Kings & Cabbages

The past week, I went to see The Great Debators with a friend. The opening shot announced that this was indeed a “big” film; the smooth, panoramic shot of the Southern Texas’ forests and mangroves not only set the scene, but spoke volumes about the production values, the expertise, and the money behind the movie. Clearly Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington also felt the need for a change from the low budget movies in which black men inevitably end up cavorting around in women’s clothes or fat suits (sometimes both at the same time). Thank God.

James Berardinelli sees the movie as the epic struggle of Wiley College’s talented black debate team to rise up against the racism that infected the 1930s South. The heart of darkness unveiled in The Great Debaters is of course, the lynching scene; as Melvin Tolson drives his team to a competition, they come across a gathering of white rurals congregating around the charred body of a young African American hung on a tree. “Was he a farmer, was he a sharecropper?” wonders one of the debaters later on. “They lynch people in Texas,” the young James Farmer Jr. tells his Harvard audience in the concluding debate. True, the ignorance and brutality of South deserves to be recorded as one of the darker chapters in human history. At a salon I recently attended, we saw printouts of historical lynch scenes where some members of the the white audience congregating around lynchings were actually smiling in glee. Clearly, there is no darkness like the darkness in the heart of man. Read the rest of this entry »