastion of the establishment, the best and the brightest the nation has to offer and, with a very, very white student body. In reality, the Wiley team did not debate against Harvard because the ivory tower of the Ivy League had already fallen. The Wiley team traveled to Los Angeles, to debate with USC in 1935.

In essence, the movie asks the audience to step back into a time that existed, but not at the same time. One Harvard was a leading college in debate. Once Harvard was all white male. Yet that was not the Harvard of 1935. Richard Greener was the first African American graduate of Harvard in 1870. He went on to become a lawyer and a foreign service officer.

Compared to these two institutes, the University of Southern California was new. USC opened in 1880 with only 53 students and 10 teachers. It was, for its time, formed by a diverse group of men: a Protestant, an Irish Catholic, and a German Jew. According to a 2001 article written for the Daily Trojan about black Trojan history, African Americans have been actively involved at USC since 1897. The first African American graduated from USC in 1909. The same article claims that during the Civil Rights era, Southern black families sent their children to USC.

Jim Crow laws didn't reach all corners of the US, as portrayed in another movie, also inspired by historical events and characters, the 2004 Ray. The absence of different laws based on race in other areas didn't mean there wasn't racial prejudice or segregated neighborhoods and entertainment.

What Martin Luther King Jr. did during the civil rights movement was to bring the South in line with the rest of the nation. People outside of the South were shocked by the conditions and extent of racism yet this didn't answer the problems faced by people in New York — the reality that Malcolm X reacted against. Being able to legally sit at the front of the bus, attend the same college or eat at the same diner didn't mean racism didn't exist in Seattle, Los Angeles or Cambridge. Born in the Midwest (Omaha, Nebraska) and raised in Wisconsin and Michigan, Malcolm X's family experienced harsh treatment, threats and hate crimes perpetrated against them. Martin Luther King Jr's peaceful protests, just as Gandhi's, involved a majority population that was treated as a minority. Malcolm X addressed what it was like for a minority to gain attention and rights.