In October 2015, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement petitioned the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to sponsor a presidential debate with candidates for the 2016 election, focused solely on the concerns of the BLM. The DNC declined the request for debate but did offer to help the BLM host a presidential candidate forum or townhall. This led to a series of conversations about the structure and format of public debates and townhalls, and about which form of activity would allow Black publics to interact substantively with those politicians seeking to lead the country. The BLMâs request for a presidential debate came just weeks after news of a group of prison inmates in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York defeated a group of Harvard University debaters. The incarcerated debaters were students in the Bard Prison Initiative, a program housed at Bard College, that offers college coursework to inmates.
More than 60 years ago, Malcolm X honed his oratorical talents on a prison debate team. Today communities of color have been ravaged by the far-reaching effects of the prison industrial complex, and its role in the enforcement of tough-on-crime policies that have led to the mass incarceration of Black and Latino/a men and women. Far too many of our youth have a better chance of encountering debate training in prison than in the classroom. This is unacceptable. Bringing debate into prisons offers us a clear picture of the kind of intellectual talents that continue to languish behind bars. And the issue of mass incarceration and over-policing of Black communities is one of the critical issues that the BLM has placed on the agenda as a critical topic for public debate and liberation.
Together these examples demonstrate that participating in and understanding how debates work are a critical part of active participation in a democracy. Moreover, having access to good debating skills is a critical literacy to which all students should have access. The ability to understand and evaluate the relative merits of competing positions is not merely an intellectual exercise. These skills materially impact the quality of life of American citizens and all people. Moreover, when matters of rights and freedoms are involved, these skills become increasingly important. If students do not know how to both ascertain and evaluate the key premises and ideas behind the range of arguments that emerge in American politics, arguments that inevitably shape their own quality of life, then our students have not been well educated and they have not been adequately prepared to be engaged and thoughtful citizens.
In the first few decades immediately following the end of slavery, Black communities placed an extremely high value not only on access to a good-quality public education, but also on access to a robust public sphere in which Black communities, including women, men and children, could come and debate issues that mattered. They wanted access to spaces in which they could litigate qualities of leadership, strategies and plans for racial advancement, and general ideas about what it meant to be Black in the slowly receding shadow of enslavement. For communities deeply invested in the quest for freedom, the right to have opinions and to publicly share and deliberate about those opinions served as a mark of freedom. Similarly, in the contemporary moment, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement acknowledges that our movements are made clearer and sharper through robust and vigorous debate, disagreement, and consensus-building. But in order for leaders to use those skills as adults, they must first learn them in the classroom.
This chapter offers a brief history of debate within Black communities in the period between Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement, with a particular focus on debate activities from the 1920s through the 1960s. Community debate programs and the emergence of collegiate debate in this period fit on the one hand with the importance of debate in the creation and cementation of a Black public sphere, but it also sets the stage for the cultures of debate that emerge during the Civil Rights Movement. The range of questions and issues with which these earlier communities concerned themselves are instructive for how educators might use debate in classrooms today. Therefore, I interrogate the manner in which local communities in the first half of the 20th century thought about the importance of debate as a form of political education for citizens. Then I turn briefly to a few of the iconic debates that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. These stories offer a vital and necessary reminder that the expansion of American democracy always requires a commitment to vigorous and sustained debate. In light of that history, we should consider debate a vital part of a good education.
In May of 1892, Ida B. Wells, a journalist and newspaper owner in Memphis, Tennessee, launched a career as a public intellectual and advocate after three of her friends were lynched. After she wrote a blistering editorial in her paper, the Memphis Free Speech & Headlight, townspeople burned down the newspaperâs office and banished Wells from town. She fled to Brooklyn, New York, where she stayed with the famous African American poet and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In New York, Wells ensconced herself in a vibrant social scene that included the weekly meetings of many African American literary societies, where participants would perform musical selections, give talks about prepared papers and engage in formal debates.
One popular outlet for such debates was the Bethel Literary Association in New York. There debates which pitted pairs of debaters against each other covered a wide range of topics including âResolved, that we need wealth more than we do educationâ; âResolved, that we should encourage western emigrationâ; âLabor is a greater power than capitalâ; âThat we owe no party a debt of gratitudeâ; and âThat we need industrial more than academical educationâ (Peterson, 2011, pp. 346â347). Carla Peterson (2011) notes that the Bethel Literary Association was remarkable for its inclusion of female debaters: âNot only did women now share a public venue with men, but they argued with them over policy on equal termsâ (pp. 347â348).
The leading Black lyceum in the city, the Brooklyn Literary Union, known for its debates, was less welcoming to women. The Union had strict debating guidelines. Four debaters gave ten-minute presentations. Then there was a 45-minute discussion, followed by a vote from the audience (Giddings, 2008, p. 234). Women were rarely among those featured as lecturers or debaters. However, during the late summer or early fall of 1892, Wells participated in a debate at the Brooklyn Literary Union, against, among others, Maritcha Lyons, a well-respected school principal from an old New York family. Though Wells had been gaining a local reputation as a compelling speaker, Lyons bested her in the debate. Wells took defeat in her stride, adopting Lyons as her mentor.
