"from lynchings in Texas to room service in Massachusetts"

Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Nate Parker, and Denzel Whitaker star in The Great Debaters.

The students learned this week about the experiences of African Americans during the postbellum period. They did so partly by juxtaposing an excerpt from Tera Hunter's study of African American female laborers in Atlanta and an excerpt from Martha Sandweiss' study on the experiences of Georgia-born Ada Copeland  faced as a  domestic worker in New York (and as the "black" wife of the white geologist Clarence King who passes as an African American) against the 2007 motion picture The Great Debaters. Like the readings, the film uncovers the ongoing oppressed conditions for African Americans amid racial progress. Set in the 1930s, the film depicts the trials and triumphs experienced by four members of an award-winning debate team from a Texas-based African American college  who eventually travel by train to debate their white Harvard opponents. Tiffany observed how the movie "perfectly illustrated the 'heightened...awareness of race" in Jim Crow America, which Sandweiss addresses in her examination of the different worlds Copeland and her white husband inhabited in New York. As Tiffany wrote, while maneuvering between "lynchings in Texas to room service in Massachusetts, the 'Great Debaters'  felt a "sense of wonder and astonishment...at being far from the crushing racial order of the South" (the latter part of her sentence uncovers her use of a quote from African American novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar). Aaron focused more on the changes in black-white relations - as made evident in the white Harvard student who offered to carry their luggage - the debaters saw while visiting Massachusetts. Lauria noted how blacks were "still see as inferiors" though "Harvard gave [the debaters] a chance to be ...seen as students with great minds." Alexis noted how the Great Debaters did not let "fear...stand" in their way. They forced their opponents to see how ideas concerning "morality and justice" were no longer suitable only for others in distant places, but for them, too. In this way, they were not unlike the  African American domestic workers who formed kinship networks in their community and churches after migrating South for the North to improve their lives.  Kalynn honed in on the debaters' grappling over the "basic rights of human[s]," something she also observed in the Atlanta female washerwomen. But not all was not well in Jim Crow America as made evident in obviously educated Wilson, the African American man who worked as a butler at Harvard even though he could translate Latin. Speaking to this, Roosevelt wrote, in the North, "poor conditions" remained. Roosevelt also detected, too, the ways in which women working as domestic workers faced special challenges, among them, sexual oppression while working in the homes of white Americans. Christin saw how the debaters "faced...[the] stubborn mindsets of people not willing...to change" including a police officer who asked them if they were "supposed to be" in the Harvard hall where their debate would take place. Raven maintained, in the end, there has not been as much racial progress as people believe because "blacks were...and still are underestimated" not unlike the African American washerwomen in postbellum Atlanta.