|
February 19, 2008 10:05 am
Tolson reflects on father's career, debate team success
By Andy Rieger
CNHI News Service
NORMAN, Okla. — Retired University of Oklahoma professor Melvin Tolson Jr., remembers his spirited father’s famous Wiley College debate team holding late night practices at their Marshall, Texas, home.
“I used to sit up and listen to them when I was supposed to be in bed,” Tolson told an OU audience Monday night. “I used to think that when I went to college I was going to be a debater.”
Tolson Jr. talked briefly before and after Monday’s showing of “The Great Debaters,” a film based on the Wiley team’s decade of debate dominance. The team won a national championship in 1935. Nate Parker, an All-American wrestler at OU, plays debate team member Henry Lowe.
Monday’s program was presented by the OU College of Arts and Sciences. It was co-sponsored by OU's African and African-American Studies Program and the Film and Video Studies Program and served as a kick off for Focus on Arts and Sciences Week. It was one of the university's Black History Month celebrations.
Tolson Jr. was hired as OU's first full-time black professor in 1959. He taught French and earned the Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching during his long tenure at OU. In 2002, the university honored Tolson and colleague George Henderson Sr. by naming the campus multicultural center in their honor.
In the film, Denzel Washington played Tolson’s father, Melvin Tolson Sr. He selects and then coaches the Wiley team against other historically black colleges, then begins challenging white colleges and universities. One of them was Oklahoma City University.
In the film one of the debaters mistakenly confuses Oklahoma University and Oklahoma City University. When the professor corrected him, the OU audience cheered Monday night.
Washington, who directed the film, made financial contributions to debate team scholarships as a result of the experience. He plans to appear April 24 at a Kansas City event celebrating debate and the Wiley College team.
“In 10 years and 150 debates, it is said they lost one. I don’t know which one it was. They didn’t keep records of such things,” Tolson said.
“This movie was a revelation because really debate was dead,” he said.
Tolson said World War II and television interrupted the interest in debate. Many of the debaters became soldiers and teams were disbanded. His father moved to Langston University in 1947 and was later named poet laureate of Liberia. He died in 1966.
The film is set against a backdrop of rural racism. Tolson said Marshall, Texas, was really an extension of Mississippi. Besides his college teaching, dramatic pursuits and weekly newspaper column writing, Tolson secretly helped organize sharecroppers. There were several threats on his life.
“My father did have the reputation of being ... a leftist,” Tolson said. “We never learned the truth of when, where and how long and whether he stopped his activities."
Tolson said several biographies of his father detail the debate squad’s prowess and his father’s work as a poet and advocate for social equality.
“I enjoy the movie more each time that I see it,” he said.
Andy Rieger writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.
|
