This Friday, March 4th, YouthLAB @ BBF will be hosting a movie screening of the film “The Great Debaters,” starring Denzel Washington.

Based on a true story, the plot revolves around the efforts of Wiley College coach Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington) to place his team on equal footing with whites in the American South during the 1930s when Jim Crow laws were common and lynch mobs were a pervasive fear for blacks. In the movie, the Wiley team eventually succeeds and is invited to debate at Harvard University.

The movie also explores the social constructs in Texas during the Great Depression, including not only the day-to-day insults and slights African Americans endured, but also a lynching. Also depicted is James L. Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), who, at 14 years old, was on Wiley’s debate team after completing high school (and who later went on to co-found C.O.R.E., the Congress of Racial Equality). According to the Houston Chronicle, another character depicted on the team, Samantha Booke, is based on the real individual Henrietta Bell Wells, the only female member of the 1930 debate team from Wiley College who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the United States. Wells also happened to be a minor African American poet whose papers are housed at the Library of Congress.

The key line of dialogue, used several times, is a famous paraphrase of Augustine of Hippo: “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Taken from Wikpedia.org