Of course the title deals with debating but it goes far deeper than that. Forest Whitaker, playing a true academician in every sense of the word, has both a precocious and gifted 14 year old son played by the brilliant Denzel Whitaker,no relation, and that son is none other than James Farmer Jr.,whom 7 years later becomes the founder of C.O.R.E., the Congress on Racial Equality. Thus began the beginning of the end of segregation as well as the vicious Jim Crow laws of the South which made it as difficult for a Negro to live and thrive there as it did for the Jew in pre-war Third Reich Germany. Yet, the film was basically not political in theme.

It deals with a small black college in Texas,Wiley,that had a poet plus a political agitator played by Denzel Washington as many students' mentor. Denzel, knowing that if given the chance, a few gifted students could form a debating team to challenge any college team in the nation and he sets out to prove it. Keep in mind that the main theme of the Civil Rights Movement was "if given the chance" and so the film builds on it and does the kind of damage to opponents as did the great "Brown Bomber," Joe Louis.

Although a bit slow moving and at times, pretentious, the film was very skillfully done in bringing to light the efforts accomplished by the African Americans to do away with the perniciousness having pervaded this nation from the time the first slave ship landed on our shores. Without delving into the ultra-political, nevertheless we are made to see for ourselves how prophetic became the words "We can overcome".

Who wrote, "And the youth shall guide them?" Truer words never written. Those Wiley College kids, without anything but minds for weapons, caused a revolution from the mid '30s to the present--kids who put real meaning into the Emancipation Proclamation.

This wasn't about my Texas, although I am familiar with many of the topics in this film. I have been to Marshall in my travels over most of the highways in Texas, I know about Paul Quinn College and Prairie View A & M University. This wasn't even about my Daddy's Texas, as he was just a small boy at the time. It was, however, my Grandfather's Texas. he typified the characters in this film.

With Denzel Washington directing and acting, I expected an outstanding film. I was not prepared to be so emotionally taken in that I left the theater wiping tears from eyes. This was a powerful statement about the differences in American. Differences that were typified by Franklin Roosevelt's affirmative action program for whites - the New Deal; differences that would be repeated twenty years later after WWII when the whites again received affirmative action in the form of the GI Bill. Robert Eisele's story really brought home the pain and deprivation of being Black in America, and how some could overcome that deprivation with the right help, but could never overcome the pain.

Besides Washington, there were outstanding performances by Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, and Denzel Whitaker, as a 14-year-old in college.

Tears in my eyes, I will long remember this film as one of the best of the year and of many years.

On this, the day of the vice presidential debates that I recorded and will watch later, I decided to watch director Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters right after watching "Survivor". Co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and inspired by actual events, The Great Debaters is a very compelling history lesson about a small black college called Wiley and that school's debate team that wins enough of them to be challenged by perhaps the biggest university of the country: Harvard. (Okay, I get that the actual final debate was at USC. Still, Harvard made a more compelling institution here.) Washington plays the teacher, Melvin B. Tolson, who also organizes a sharecroppers' union at night that temporarily gets him in trouble with the law. The students who comprise of his team include Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), and James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) and yes, he was named after Washington! Forest Whitaker plays James Farmer, Sr. and no, he and Denzel are not related. With that cast, there was, no doubt, some expectation of quality and that's what you get throughout the picture. All the conflict and some romance between Parker and Smollett are handled with great dramatic clarity and when Washington and Forest are not on screen Parker, Smollett, and the younger Whitaker have enough presence in filling in. All in all, The Great Dabaters is one of the most inspirational movies I've yet seen. P.S. As a Louisianian, I was pleasantly surprised to read that parts were shot in Shreveport and Mansfield and that there was a "Filmed in Louisiana" logo in the end credits.