History and Hollywood: Spot the Difference

Tell me a good story and I will tell you a good lie. Hollywood is very good at producing films that tell deeply moving stories. Those movies are sometimes based on true facts, but often these get lost in the story. Such is the case with The Great Debaters.

Denzel Washington claimed that the reason he produced The Great Debaters was “it’s history.” Unfortunately the movie is anything but that. It is classified as a periodic drama, and it does an excellent job of bringing the mood of the period to the big screen. We see this in the way African Americans are treated as second class citizens, in the values the movie tries to instill, and in the larger events that take place in the background, such as the struggle to create farmers’ unions. However, the actual story of the movie is false, and never really took place.

A brief recap –the movie tells the story of the 1935 Wiley College debating team, and how they became the first debating team to take on Harvard and win. The team included a historic figure from the Civil Rights movement, James Farmer Jr., founder of CORE (Committee of Racial Equality), and initiator and organizer of the 1961 freedom ride, which led to the desegregation of inter-state buses in the US.

The other members of the debate team did exist, but their names were changed, and one of them was not even on the team during the period in which the movie took place. Samantha Booke, the teams only female member was based on the very real Henrietta Bell Wells, who was a member of the 1930 debate team at Wiley college, and participated in the first interracial college debate against the university of Michigan which her team won, which means that the 1935 team were not the first to debate against a white college.

This leads me to the most obvious lie of the movie, the nationally broadcast debate against Harvard, which never occurred. The team’s famous victory was against the University of Southern California who were the reigning champions of the league. James L. Farmer was an alternate, which means that he never got to speak. The topic of that debate was arms sales to foreign countries, not civil disobedience. And, finally because the college was not part of the debate society they were not allowed to call themselves victors, even though they won the debate. African Americans were only admitted to after world war II.

debate against Harvard from The Great Debaters starring Denzel Whitaker

Professor Melvin Tolson had leftists leanings, and some of the debaters’ parents were concerned that this would affect their children. Their is no historical evidence to support the claim that he was in any way instrumental in creating unions, although because he was black and a leftist these types of allegations were raised.

The historic team did get to view a lynching, which surprised me. While lynches were part of the reality in the US south, the number of actual lynchings that occured was quite rare. During that year in the entire US there were probably 11-12 lynches total (thank you Freakonomics), which meant that there were greater odds of them witnessing a murder, rape or theft (although less dramatic). However, since this was probably one of the few true historic events, it was important to include it, the fact that this makes for good drama also helped.

Of the “true” facts about the characters which are presented after the movie, only one was true, the rest never occured or were inaccurate. James Farmer Jr. did found CORE. He also organized the freedom rides so it is not clear why they were attributed to Samantha Booke.

admission to universities from The Great Debaters

From a debate standpoint, there was no real debate. True debate appeals to reason not emotion. You cannot quote someone, make an assertion based on that quote and expect to win as was done frequently throughout the movie. You cannot win a debate with a passionate emotional outburst. Logic is more important than research, and it was sorely lacking in the debates in the movie. Debaters debate both sides of any given topic, and not just the side that is politically correct 70 years in the future, and it would have been nice to see the team debate against an idea that they believed to be true.

Labeling this movie as history does a great disservice to the audience and history because most viewers have no idea that the story is false. I have spoken to people who grew up during the sixties, which was the height of the struggle for civil rights, and they believed that the events in the movie were true and the period was accurately portrayed. If people who are old enough to remember the black struggles for civil rights believe that these events are true, how can todays younger generation, who has no historical perspective, be expected to tell the difference. It is not clear why the movie needed to substitue real history, with something fake, why it wasn’t good enough.

There are no lack of films on black triumphs in the face of adversity (Pride, The Blind side, Remember the Titans), it is unclear why Denzel Washington felt the need to create another one, and in doing so rewrite the past. If he wanted to create a periodic drama, he could have used characters and locations that were entirely fictional. If he wanted to create history he should have used the real characters and included the actual events. There was no need to reinvent it to get the message and values across.

Whenever a movie rewrites history it causes damage to the true story behind the events shown. Viewers either disbelieve the story entirely because it is a movie, or substitute the truth with the fiction that movie depicts, and neither result is good. A minority will take the trouble to look up the true facts. This only harms attempts to produce movies that are accurate. If there is no way of telling the difference between Apollo 13 and The Great Debaters, then I might as well provide them both with equal credibility, which is a shame.