The Great Debaters
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40 free The Great Debaters trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington, tells how a small Black college fielded a debate team good enough to take on the best in the country. It is a sports movie where the contest is argument, set against the dangers of the segregated South in the 1930s. This quiz covers the story on screen, from the tryouts to the final debate, along with the actors who played the students and their coach, the people who made the film, and how it was received. It also digs into the real history: what Melvin Tolson and his Wiley College debaters actually achieved, and where the screenplay changed the facts. It suits anyone who has watched the film in class or on the couch, fans of Washington's work, and teachers looking for discussion questions with sourced answers.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In The Great Debaters, which Ivy League university do the Wiley College debaters face in the climactic contest?
Harvard
Harvard was picked by the screenwriters to show the heights the team reached; no record shows the real Wiley squad ever debating there.
Q 02Which reigning champion did the real Wiley team beat in 1935, replaced in The Great Debaters by an Ivy League school?
USC
USC was the national champion when Wiley won on its campus before a crowd of about 2,200 in April 1935.
Q 03Which daytime talk-show host was one of the producers of The Great Debaters?
Oprah Winfrey
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.
Q 04Which future Top Gun: Maverick star has an early screen role as Preston Whittington in The Great Debaters?
Glen Powell
Glen Powell, an Austin native, was still a teenager when the film reached theaters, 15 years before Top Gun: Maverick made him widely known.
Q 05Which actor, the father in Home Alone, plays the hostile Sheriff Dozier in The Great Debaters?
John Heard
John Heard played Peter McCallister in Home Alone and its sequel, long before he pinned on the badge of a 1930s Texas lawman.
Q 06In The Great Debaters, what do Melvin Tolson and his debaters come upon during a late-night drive?
A lynching
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.
Q 07In The Great Debaters, what secret night work makes Melvin Tolson a target for the local sheriff?
Organizing a farmers' union
Organizing a farmers' union of Black and white sharecroppers, Tolson slips out in overalls and work boots so nobody takes him for a professor.
Q 08James Farmer Jr., the 14-year-old debater in The Great Debaters, grew up to co-found which civil rights group?
CORE
CORE began in Chicago in 1942 as the Committee of Racial Equality, devoted to ending segregation through nonviolence.
Q 09How much did Denzel Washington give Wiley College in 2007 so the school could restart its debating program?
$1 million
$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.
Q 10The Great Debaters is set at Wiley College, which stands in which East Texas town?
Marshall
Marshall was also the hometown of James Farmer Jr., whose father taught at the college while the boy was growing up.
Q 11What subject does Melvin Tolson, the debate coach in The Great Debaters, teach at Wiley College?
English
English and speech were the real Tolson's subjects at Wiley for 23 years, and he also directed the campus theater club.
Q 12In The Great Debaters, what does Samantha Booke, the first woman on the team, hope to become?
Lawyer
Lawyer is her stated ambition, at a time when the United States had very few Black women in the profession.
Q 13In The Great Debaters, how do the Farmer family back in Texas follow the climactic debate?
On the radio
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.
Q 21Which actress, a child star of Eve's Bayou, plays debater Samantha Booke in The Great Debaters?
Jurnee Smollett
Jurnee Smollett played 10-year-old Eve in Eve's Bayou, and she later starred in Lovecraft Country and Birds of Prey.
Q 22Which actor, later the director of The Birth of a Nation, plays the hard-drinking star debater in The Great Debaters?
Nate Parker
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.
Q 23Which actress, Denzel Washington's co-star in John Q, plays Pearl Farmer in The Great Debaters?
Kimberly Elise
Q 14Where does Melvin Tolson hold tryouts for the four places on his team in The Great Debaters?
At his house
At his house that night, 45 students compete for four places, taking turns inside a box chalked on the wooden floor.
Q 15In The Great Debaters, what does Sheriff Dozier do to Melvin Tolson that draws an angry crowd into the street?
Arrests him
Arrests him, and the crowd outside demands his release until James Farmer Sr. confronts the sheriff on his behalf.
Q 16In The Great Debaters, who gives up his own place in the final debate so James Farmer Jr. can speak?
Henry Lowe
Henry Lowe, the team's restless star, steps aside for the 14-year-old who had served as its researcher.
Q 17Why does Hamilton Burgess leave the Wiley College team partway through The Great Debaters?
Tolson's radical politics
Tolson's radical politics worry the young man's parents; he had been the one returning member from the previous year's squad.
Q 18In The Great Debaters, which animal does a Black family's car kill, bringing threats from its white owners?
A hog
A hog is the casualty; the two men who confront the family are credited only as Pig Owner and Pig Farmer.
Q 19Which Christian thinker do James Farmer Sr. and his son paraphrase in The Great Debaters about unjust laws?
St. Augustine
St. Augustine supplies the film's recurring maxim, an idea Martin Luther King Jr. later built into his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Q 20Which system of segregation laws governs daily life for the Wiley College students in The Great Debaters?
Jim Crow
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.
Kimberly Elise made three films with Washington: John Q, The Manchurian Candidate and this one, as the mother of James Farmer Jr.
Q 24Denzel Whitaker, James Farmer Jr. in The Great Debaters, had a child role in which 2001 Denzel Washington thriller?
Training Day
Training Day came six years earlier, and Whitaker later learned from his father that he really had been named after Washington.
Q 25Forest Whitaker joined The Great Debaters fresh from an Oscar for playing which African dictator?
Idi Amin
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.
Q 26The Great Debaters was Denzel Washington's second film as director; which 2002 drama was his first?
Antwone Fisher
Antwone Fisher also cast Washington as a mentor to a troubled young man, and it too won the Producers Guild's Stanley Kramer prize.
Q 27The Great Debaters opened in US theaters on which holiday at the end of 2007?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day was the nationwide opening, two weeks after a premiere at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome.
Q 28Which film beat The Great Debaters and five other nominees to the Golden Globe for best drama?
Atonement
Atonement took the prize in a field of seven that also held American Gangster, Washington's other release of 2007.
Q 29Which ceremony named The Great Debaters outstanding motion picture and honored Denzel Washington as lead actor?
NAACP Image Awards
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.
Q 30Which real Wiley College debater inspired Samantha Booke, the only woman on the team in The Great Debaters?
Henrietta Wells
Henrietta Wells, then Henrietta Bell, lived to 95 and told Denzel Washington that he should play her old coach himself.