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.
Article comments
1 - Annette
I loved the movie...It was sorrowful...and rejoiceful. It's a movie for all people to see.
The moral of this story is strong...leading...and unforgetable. It touches the soul the mind..and the spirit.
2 - Purple Tigress
Would the movie have been any less touching if the opponent had been USC?
The problem of racism was more complex than portrayed in the movie and aren't we as a nation ready to deal with that?
3 - truth
What upsets me personally is the concocted debate around gandhi and civil disobedience.
Too few African Americans actually know that Gandhi was racist and prejudiced against black people.
I am willing to bet king and farmer never read gandhi's letters and petitions in South Africa where described black people as subhuman and of an inferior race.
4 - Purple Tigress
You are discussing two different issues.
Civil disobedience can be violent or it can be non-violent. Gandhi demonstrated that it could be peaceful yet effective.
Racism is a different issue.
Most assuredly since India had a caste system before and after British Imperialism, there was racial prejudice in India.
From the British perspective, both Asian Indians and native South Africans are black, just as Arabs are black.
I am not familiar and you do not provide links to the letters you reference and yet, still, civil disobedience and racism are two separate issues.
In any case, this article is not about MLK Jr or Gandhi. It is about the misrepresentation of history in order the heighten the concept of triumph against established black and white racism.
This article does not explore the possibility that Martin Luther King Jr. was racist or sexist either. It does not explore Gandhi in depth either.