The Great Debaters (2007)

Denzel in an excellent performance as the coach of a debateteam from Wiley College, a small East Texas school. The team slays the dragons of competition and racism.

Based on a true story, the plot revolves around the efforts of debate coach Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington) at historically black Wiley College 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 to the point where they are able to debate Harvard University. This was their 47th annual debate team.
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."
Another major line, repeated in slightly different versions according to context, concerns doing what you "have to do" in order that we "can do" what we "want to do." In all instances, these vital lines are spoken by the James L. Farmer Sr. and James L. Farmer, Jr. characters.

The major characters are very well acted. Denzel delivers a soliloquy about Negroes and racism that is a perfect example of the excellence of his acting. Wonderful film.

To kill a mockingbird

After reading The Help, I thought if this work. I did not recall reading it, and, if I had, did not remember it. I decided to read the book, and finish it, before watching the film (which I did recall, dimly).

The book is considered a modern American classic. It is taught in high school. It is the story of the Finch family, Atticus and his son Jem and daughter Scout. Atticus is a lawyer in a small Alabam town, and is appointed by the local judge to defend a black man who stands accussed of raping a local white woman. Jem and Scout are inquisitive children who are treated kindly and somehwat indulgently by their father, whom they call Atticus. Their maid, or housekeeper, Calpurnia, is also involved in their upbringing: she is not afraid or reluctant to discipline them, including administering a swat in the leg when she feels it is appropriate.

Atticus is well respected in town. He is tolerant, sociable, and widowed. In the book his sister considers him too indulgent of his children, and pushes herself into their lives to improve what she considers some shortcomings. Primary among these are Scout's behavior; Jean Louise is a tomboy who never wears dresses, always wears overalls, fights, and otherwise does not behave as a proper girl should.

Aunt Alexandra does not appear in the film. In fact, the film dispenses with much detail, as films have to, in the interest of brevity. Her absence changes the story, yet the film is a wonderful representzation of the film. The relationships between Atticus and his kids, the trial, and relationships between Atticus and some townspeople come through. Of course, in the film there are many more relationships, and much richer detail. But a 2-hour film can only include so much detail.

Gregory Peck does a beautiful job of acting. Deservedly, he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch. He happens to be one of my favorite actors of all time, so I can not quibble much with his role. One weakness is that he has no Southern accent, made all the more glaring bu the rather thick accents of the kids (Jem, Scout and their friend Dill). But the basic character of Atticus Finch comes through Peck's acting: tolerant, reflective, decent.

A key scene, in which Atticus is seated in front of the jailhouse where Tom Robinson is awaiting trail, is depicted quite nicely in the film. Heck Tate, the local sheriff, warns Atticus that a group of local men is headed for the jail, looking to take Tom out and lynch him. Atticus prevents them from taking Tom, but the situation is diffused when Scout talks to Mister Cunningham about his son, her schoolmate.

The word nigger is used in the book, as it was, surely, in 1935 Alabama. At one juncture Scout tells Atticus that she has fought in school, something he has forbidden her to do, because a classmate call her father a nigger lover. She tells Atticus so, and he tells Scout to not use the word, then explains to her why he is defending a Negro.

I found the lack of use of the word nigger to be a detriment in The Help. Surely the word was used in 1962 Mississppi, even by genteel white folks. Its absence, it seemed to me, spoke more to the political correctness of our current day, than to the character of 1962 Jackson. Nonetheless, both books address a similar social milieu: the role of black servants in white families. Of course, Mockingbird delves into a deeper topic, racism, and Help does not go quite as deep. It, too, considers racism, of course.

Mockingbird is not an easy read. At first, I found it difficult to approach. Yet I did get into it, and now, having ended it, and having seen the film, I am astounded by its radicalism. It was published in 1960.

Taboo

In weeding 796 call numbers in Sports, came across this book.

Luminarias

Rated R, for language and sexuality. When a spicy Latin divorce attorney finds herself guilty of falling for her white and Jewish opposing council, her three single friends choose sides in the ongoing and often hilarious debate over race and sex.

Well, it isn't council, but counsel, as in attorney. A review in Imdb has the same error in a synopsis attributed to Echo Bridge Home Entertainment.

