This wasn't about my Texas, although I am familiar with many of the topics in this film. I have been to Marshall in my travels over most of the highways in Texas, I know about Paul Quinn College and Prairie View A & M University. This wasn't even about my Daddy's Texas, as he was just a small boy at the time. It was, however, my Grandfather's Texas. he typified the characters in this film.

With Denzel Washington directing and acting, I expected an outstanding film. I was not prepared to be so emotionally taken in that I left the theater wiping tears from eyes. This was a powerful statement about the differences in American. Differences that were typified by Franklin Roosevelt's affirmative action program for whites - the New Deal; differences that would be repeated twenty years later after WWII when the whites again received affirmative action in the form of the GI Bill. Robert Eisele's story really brought home the pain and deprivation of being Black in America, and how some could overcome that deprivation with the right help, but could never overcome the pain.

Besides Washington, there were outstanding performances by Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, and Denzel Whitaker, as a 14-year-old in college.

Tears in my eyes, I will long remember this film as one of the best of the year and of many years.

On this, the day of the vice presidential debates that I recorded and will watch later, I decided to watch director Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters right after watching "Survivor". Co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and inspired by actual events, The Great Debaters is a very compelling history lesson about a small black college called Wiley and that school's debate team that wins enough of them to be challenged by perhaps the biggest university of the country: Harvard. (Okay, I get that the actual final debate was at USC. Still, Harvard made a more compelling institution here.) Washington plays the teacher, Melvin B. Tolson, who also organizes a sharecroppers' union at night that temporarily gets him in trouble with the law. The students who comprise of his team include Henry Lowe (Nate Parker),Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett),and James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) and yes, he was named after Washington! Forest Whitaker plays James Farmer, Sr. and no, he and Denzel are not related. With that cast, there was, no doubt, some expectation of quality and that's what you get throughout the picture. All the conflict and some romance between Parker and Smollett are handled with great dramatic clarity and when Washington and Forest are not on screen Parker, Smollett, and the younger Whitaker have enough presence in filling in. All in all, The Great Dabaters is one of the most inspirational movies I've yet seen. P.S. As a Louisianian, I was pleasantly surprised to read that parts were shot in Shreveport and Mansfield and that there was a "Filmed in Louisiana" logo in the end credits.

I was pretty much captivated by this film. While from a past era, it was the intellectual version of Remember the Titans. This guy and the coach had more than a physical similarity (I'm kidding, of course). This film pulls us back to a time that set up the second picture, with all of the Jim Crow laws and the nasty Souther whites. We have some nicely developed characters here. It was fun seeing Forrest Whittaker's son play his son. I thought there is a real resemblance, and then I read the credits. it's interesting to see how the promotion of labor movements were treated in those days. Black or white, police often opened fire on strikers and rabble rousers. The lynching scene here is so powerful. It is so sad that a people had to live in such terror, often from people who had IQ's way below theirs. I was a little disturbed by some of the sexual stuff--how realistic would that have been in 1935--and how does this fit with college life at that time. I'm sure that much of this was thrown in because we have an audience that needs it. Oh, well, it still works on many levels and we do pull for these guys, even if there's quite a bit of revisionism.