40 Fun Facts About The Great Debaters

In The Great Debaters, which Ivy League university do the Wiley College debaters face in the climactic contest?

Harvard was picked by the screenwriters to show the heights the team reached; no record shows the real Wiley squad ever debating there.

Which reigning champion did the real Wiley team beat in 1935, replaced in The Great Debaters by an Ivy League school?

USC was the national champion when Wiley won on its campus before a crowd of about 2,200 in April 1935.

Which daytime talk-show host was one of the producers of The Great Debaters?

Oprah Winfrey shared the producing credit with Todd Black, Kate Forte and Joe Roth, and young star Denzel Whitaker promoted the film on her show.

Which future Top Gun: Maverick star has an early screen role as Preston Whittington in The Great Debaters?

Glen Powell, an Austin native, was still a teenager when the film reached theaters, 15 years before Top Gun: Maverick made him widely known.

Which actor, the father in Home Alone, plays the hostile Sheriff Dozier in The Great Debaters?

John Heard played Peter McCallister in Home Alone and its sequel, long before he pinned on the badge of a 1930s Texas lawman.

In The Great Debaters, what do Melvin Tolson and his debaters come upon during a late-night drive?

A lynching by a white mob stops the team cold, and they barely escape when the crowd turns on their car. The memory later fuels their arguments on stage.

In The Great Debaters, what secret night work makes Melvin Tolson a target for the local sheriff?

Organizing a farmers' union of Black and white sharecroppers, Tolson slips out in overalls and work boots so nobody takes him for a professor.

James Farmer Jr., the 14-year-old debater in The Great Debaters, grew up to co-found which civil rights group?

CORE began in Chicago in 1942 as the Committee of Racial Equality, devoted to ending segregation through nonviolence.

How much did Denzel Washington give Wiley College in 2007 so the school could restart its debating program?

$1 million was the gift, announced days before the film opened, and Wiley's revived squad took the movie's title as its own name.

The Great Debaters is set at Wiley College, which stands in which East Texas town?

Marshall was also the hometown of James Farmer Jr., whose father taught at the college while the boy was growing up.

What subject does Melvin Tolson, the debate coach in The Great Debaters, teach at Wiley College?

English and speech were the real Tolson's subjects at Wiley for 23 years, and he also directed the campus theater club.

In The Great Debaters, what does Samantha Booke, the first woman on the team, hope to become?

Lawyer is her stated ambition, at a time when the United States had very few Black women in the profession.

In The Great Debaters, how do the Farmer family back in Texas follow the climactic debate?

On the radio, the contest is carried across the country, and the family is shown praying around the set as James steps up to speak.

Where does Melvin Tolson hold tryouts for the four places on his team in The Great Debaters?

At his house that night, 45 students compete for four places, taking turns inside a box chalked on the wooden floor.

In The Great Debaters, what does Sheriff Dozier do to Melvin Tolson that draws an angry crowd into the street?

Arrests him, and the crowd outside demands his release until James Farmer Sr. confronts the sheriff on his behalf.

In The Great Debaters, who gives up his own place in the final debate so James Farmer Jr. can speak?

Henry Lowe, the team's restless star, steps aside for the 14-year-old who had served as its researcher.

Why does Hamilton Burgess leave the Wiley College team partway through The Great Debaters?

Tolson's radical politics worry the young man's parents; he had been the one returning member from the previous year's squad.

In The Great Debaters, which animal does a Black family's car kill, bringing threats from its white owners?

A hog is the casualty; the two men who confront the family are credited only as Pig Owner and Pig Farmer.

Which Christian thinker do James Farmer Sr. and his son paraphrase in The Great Debaters about unjust laws?

St. Augustine supplies the film's recurring maxim, an idea Martin Luther King Jr. later built into his Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Which system of segregation laws governs daily life for the Wiley College students in The Great Debaters?

Jim Crow laws enforced separation across the 1930s South, and the film shows both the daily insults and the mortal danger that came with them.

Which actress, a child star of Eve's Bayou, plays debater Samantha Booke in The Great Debaters?

