Word: wiley
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Pressed for time, Washington answered about 10 students’ questions. Washington noted that in the real tale, the Wiley College debaters defeated students from the University of Southern California, not Harvard...
Washington was also greeted after the event by Mildred Boutin Prothrow, a 1941 graduate of Wiley College...
Prothrow said James Farmer, Jr., the young student who led the debate team to victory, was the reason she decided to attend Wiley...
...Great Debaters is this year's major entry to this rather dubious genre. The facts on which the movie is based are these: Beginning in 1935, under the leadership of a professor, poet and political activist named Melvin Tolson (played by Denzel Washington, who also directed), Wiley College, a small black institution in Marshall, Tex., became a power in collegiate debating circles, going undefeated, according to the movie, for a decade. This was no small achievement, considering the school's location deep in redneck country, the impoverishment of the institution in the darkest days of the depression and the endemic...
Probably the biggest whopper is the film's climax, which has gritty little Wiley taking on august Harvard in a nationally broadcasted debate. In reality, the biggest name Wiley argued against was USC, which isn't bad, but doesn't quite reverberate with the same kind of class and caste issues that a contest with The Crimson does. In reality, I'm also inclined to doubt that the Wiley Wildcats always got to argue in the affirmative for Civil Disobedience and against Segregated Education as they do here. If memory serves, debaters in the past often had to snore their...