4 successful Chicanas meet to drink and chat about men, sex, being Mexican, and their problems arising from the combination of men, sex, being Mexican and having problems. One of them gives up sex as a sacrifice for Lent, and beseeches La Virgen de Guadalupe for strength to remain celibate all 40 days. An attorney defends a young Latina in court against her abusive husband, who wants joint custody of their son, and soon catches her husband kissing (of all things) a white woman. A therapist striving to be white, or accepted by whites, does not visit her mother in East LA and can't speak Spanish, yet brandishes a Chicana accent when she calls herself a Chicana. The fourth of the band can't find a decent man, has unresolved issues (having being called fea as a child among them), but soon falls for a Korean man.

The movie tries to explore racial pride, emotional ambiguity, and uncertainty in the face of 40th birthdays. It is in turns funny, touching, even insightful, but it does not work completely. There are too many cliches and stereotypes (the wise Latino man who happens to be a professor at UCLA, played by Cheech Marin with a wisp of beard under his lower lip that looks less Dizzy Gillespie than, what? Mandarin? and the uninhibited Latina aunts who don't watch their mouths but do watch male asses).

Yet, there are some nice performances and good points made. Evelina Fernandez plays the main character, Andrea, the attorney who prides herself on being a Latina, excoriates whites, and defends women against machismo. She falls for a white Jewish attorney, resists her husband returning after having announced he would marry a white woman, and lectures her son on not letting rage (sloppily defined as a legacvy of colonial oppression, or some such thing) overwhelm his Latino passion. In a nice twist, at the end the son, Joey, announces he has a girlfriend named Laura Johnson; his mother assumes she's white, and is surprised, when she meets her, to see she's black.

Still, a good film. 3 stars, of 5.

On Lincoln

Lincoln on race & slavery. (2009). edited and introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Princeton : Princeton University Press.

Wizard of Tuskegee

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal


Up From History. Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Bettmann/Corbis

Booker T. Washington in 1906

Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty. In 1881, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school in Alabama dedicated to educating recently freed slaves. He gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Scholarly assessments of his achievements noted that Washington "alone represented a well defined school of opinion which was supported by the rank and file of the race" (Horace Mann Bond). And that "no president of a republic, no king of a country, no emperor of a universal domain of that day approached anywhere near doing as much for the uplift of humanity as did Booker T. Washington" (Carter G. Woodson).

Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

• Excerpt from "Up From History"

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better. We might forgive John Lewis, the 1960s civil-rights activist and current congressman, for suggesting that Washington deserved to be "ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America." Mr. Lewis, after all, earned his fame in a confrontational moment in American race relations. But when influential historians like John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan and C. Vann Woodward -- all of whom wrote about Washington after World War II -- disparage the man, refusing to assess him fairly within the context of his time, something is amiss.

[Up From History] Shira Kronzon

Woodward -- who died in 1999, having inspired a generation of academic historians of the South -- faulted Washington for not attacking the "prejudices and injustices of the caste system and the barbarities of the mob (subjects he rarely mentioned)." And Woodward sneered: "The businessman's gospel of free enterprise, competition, and laissez faire never had a more loyal exponent than the master of Tuskegee." Woodward also criticized Washington's hostility to unions and close ties to people like Carnegie. In Woodward's view, according to Mr. Norrell, Carnegie "had perpetrated a weak, colonial economy on the South."

"Woodward," Mr. Norrell writes, "surely knew that throughout his career Booker was fighting a defensive battle to save black education from official abandonment. But the historian refused to grant that much black education would not have existed but for the northern philanthropy that Washington promoted. To have acknowledged the good works of the rich men would have undermined his argument about the evil influence of big corporations on the South."

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."

Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of judging Washington from the vantage point of modern times, it also happens that many of these assessments are wide of the mark. Far from condoning the racial injustices of his day, Washington said: "It's important and right that all privileges of the law be ours." He believed that "political activity alone" would not bring black progress, but he quietly financed court challenges to Jim Crow laws. Mr. Norrell notes that Washington made public protests against "lynching, disenfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation, and discrimination by labor unions." And in 1899 he wrote: "I do not favour the Negro giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States."

Many criticisms of Washington in more recent decades have echoed those of his contemporary black nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the political activist and social critic who belittled Tuskegee as "the capital of the Negro nation." Where Washington wanted to focus on the achievement of self-determination through independent black schools and businesses, Du Bois argued that civil rights were more important because political power was necessary to protect any economic gains.

Much has been made of this rivalry, but the relevant point is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not goals. Washington never renounced equal rights, and Du Bois acknowledged the need for vocational education as a means to self-improvement. Putting their differences into proper perspective is yet another way that "Up From History" serves as a useful corrective.

Jason L. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10