Jurnee Smollett played 10-year-old Eve in Eve's Bayou, and she later starred in Lovecraft Country and Birds of Prey.

Which actor, later the director of The Birth of a Nation, plays the hard-drinking star debater in The Great Debaters?

Nate Parker went to a debate boot camp for the part, and the experience led him to back a Brooklyn program teaching literacy through debate.

Which actress, Denzel Washington's co-star in John Q, plays Pearl Farmer in The Great Debaters?

Kimberly Elise made three films with Washington: John Q, The Manchurian Candidate and this one, as the mother of James Farmer Jr.

Denzel Whitaker, James Farmer Jr. in The Great Debaters, had a child role in which 2001 Denzel Washington thriller?

Training Day came six years earlier, and Whitaker later learned from his father that he really had been named after Washington.

Forest Whitaker joined The Great Debaters fresh from an Oscar for playing which African dictator?

Idi Amin, in The Last King of Scotland, won him Best Actor; he gained 50 pounds and learned the accordion to play the Ugandan ruler.

The Great Debaters was Denzel Washington's second film as director; which 2002 drama was his first?

Antwone Fisher also cast Washington as a mentor to a troubled young man, and it too won the Producers Guild's Stanley Kramer prize.

The Great Debaters opened in US theaters on which holiday at the end of 2007?

Christmas Day was the nationwide opening, two weeks after a premiere at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome.

Which film beat The Great Debaters and five other nominees to the Golden Globe for best drama?

Atonement took the prize in a field of seven that also held American Gangster, Washington's other release of 2007.

Which ceremony named The Great Debaters outstanding motion picture and honored Denzel Washington as lead actor?

NAACP Image Awards voters gave the film eight nominations, the most of any movie that year, with further wins for two of its young stars.

Which real Wiley College debater inspired Samantha Booke, the only woman on the team in The Great Debaters?

Henrietta Wells, then Henrietta Bell, lived to 95 and told Denzel Washington that he should play her old coach himself.

James Farmer Jr., a teenager in The Great Debaters, later launched which 1961 campaign against segregated buses?

Freedom Rides sent mixed groups through the Deep South by bus, and the violence that met them put segregation on the national news.

The real James Farmer Jr. credited Melvin Tolson's coaching for four debate wins over which Black nationalist leader?

Malcolm X met Farmer in debate four times, and Farmer claimed every win, joking that his rival never had Tolson for a coach.

The real Melvin Tolson, the coach in The Great Debaters, was named poet laureate of which West African nation?

Liberia gave Tolson the title in 1947, and he answered with a book-length poem for the country's centennial.

After leaving Wiley College, the real Melvin Tolson of The Great Debaters won which office in his new town?

Mayor of Langston was a post Tolson held from 1954 to 1960 while he taught drama at the town's historically Black university.

Melvin Tolson, the coach in The Great Debaters, titled his last long poem after which New York neighborhood?

Harlem Gallery appeared in 1965, a year before Tolson died, with each section headed by a letter of the Greek alphabet.

Wiley College, the school at the heart of The Great Debaters, was founded in 1873 by which church?

Methodist Episcopal Bishop Isaac Wiley gave the college its name, and the church's Freedmen's Aid Society supported it.

Wiley College, the setting of The Great Debaters, is among the oldest Black colleges west of which waterway?

Mississippi River is the marker, and Wiley's library, built by its own students in 1907, was the only public library in town until 1974.

Melvin Tolson's real Wiley team made history in the South by debating a white university from which state capital?

Oklahoma City University faced Wiley before a packed chapel of Black and white spectators, the first such contest in the South.

Why was the real Wiley team of The Great Debaters never officially named national champion after its 1935 win?

It was barred from membership: the national debate society admitted no Black members until after World War II, so the title stayed unofficial.

Which soul singer, frontwoman of the Dap-Kings, appears as juke-joint singer Lila in The Great Debaters?

Sharon Jones turned down a touring slot behind Lou Reed to make the film, and she sings several 1930s numbers on its soundtrack.