The Darker Brother: A Review of The Movie The Great Debaters (2007)

I am the darker brother
They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes
But I laugh, and I eat well and I grow strong
Tomorrow I will sit on the table when company comes
Nobody'll dare say to me 'eat in the kitchen' then
Besides, they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed
I, too, am America
- Langston Hughes, 1924 -

Opened with a witted poem read out loud by Denzel Washington in front of his class, this 'inspired-by-a-true-story' movie had all at once brought me up to my whole attention (though it was 00.00, my clock said). He was a literature teacher in the movie, politically radical, but also a strong-hearted debate team coach for one of the small 'black' colleges in America. It was 1934, and I just realized that at the time, black-racism was still so strong in America. Black people or coloured people or Negroes or Niggers could not be admitted to state universities. They were lynched instead. I just noticed that there were such a word, 'lynch', which according to my Longman Dictionary would mean:

(esp. of a crowd of people), to take hold of and put to death without a legal trial (a person thought to be guilty of crime).

Denzel in the movie taught me the history about this word:

Take the meanest, most restless nigger
Strip him off his clothes
In front of the remaining male niggers, female niggers and niggers infants
Tar and feather him
Tie each leg to a horse facing an opposite direction
Set him on fire
And beat both horses until they tear him apart
In front of the male, female and nigger infants
Bullwhip and beat the remaining nigger males within an inch of their life
Do not kill them, but put the fear of God in them
For they can be useful for future breeding

It was an expression made popular by Willie Lynch, a vicious slave owner in the West Indies. He was also very well-known of his simple-yet-diabolical methods of controlling slaves: "keep the slave physically strong but psychologically weak and dependent of the slave master: keep the body and take the mind". The word 'lynch' came from his last name.

Basically, this movie told us the story of a group of underdog Negro college students in a debate team that eventually took on the Harvard elite. I enjoyed very much the debates in the movie (since I was also in a debate team when I was a college student, *giggle*). But not only that, this movie also brought its audiences into an insight. It opened their eyes of the power of destruction of 'human-ego'. The ego that lied (and still lies and will always lie there) in each and every one of us. The ego that always sprouted hatred in the heart. The ego that kept people in boxes, classified by their colours, religions, sexes, and so on.

I myself believe in a non-violent way, that hatred can only be ceased by love. But this movie somehow made me undertand that some people could not simply just walk in that way so easily. Especially when you were black, and had just witnessed a fellow of yours being lynched, strung up by his neck up on a tree and set on fire burnt alive to death, simply for just being black. Therefore, I myself would give my every thumbs up for the Negroes that had managed to survive and prove themselves in a constructive way nobody else could.

This was part of the last speech by the debate team against the Harvard, giving us confidence that somehow, some way, non-violence can be the best moral weapon to fight for justice.

[Proposition: Civil disobedience is a moral weapon in the fight for justice]

But how can disobedience ever be moral?
Well, I guess that depends on one's definition of the words.
Word.
In 1919, in India...
10.000 people gathered in Amritsar to protest the tyranny of British rule.
General Reginald Dyer trapped them in a courtyard,
and ordered his troops to fire into the crowd for ten minutes.
379 died.
Men, women, children shot down in cold blood.
Dyer said he had taught them a moral lesson.
Gandhi and his followers serponded not with violence.
But with an organized campaign of non-cooperation.
Govenrment buildings were occupied.
Streets were blocked with people who refused to rise, even when beaten by police.
Gandhi was arrested.
But the British were soon forced to release him.
Gandhi called it a moral victory.
The definition of moral: Dyer's lesson or Gandhi's victory?
You choose.

In Texas, they lynched Negroes.
My teammates and I saw a man strung up by his neck and set on fire.
We drove through a lynch mob and pressed our faces against the floorboard.
i looked at my teammates.
I saw the fear in their eyes.
And worse....
The shame.
What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung without trial?
In a dark forest filled with fog.
Was he a thief? Was he a killer?
Or just a Negro?
Was he a sharecropper? A preacher?
Were his children waiting up for him?
And who are we to just lie there and do nothing?
No matter what he did, the mob is the criminal.
But the law did nothing.
Just left us wondering why.
My opponent says: "Nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral"
But there is no rule of law in the Jim Crow South.
Not when Negroes are denied housing.
Turned away from schools, hospitals.
And not when we are lynched.
St. Augustine said, "An unjust law is no law at all"
Which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist...
But with violence or civil disobedience?
You should pray I choose the latter.