The Great Debaters

In the south, African Americans could not go to the same school as the white children. That made them mad because they were made equal. In the the book, The Watsons go to Birmingham, their cousins marched to have rights and to show that there should be no segregation between African Americans and whites. In the book ,The Watsons go to Birmingham it says “ White children often attended large, well equipped , modern schools while African American students went to one-room schoolhouses without enough books or teachers.”(207 -208) They treated them unfair because the African Americans got the hand me downs of the white kids.This is an example for how segregation fits in the book and when it really happened.

The movie The Great Debaters is about a group of college kids debating other colleges in order to become equal to white americans in the south. There are 5 main characters in the movie: Melvin Tolson, James Farmer Jr., James Farmer Sr., Henry Lowe, and Samantha Booke. The character I chose to research is Melvin Tolson who is played by Denzel Washington. Based on all the movies that Denzel has played in, his character always seems to be hard on the outside and soft on the inside. He believed in “tough love”, so I was not very surprised by the way he acted in this movie.

This entire movie is encased with ingroup bias and outgroups. A great example of this is a scene when the team is at their football camp. Louie goes to sit down at a table of all African Americans and Julius says, “What you doing man?” Louie answers “I’m eating lunch.” and Julius replies “I see you eating lunch. Why you eating over here? Why don’t you go on over there and eat with your people.” This shows Julius’ tendency to favor his own group over Louie who is perceived to be part of a group that is different than his group. Remember the Titans being set in a segregated time is all about the in-group and out-group.

One of the points that Tyson brings up is the persecution whites who supported civil rights. Tyson mentions in the book that he and his family were forced to move because of their support for the Civil Rights Movement. This was the main reason why they got kicked out of Oxford and other towns in North Carolina, prior moving to Oxford. The Southern States were still segregated even after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was passed, which outlawed all discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or origin. Some states in the South neglected this law and remained segregated. Tyson mentions being persecuted when he says, “Even as a little boy, I already knew somehow that the Tysons were not always part of white newspaper editors of the day called “the South” … I suppose they never stopped to consider that black people might be Southerners.” (Tyson 18) Whites who supported civil rights or black people in any way were considered as traitors by other white people.

Another example of social inequality in Evicted was not in the housing market, but when Desmond witnessed a police officer harassing Arleen’s eldest son, Ger-Ger. Desmond describes the experience by saying, “I watched a police officer pull his patrol car up to Ger-Ger, Arleen’s eldest son, and say, ‘Man you’re fucked up!’...When I came out of the apartment for a closer look, the officer looked at me and drove away. He might have acted differently had I not been a white man with a notepad.” (P. 322). Desmond was not only witnessing inequality in the housing market, but also within the police department. When I read this, I could not believe that the police would rather harass a young black man than keep the streets of Milwaukee clean. Desmond witnessed this inequality firsthand, and I think he saw how unfairly these families were treated. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance described a lack of social acceptance from the people in Middletown towards the people from Appalachia. Vance described the way that hillbillies handled many problems as “Hillbilly Justice.” This form of problem solving within their community was highly frowned upon by the suburbanites of Middletown. The culture of Appalachia was highly irregular, but that is not a reason to look down upon or discriminate against a group of people. J.D even described that when he was in Middletown, he

Another example of lacking racial connections is openly discussed in chapter twelve during the Davidson versus Annadel baseball game. Many of the Davidson players do not want to play against the Redlegs simply because they do not want to take the chance of losing to a black man. On the other hand, the underdogs from Annadel are very open-minded and appreciate their black teammates for

Democrat Stephen A. Douglass was born on April 13, 1813 in the scenic and serene city of Brandon, Vermont. He was born to Stephen Arnold Douglass and Sarah Fisk. Some years later, Stephen Douglas dropped the second “s” from his last name. Douglas then migrated to Winchester, Illinois, in 1833, where he worked as an itinerant teacher and opened a school for three months at three dollars a student. Douglas also studied law, and then settled in Jacksonville, Illinois. Towards the end of the year, he wrote back to his Vermont relatives, “I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings, principles, and interests, and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption.”

An Excerpt from a Paper for my University Writing Class, “Justice for All? How Race and Class Influence American Institutions”

According to the Loeb’s book, Derrick Bell is a minority African American and the first black American professor at Harvard University, but Bell becomes a successful lecture who had been teaching the University for 20years. Bell took a decision not to go for strike. The University Manager when to hire the minority women, but the University took a strike against minority women not to be hire. Bell was advocating the right of

Alain de Botton is a well-respected English author and philosopher. As of today, he has written several best sellers such as Essays in Love and Status Anxiety. During the debate, Botton argued against the resolution “Be it resolved humankind’s best days lie ahead”. Although each debater brought valid arguments and unique perspectives to the resolution, out of the four, I believed that Botton’s debate was the weakest of all for a number of reasons.

The hatred of black people was widespread. It was universally; even some black people started hating themselves for their skin color. There were two psychologists that did a study on children and they had picked some white kids and some black kids and given two dolls a white one and a black one. The psychologists would watch and take notes on how the kids would treat the dolls, their studied showed that the white doll were well kept, clean and the one that was taken care of. The black doll on the other hand was tossed away and forgotten; the kids wanted to take care of the white baby doll and didn’t care about that black one. The psychologist urged that the kid were being deprived of self-respect from segregation and that it invited their learning ability. The case won, and made it so all public schools had to desegregate. But people didn’t like the decision that was made and fought back. The case seemed that did not succeed in completely desegregating public schools, the case did get some schools to desegregate but not all in the United States in the 1960’s. The parents had gotten their wishes and their kids could go to an all-white public school. But for the kids the fight had just started, and they were going to have to fight for this new freedom to

In Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Tom Robinson suffers the injustices of racism due to the community mindset that most people have in which they cannot see things from the perspective of another and therefore cannot possibly understand them. The jury deliberating Tom’s case is made up of people who have grown up in a world of segregation and discrimination; their society has inculcated this mindset into Tom’s jury. This jury “couldn’t be fair if they tried. In [those] courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins.

For my compare and contrast essay my three themes were: Friendship, Courage, and Racial Segregation because each of the movies/book shows these characteristics in their own way. Both were related to football and to friendships which started off difficult due to race but turned into strong bonds. I think Brian’s Song shows friendship because no matter what Brian and Gale were there for each other. In the beginning of Brian’s Song Brian and Gale weren’t friends they were practically enemies Brian starts their rivalry by having Gale make a complete fool of himself while talking to coach Halas. What Brian did was he told Gale that Halas was deaf in his left ear (pg. 6).

This tells me that African-Americans didn’t have a fair chance and were treated as less, which happened in history African-Americans were treated like slaves and weren’t given equal pay when they weren’t slaves. Text evidence: the author also says “The history of women in sports is a bit different. For most of the 1900s, women were told that sports were

The Great Debaters is a loosely based on an article published in 1997 in American Legacy magazine about the debate team of Wiley College a small, religious black college in East Texas, during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Under the guidance of their coach, English professor Melvin B. Tolson, the debaters victory in contest after contest. And against bigger black schools and triumph over prestigious white schools as well. The Great Debaters drives home the hardships faced by even relatively elite black students and intellectual the “talented tenth” in the Jim Crow South. Farmer’s father, religion professor James Farmer Sr., the first black person in Texas to earn a PhD, is threatened with death by two impoverished white farmers while driving