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Libralind2
Veteran Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 991
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, December 06, 2007 - 09:47 pm: | 
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POV: the great debaters
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05wiley.html
For Struggling Black College, Hopes of a Revival
By LAURA BEIL
MARSHALL, Tex. — When the light at University Avenue is green, drivers can
pass Wiley College without a glance. There was a time, however, when this small
black liberal arts college here caught the attention of a nation: in the
1930s, Wiley’s polished team of debaters amassed a series of victories over white
competitors that stunned the Jim Crow South.
The college would go on to groom civil rights leaders like James Farmer Jr.
and Heman Sweatt, whose lawsuit against the University of Texas Law School in
the 1940s helped pave the way for public school integration. Yet Wiley itself,
like many black colleges, has struggled for survival ever since, and even
reached the brink of collapse. This year, professors and staff members accepted
unpaid furloughs. One employee could not share a recent report with trustees
because his department could not afford copy paper.
Now Wiley is looking for a Hollywood ending.
On Dec. 25, “The Great Debaters" will appear in theaters with Denzel
Washington as its director and star, and Oprah Winfrey as producer. The film depicts
Wiley’s most glorious chapter: 1935, when the black poet and professor Melvin
B. Tolson coached his debating team to a national championship.
No one knows whether the story will raise the college’s fortunes, but Wiley,
which has not been able to support a debate team for decades, is suddenly
feeling the glow of celebrity. Enrollment has soared past 900 for the first time
in at least 40 years. The administration building was given a face-lift,
compliments of the moviemakers, who also manicured the campus with new greenery.
There are hopes to revive the debate program, and in a movie tie-in, Wal-Mart is
to endow a Melvin B. Tolson Scholarship Fund with $100,000.
Today, callers to the institution are greeted with a cheery recorded
reminder: “Home of the Great Debaters.” Jamecia Murray, a junior from Logansport,
La., has joked to prospective students that “you could wake up in the morning
and see Denzel Washington out your window.”
Movies can have an impact on schools that lingers for years. Garfield High
School in Los Angeles, made famous by “Stand and Deliver” in 1988, was able to
recoup quickly when its auditorium burned last May. By October, the school
had received more than $100,000 in donations, largely from those who remembered
the film. “Garfield itself has become synonymous with the movie,” Nadia
Gonzales, a school district spokeswoman, said.
But celebrity can be unpredictable. While “Fame,” in 1980, brought the High
School of Performing Arts in New York City a bumper crop of applicants, many
students resented the portrayal of drug use and premarital sex.
In many respects, Wiley’s story is the larger narrative of historically
black institutions whose graduates lived to see landmark achievements in the
1960s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But after securing the
opportunity for bright young students to attend any institution they wanted, many
black colleges stalled.
Texas had 11 black colleges in 1954. Three are now gone, another is on
probation for academic and other problems, and a fifth operated during most of the
1990s without accreditation.
Wiley’s woes reflect 130 years of racial and economic tumult. The Methodist
Church founded Wiley in Marshall, in the northeast corner of the state, which
has always aligned with the Deep South more than the Old West. Harrison
County, home to Wiley, once held the largest slave population in the state, and
antebellum culture cast a shadow on race relations well into the 20th century.
By the time Mr. Tolson arrived in 1923, Wiley had emerged as an elite
institution for the black middle class. The son of a Missouri preacher, Mr. Tolson
had a soul fed by the Harlem Renaissance. He was both feared and loved,
inspiring, as one biographer wrote, “devotion bordering on adulation in many who knew
him well.” He remained at Wiley 24 years, publishing his most heralded work
of poetry a year before his death in 1966.
Wiley’s 1935 victory over the University of Southern California (the
opponents in the film are from Harvard) inspired people long denied dignity in white
society. But the film omits one reality: even though they beat the reigning
champions, the Great Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors
because they did not belong to the debate society, which did not allow blacks until
after World War II.
The most renowned member of the debate team was a teenage James Farmer Jr.,
who would go on to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. He would
later use his Wiley-honed skills in debates against Malcolm X, an unflinching
orator. “I debated Malcolm X four times and beat him,” Mr. Farmer told an
interviewer in 1997. “I’d think, ‘Come off it, Malcolm, you can’t win. You didn’t
come up under Tolson.’”
In 1960, college students in Marshall were jailed for the first large sit-in
in Texas. Within five years, the federal government would require
integration.
But as black students and faculty members were courted by white
institutions, the college’s identity became less clear. “I don’t think anybody could have
calculated what integration would really do,” said Bob Hayes, a United
Methodist bishop in Oklahoma whose father became president of Wiley in 1971.
Wiley’s football program, which had five national champion teams, disbanded
in 1969. Two years later, the Methodist Church dispatched the Rev. Robert
Hayes Sr. to Marshall to dissolve the college entirely. “The bishop said, ‘Go
give it a decent funeral,’” recalled Mr. Hayes, who now lives in Houston.
