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The University of Kansas has one of the premier debate programs in the country. KU Debate currently has six National Debate Tournament (NDT) National Championships under their belts, and the team has reached the NDT Final Four 20 times since the tournament began in 1947.
For those who are keeping score, yes, that is the same number of championships as KU’s blue blood basketball program, with more Final Four appearances than the roundball players. Such illustrious programs usually have a few significant events tied to their history, and such is the case for KU Debate.
Many people are familiar with the film “The Great Debaters” (2007), starring Denzel Washington as Wiley College’s (Marshall, Texas) debate coach, activist, and literary giant Melvin Beaunorus Tolson. As wonderful as the Washington-directed, Oprah Winfrey-produced story is, it, like numerous films based on true events, suffers from liberties taken by writers and directors leaving real-life events lost in translation.
In the case of “The Great Debaters,” one of the pieces left in the archives or on the cutting room floor is the University of Kansas’ role in Wiley’s rise in the debating world in the 1930s.
Tolson, raised in Kansas City, organized the debate team at Wiley in 1924, the same year that he joined the faculty as a professor of English and director of dramatics. He had just graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he participated in forensics with Horace Mann Bond as a debate partner. The Wiley team quickly became one of the strongest in the country, going undefeated for a decade against other Black colleges and universities both in the southwest and nationally, including Tolson’s alma mater, Lincoln, Fisk, Morehouse, Wilberforce, Virginia Union and Howard.
With their success, Tolson began writing predominantly white institutions (PWI) asking for non-decision, friendly debates. The University of Michigan was the first to accept his invitation and the two teams squared off in Chicago’s 7th Street Theatre in 1929. The first time Black “debaters met a northern university of the Anglo-Saxon race,” as Tolson remembered, was triumphantly covered in the Black press.
The following year on March 21, 1930 — not 1935 as the film depicts — Wiley debated Oklahoma City University at Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. As Tolson explained in his Washington Tribune column, the chapel was packed with Black and white citizens to see “the first time that white and colored students ever discussed propositions in the South from the same platform.” This debate also featured Henrietta Bell Wells, the individual who the character Samantha Booke is based on in the film.
Following the successful debates against Michigan and Oklahoma City University, and the continued debating prowess by Wiley’s students, other PWIs began accepting Tolson’s invitation, including Texas Christian University and Oxford University, the “international argumentative champions” who went on an American tour in 1933 and debated Wiley twice, once in Kansas City and the other in Houston.
That same year, KU’s debate director, Ezra C. Buehler, agreed to organize a debate with Wiley. The event scheduled for Feb. 24 at Kansas City’s Grand Avenue Temple quickly became a sensation.
It was estimated that nearly 5,000 people attended “the interracial clash,” as it was described by the Chicago Defender, to hear arguments on the question: “Resolved: That Socialism Would Be Preferable to Capitalism in the United States.”
Those who debated for Kansas, including some “died-in-the wool Socialists” according to the Kansas City Call, were future KU political science professor Hilden Gibson, James Callahan and Charles Heckler. While Thomas Cole, Hobart Jarret and Frederick Weaver, a Kansas Citian and Frederick Douglass’ great-grandson, took to the podium for Wiley.
Wiley maintained the affirmative side and the negative was upheld by KU, and even though there was no decision, all reports indicate it was a tremendous event with “stirring wit and arguments” from both teams.
To add to the “interracial flavor of the project,” the coaches and teams attended a dance at Paseo Hall after the debate — something that could not have happened at KU in the 1930s as the institution upheld segregation around social events, including dances, on the Lawrence campus.
The following year, Wiley returned to Kansas City for a rematch of sorts. While there was no decision in 1933, some believed that Wiley had the best orators and KU had been “a trifle better at debating.”
In 1934, the subject of the debate was “Resolved: That the Powers of the President of the United States should be substantially increased as a Fixed Policy.” Wiley had the negative and KU the affirmative. Again, there was no decision, but at the conclusion of the “highly interesting debate,” Wiley believed they carried the “mythical decision in the minds of the hearers …”
It was the next year, 1935 — the year “The Great Debaters” supposedly took place, though many of the events portrayed in the film occurred between 1930 and 1935 — that Wiley scheduled a west coast tour. It is unknown if KU and Wiley met again in Kansas City before they headed west for the “interracial goodwill tour,” but the Los Angeles Sentinel in their coverage of the west coast swing called the KU/Wiley debate an annual affair noting it was sponsored yearly by the “Young Matrons’ club and the Wiley College Alumni Association of Kansas City.”
During the Pacific Coast tour, Wiley met the University of Southern California (USC) Trojans, the national champions — not Harvard, as depicted in the film. The much-anticipated event took place on April 2, in USC’s Bovard Hall, before an audience of more than 2,000 people. Wiley, with the team of James Farmer Jr., Hobart Jarrett, and Henry Heights defeated the champions and took the title. Jarrett in particular “astounded Angelenoes with his logic and wit” during the debate.
Melvin B. Tolson’s interracial debates of the 1930s, according to author and social commentator George S. Schuyler, were in their own way breaking down racial barriers and stereotypes. Tolson saw them in a similar light. A few years later he argued “when the finest intellects of black youth and white youth meet, the thinking person gets the thrill of seeing beyond the racial phenomena to the identity of worthy qualities.”
For the hour of the debate at least Tolson believed racial animosity was set aside. He even claimed that he had “seen ex-slaves shaking hands with the grandson of the masters after the debate.”
Whether that is true at a time when extreme segregation and racial violence existed throughout the nation, including at the University of Kansas, is uncertain, but for at least two to three years in a row the illustrious debate programs of Wiley College and KU came together in Kansas City to argue topics that are still relevant today. Thousands of people attended the events and applauded each team, and Kansas Debate, led by Ezra C. Buehler, participated in events that may not have been readily accepted on their own campus for the excitement and intellectual exercise of argument.
About this column
“The Way of the Wide, Wide World” is a regular column about race, history and politics by Shawn Leigh Alexander, professor of African & African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. Dr. Alexander is the author of, among other titles, “An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights before the NAACP” (2012) and “W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist” (2015). He is also a frequent consultant and contributor on PBS documentaries, including “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” (2019) and “Niagara Movement: The Early Battle for Civil Rights” (2023).
Read more of “The Way of the Wide, Wide World” at this link.
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