What kind of place was Los Angeles in 1935? In Los Angeles County, a Georgia-born African American athlete graduated from Muir Tech, now Muir High School, after playing shortstop and catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, guard on the basketball team, and winning awards in the broad jump for the track and field team. That young man would go on to play on various teams at Pasadena Junior College, now Pasadena City College and even, for a short time, play at UCLA. He was the first athlete, black or white, to earn varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. What he would become famous for would be baseball, when he, Jackie Robinson, became a Brooklyn Dodger in 1947.

That was after the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 where some African Americans assisted the Mexican Americans, but before the Watts Riots of August 1965. In 1935, yellow perilism was building up on the West Coast. Racial prejudice was focused on other minorities in Los Angeles and African American were aware of this.

In this respect, The Great Debaters isn't so great in showing the shades of racism that existed outside of the Deep South and outside of the North. Even in 1935, the US was more than North and South and racism came in different shades and affected people of different skin colors.

The script went for the easy win with a plot of black versus white, of new versus old, of small versus big. A better film might have left us questioning the gray areas and seen beyond the landowners and the landless and the North versus the South. Such a simplistic theme harks back to the original Constitution which granted voting rights to landowning white men (landless white men gained the vote in 1856) and to the Mason-Dixon Line of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In February 2008, The Great Debaters won at the NAACP awards for motion picture, best actor in a motion picture (Washington) and actress in a motion picture (Jurnee Smollett). Yet did this movie really serve people of color well?

California was neither North nor South. At the time, legal racism in California didn't focus on the African Americans, yet that doesn't mean racism and racism against African Americans did not exist. It doesn't even mean that African Americans in California or anywhere else aren't racist themselves. Do we really need movies that promote stereotypes, even if they favor African Americans from the Deep South?