But the elder Mr. Hayes, a Wiley graduate, could not bring himself to close
his alma mater. A commanding preacher with a silky baritone, he convinced town
bankers not to call in loans. Until he left in 1986, Mr. Hayes kept the doors
open, even while enrollment dipped below 400. Robert Sherer, a history
professor for 14 years beginning in 1975, recalls that he “got constantly in trouble
with the dean by failing too many students. Every student they lost was a
major financial hit.”
Heightening a sense of instability, a succession of five presidents passed
through Wiley between 1986 and 2000. Lawns grew weedy. Buildings aged. In 2000,
trustees recruited Haywood Strickland, president of Texas College in nearby
Tyler, as president. He restored stability, but his tenure has not been
completely smooth. In 2003, The Marshall News Messenger reported that despite an
official biography that lists “doctoral training” at the University of Wisconsin,
and publicly taking the title “doctor,” Mr. Strickland in fact has no earned
Ph.D.
“I was unaffected by it,” Mr. Strickland said of the report, adding that he
did not believe he had misrepresented himself.
The college has run deficits for much of his tenure — 2006 ended $1 million
in the red — but administrators predict finishing the 2008 financial year in
the black. There are plans to establish the campus’s first endowed chair, named
after Mr. Tolson. The poet’s home, next to campus, now sports a sign in the
yard advertising its place in history.
For his part, Mr. Washington had not previously heard of the debaters or
even the college, but he said, “I’m aware of the strength of these historically
black colleges, and what they’ve done for millions of African-American men and
women over the years.” His son graduated from Morehouse College, which recent
ly raised $118 million.
While historically black colleges constitute only 3 percent of American
higher-education institutions, they graduate about 24 percent of all black college
students. Some prefer a campus like Wiley, so personal that faculty members
will track down a student who misses class. “To teach in schools like this
demands some missionary-like spirit,” said Solomon Masenda, an English professor
who joined the faculty almost 20 years ago. “You fall in love with it. I cannot
explain it.”
Deborah Phillips credits the college with identifying her daughter Ashley’s
strengths. Ashley Phillips arrived in Marshall unsure of what she might
accomplish. Last month, Ms. Phillips was crowned Miss Wiley. By next year, she plans
to be in medical school, with Wiley’s biology program as her foundation.
On a crisp November morning, her mother watched Homecoming paraders toss
candy from convertibles on University Avenue. “Here,” Mrs. Phillips said, “you’
re a student who dreams.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Moonsigns
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Moonsigns
Post Number: 2037
Registered: 07-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 - 09:12 am: |
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We can't wait to take our kids to see this movie! I think it's going to be incredible!!!! |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 5844
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 - 12:36 pm: |
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I hope they make you sit in the back, Moonshines. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 2864
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 - 04:42 pm: |
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"I hope they make you sit in the back, Moonshines."
Why? You need her for a lookout while you're back there with your camcorder making a bootleg copy? Just curious.....
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 10804
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 - 06:24 pm: |
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 10805
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 - 06:53 pm: |
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This is a very noble cause and I hope the movie proves to be a successful and lucrative endeavor! |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 5864
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, December 08, 2007 - 11:28 am: |
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Why? You need her for a lookout while you're back there with your camcorder making a bootleg copy? Just curious.....
(I trust her about as far as I can hiptoss an elephant) |
Moonsigns
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Moonsigns
Post Number: 2040
Registered: 07-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 09:03 am: |
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Chrishayden to Moonsigns:
"I hope they make you sit in the back, Moonshines."
Chrishayden to Ntfs:
"(I trust her about as far as I can hiptoss an elephant)."
Moonsigns:
Blah. Blah. Blah. Chrissy is an eternal pessimist. I don't expect him to "trust" me or anyone else because he can't even "trust" himself. He is extremely envious of anyone who possesses the tenacity to commit to rising above the madness of the world's ill ways. People who are disciplined in the process of seeking personal happiness and peace - despite the challenges of life - are threatening to him because such individuals constantly remind him that he lacks the skill of self-mastery.
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 5872
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 10:09 am: |
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Just what is that crap supposed to mean?
Please translate for those of us who speak English--and by the way, you are starting to sound like Cynique.
Are you another Cynique identity? |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 10851
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 02:22 pm: |
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Don't waste your time on trying to penetrate chrishayden's lead head, Moonie. Any time he can't supply an intelligent response he tries to blame the person reaming his ass out. |
Moonsigns
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Moonsigns
Post Number: 2042
Registered: 07-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 03:45 pm: |
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Chrishayden:
"Just what is that crap supposed to mean?"
Moonsigns:
I'm not surprised you don't "get it", Chrissy! |
Moonsigns
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Moonsigns
Post Number: 2043
Registered: 07-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 03:46 pm: |
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Cynique.... |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 2877
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 10, 2007 - 04:02 pm: |
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"He is extremely envious of anyone who possesses the tenacity to commit to rising above the madness of the world's ill ways. People who are disciplined in the process of seeking personal happiness and peace - despite the challenges of life - are threatening to him because such individuals constantly remind him that he lacks the skill of self-mastery."
 ........????????????
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