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The 1930 Wiley College debate team. Wells is in the center of the front row. Henrietta Bell Wells (October 11, 1912 – February 27, 2008) was the first female member of the debate team at historically Black Wiley College in Texas. She was born Henrietta Pauline Bell on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas to a West Indian single mother.
Based on a true story, the plot revolves around the efforts of debate coach Melvin B. Tolson at Wiley College, a historically black college related to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (now The United Methodist Church), 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 fear for African Americans.
As a debate coach at the historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, Tolson led a team that pioneered interracial college debates against white colleges in the segregated South. [2] This work was depicted in the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters, produced by Oprah Winfrey, starring and directed by Denzel Washington as Tolson. [2] [3]
Competitive debate, also known as forensics or speech and debate, is an activity in which two or more people take positions on an issue and are judged on how well they defend those positions. The activity has been present in academic spaces in the United States since the colonial period .
Inter-collegiate and high school policy debate are largely similar. Some of the differences: High school debate has its own, separate, leagues and tournaments. High school constructives are typically only 8 minutes, and high school rebuttals are typically only 5 minutes. College times are typically 9 minute constructives and 6 minute rebuttals.
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The National Debate Tournament is an American inter-college debate competition, held annually since 1947. The Rex Copeland award, inaugurated in 1989 for the team with the best performance over the whole season, is presented on the same occasion.
The success of the 1935 Wiley College debate team, coached by professor and poet Melvin Tolson, was the subject of a 2005 AMS Pictures documentary, The Great Debaters, The Real Great Debaters of Wiley College, which received heavy play around Texas, followed by the 2007 dramatic movie, The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington.