for the record, i did not see this film. it may be phenomenally produced, acted and born out of love and respect. it may be powerfully written and in fact, i don’t doubt the powerful scenes that are sure to leap off the screen. the fact of the matter is, how often is history distorted to portray a story intended to make the original history more “effective”…. more “powerful”…. more “accessible and easy to relate to”…. more “true to life”?
WRITTEN BY GLOBE NEWSPAPERS’ ELEANOR BOSWELL-RAINE
I am the daughter of Hamilton Boswell, who was a member of the Wiley College debating team of 1935. I regret that my father’s history was twisted and that writers somehow didn’t think that the truth was enough.
He was so proud to have contributed his memories to the making of what he thought would be a representative account of his beloved alma maters, Wiley and the University of Southern California, his mentor Melvin Tolson, his debating team and the team’s triumph.
Through the years I’ve listened to people say that early American historians distorted the history of blacks. It was a tactic that contributed to the undermining of the accomplishments of blacks; it haunts us to this day.
In an interview with film critic Kam Williams after the opening of the film, Denzel Washington, when asked why he wanted to bring the story of “The Great Debaters” to the silver screen, said: “It’s history, that’s why I wanted to capture it. I said, ‘We can’t miss this.’ There’s a lot there, and we need to pass that on. These things need to be shared and celebrated.”
While the film, “The Great Debaters,” produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo production company and actor/director Denzel Washington, successfully projects episodes of cruelty and blatant hatred against blacks by the white South of 1935, it holds up a shining example of a tiny black Texas college that produced one of the finest college debating teams of the time.
So the question is, why did its writers distort the Wiley College debating team’s history?
Here’s what is true:
Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas, is a real black college. Melvin Tolson was a brilliant professor who coached an outstanding debating team that competed and won against other black and white colleges.
James Farmer, a famous civil rights activist, was a junior member of the Wiley debating team. The year was 1935. Whites were lynching black people in the South. Fathers and mothers were humiliated in front of their children.
While on the road, Tolson and his debaters were traveling in a car when they encountered a crowd of white men, women and children who had lynched and mutilated a black man.
The Wiley debating team did compete and win a championship against a highly rated and revered university.
Professor Tolson did have leftist leanings, and one of the debater’s parents was concerned about how it would affect his son’s future. These are among the real facts.
Here’s what is untrue:
Perhaps one of the most damning distortions was the fictitious venue: the Wiley debating team did not debate at Harvard, it debated at the University of Southern California.
The team traveled west, not north, to debate a university not used to debating with black schools and not used to losing.
Three of the four debaters were fictional. The film’s writers took half of the names of authentic debaters and changed their last names. Hamilton Boswell became “Hamilton Burgess,” complete with the use of Boswell’s nickname, “Ham.” Henry Heights became “Henry Lowe.” There was no woman on the team in 1935.
In his 90s, Boswell shared with the researchers of the film his memories of the times – of Tolson and Wiley and of his personal experiences on the road with the debating team. Boswell died in May 2007 thinking that the Wiley debating team’s story would be told, and without knowledge that his name would be fictionalized.
The film sprinkled in facts that he provided. The most dramatic was the lynching scene that he, Tolson, and Farmer witnessed. Boswell’s testimony about the event was carried by The New York Times online edition as an MP3. His voice boomed out as he discussed the impact on the group of witnessing the horrible lynching.
Was it lack of information that created fictitious people, quoting Willie Lynch who, by the way, was unknown to them, a mere confusion of facts and historic context, or was it creative license taken to the extreme that caused a black producer and a black director and actor to recreate a profoundly notable moment in a small black college’s history?
Was it necessary to attribute real-life people’s accomplishments to fictitious characters at the end of the movie?
It was Hamilton Boswell, a real living person, who went to USC and became an important minister, not Hamilton Burgess. Was Hamilton Boswell not worthy of this recognition in his own right? Was Henry Heights not worthy of his accomplishments?
How long will we as blacks think that it’s all right to take our accomplishments as a basis for rewriting our true history? If Denzel Washington’s writers wanted to write about a fictitious team, why include a person like Tolson, who was not a fake, and distort him? Why take a small black college’s history and moment of triumph only to fake it up? Why insult real debaters by faking their last names when one of them contributed to some of the authenticity of the film and was not even mentioned as an advisor to the film?
When will we treasure our true history instead of trying to improve on it? Once more we are saying to black people, “Your history is just not good enough!”
Copyright © New America Media
Eleanor Boswell-Raine, Jan 05, 2008
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Humm, this is a pretty much serious and complicated debate.
I didn’t see the movie, but I can say something related to what Eleanor Boswell-Raine wrote.
I think like her that we should write real stories about black history.
But sometimes, people have to change it a little bite to make the movie really interesting. For example when you hear that the debaters won against Harvard, the movie is more attractive than if you hear USC. That helps to get more people into it. It is not just about black people, even with white history,there are changes.
If there is a team of great debaters without woman, it can feel bizarre. You know, people can get it like women are less intelligent.
Now, debaters’ names, I think that the production should have respected that because when you look a movie based on truth, you remember names, and that makes you able to search about them, to find details that are not necessarily in the movie. Besides, that would have been an honor to those debaters.
Where some of those changes due to the lake of informations? I don’t know, we should ask the production of the movie.
There is a lesson to get from that story whether it is the movie or the “real” story. And I think it all comes down to the same thing, it shows what black people are capable of, whether they are called boswell or burgess or they are men or women.
You make a very valid point about an audience’s capability to learn important lessons from film, whether it’s a docu-film, simply influenced by a true story, or a work of fiction altogether.
The debate lends itself to a question above race or gender…. how far-stretched are our ever-hungry, insatiate imaginations that we crave a story line that’s packed with every hollywood cliche, over a story line that’s true to history? And this goes above and beyond “The Great Debaters”. At this point, it’s merely a scapegoat for every film that’s come before it…. but let’s look at film in a greater scope….
How numb have we become that we’d rather see every Hollywood film made about Africa be a testimony to the “generosity and kindness of someone from the West (usually white, usually forming a romance with another savior doing good deeds there as well) and saving the life of the poor vulnerable people of Africa”….. but because it makes the movie a little more “interesting” to us, we eat it up because it satisfies our desire to see a powerful movie, with strong punch lines, and that climatic ending….
Another valid point about people feeling a certain way if they were to see no women in the debate team. But what does that tell you about how strongly we feel bout race and how we often tend to forget about the struggles of women as well? What a disservice and dishonor to all those women who were in fact intelligent enough to be on a debate team at that time in 1935…. for a film to re-create history and put women on a team depicting reality at that time…. when in fact, women were ostracized in many, many circles of society. To feed our need to become politically correct now?? Again, it lends itself to our insatiate need to have something catch our attention rather than make us think or ask questions…. to move us more than educate us….
And don’t get me wrong, I am definitely one of those people who will see a movie to get away from reality and just enjoy an entertaining, and powerful film….. it’s a creative outlet and the artistic masterpieces of so many talented individuals behind and in front of the screen…..
But at some point, we need to ask ourselves the question…. in every genre of film, how enslaved have we become to Hollywood’s gross distortion of history?
Personally, I feel Eleanor Boswell-Raine claims are bogus!
People have interviewed the composite character of Henrietta Bell Wells played as Samantha Booke, by Jurnee Smollett. This elderly woman, Henrietta Bell Wells has no reason to LIE! I suggest that Eleanor read and listen to Henrietta’s interviews granted with the other reputable media .
In all honesty, I think this is a pathetic attempt by Ms. Raine to obtain compensation for her Father’s so-called interview. Furthermore, the movie is “BASED ON A TRUE STORY”. The operative word is “BASED ON” the writers of the story can and do pick and choose what they want to fictionalize in a script!
And why is she just now coming forward with this BS?
I can’t agree more with you V, when I watch a movie, it is totally to escape to the reality. But when I wacth a movie based on history, it is to get more cultured.
You’re right, If we continu to see movies where truth is change, we’ll forget what’s the real history, how we get where we are, who we are, what did our parents get trough for us to be here….
Yep we need to ask ourselves questions.
I have a funny example, one day I was at school, and my classmate ask me a wird question, she told me: “You come for Africa, right? Do you miss animals?”. And I was like “OK, you need to learn about other places in the world. I didn’t live the way you think, you know it is just like here, we live in houses”. Just to say that society in general is blind because of the media. It might not be at that point, but it matters to know the history of the world, our history(cause we are the world), so we can think by ourselves.
But, It is difficult to reach that point in this society. There is a quote from e. e. cummings that I like and it really represent what I think: “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Afrikah Venus, I search what you said on the woman debater. I found it, you’re right, thx for the information. It is clear that if they say “BASED ON”, it will not be all true.
But it still ain’t change the fact that we need to ask ourselves questions, it is not just about that story I think, it is a general thing.