Lyons, together with Victoria Earle Matthews, another active member of the Brooklyn Black literati, put together the event that launched Wellsâs formal career as a public lecturer. In their mentorâmentee relationships, Lyons imparted to Wells two main lessons. ââBe so familiar with your discussion that you are literally saturated with it; think, meditate, and reflect, to develop all the points in a logical sequence.â Lyons also told Wells to learn how to âmanage the voice; if thought is prolific, expression of ideas will become automaticââ (Giddings, 2008, p. 235). In the ensuing months and years after her encounter with Lyons, Wells went on to become the most visible and vocal anti-lynching advocate of her generation, helping for the next 30 years to bring visibility to the epidemic of lynchings of African American men, women and children. By the early 1910s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) made anti-lynching one of its key political issues, largely because of the public foundation laid by Ida B. Wells.
In the mid 1920s, Pauli Murray, a famous Civil Rights attorney, writer, professor, and the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, joined the debate team of the Hillside High School, the newly built âcoloredâ high school for students in Durham, North Carolina. âWe had a debating team, a glee club, organized baseball, boysâ and girlsâ basketball teams, a school newspaper, and a yearbook,â she wrote (Murray, 1987, pp. 59â60). All of these were âinnovations utterly new to colored high school students in our townâ (Murray, 1987, pp. 59â60). Moreover, she wrote, âour sports teams and debating team competed with those of other high schools in the state, and it was the first time that colored students in Durham had an opportunity to travel to other cities and expand our horizons. These modest advances were important milestones for us. They sustained our hope and gave us a sense of achievement at a time when the prevailing view that Negroes were inherently inferior remained unchallengedâ (Murray, 1987, pp. 59â60). Murray suggests that access to a debate team and other modern forms of extracurricular activity increased the rigor of her educational experience and chipped away at the sense of inferiority that a separate and unequal system of public education had produced in Black children, an argument that would be critical to the overturning of the Plessy decision in 1954. Moreover, debate and other activities marked the modernization of the American high school. Among many firsts, Pauli Murray graduated at the top of her class at Howard University Law School in 1944, producing a senior thesis that formed the basis for the legal strategy in the Brown desegregation decision. In addition to her work on the inclusion of the word âsexâ in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Murray also played a role in the dismantling of the all-white, all-male jury system. The first seeds of her voluminous career as a writer, thinker, academic, and poet undoubtedly had some of their genesis in the years she spent âpreparing for inter-high school debates on the debating team.â
This abbreviated history of Black debaters is a critical part of the intellectual and political history of African American people. To trace that history offers us a picture of the intellectual environs in which African American people honed and refined the arguments and strategies that shaped Black political discourse in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. This history of Blacks in debate also gives us a picture of the kind of training that it took to shape an African American leadership class in the post-slavery period. The robust cultures of debating that Black people created in the antebellum North and then throughout the country after Emancipation were critical in building a Black public or counterpublic sphere, a place where Black people could debate together about the collective fate of African Americans. In these nascent iterations of a Black public sphere, gender politics, and more specifically the participation of women, constituted a site of battle; thus, I began with the women because it is important to make visible the variety of ways that women participated in and helped to fundamentally shape the inter-workings of these spaces.
Several years ago, while I was conducting research for a project on the African American Club Womenâs Movement in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the pages of the Shreveport Sun, the stateâs oldest Black weekly, I unexpectedly began to see prominent front-page headlines advertising the debates of Black colleges near and far. For instance, the front page of the May 28, 1927 issue of the Sun proudly proclaims âWiley College Debating Team Defeats Howard Univ, 3 Points.â The famed Wiley College debate team was frequently the focus of the Sunâs coverage, in part because Marshall, Texas, home of Wiley College, is located only 30 miles from Shreveport, just across the Texas state line.
Debate and forensic activities were so popular in Shreveport that Black women who participated in the club movement also staged debates about particular issues. In one such debate, the townâs Mary Church Terrell Club debated the topic âResolved: That the South offers greater inducements and better advantages to our people than any other part of the countryâ (âNegative win in Debateâ, 1927). Mrs. Z. E. Baker and Mrs. R. E. Brown argued the affirmative; the clubâs president Cora M. Allen and Mrs. Alice Davis argued the negative. In 1927, African Americans were exiting the South in droves as part of the Great Migration to the North in search of better jobs and more reasonable racial conditions. As fairly well-to-do club women with stable middle-class existences, women like Cora Allen, wife of the Rev. Luke Allen who pastored the largest Black church in town, were part of cadre of Black people who opted not to migrate. But the team of Allen and Davis prevailed in the debate, effectively defending the advantages of leaving the South. The debate is important, however, because it makes clear that the choice of whether to migrate or not, was in fact a debate, rather than a foregone conclusion.
The Sun covered a range of forensic activities, including those of Black colleges and universities throughout the country, and also debates at local churches and high schools. For instance, in 1928 the paper highlighted a story of a woman who had beaten a man in debate at the Galilee Baptist Church on the topic âResolved: That woman has done more for humanity than man.â The article noted that âit was fairly proven by Miss Shelton that woman had done more for humanity than man. Mr. Bounds made some strong points but came out ten points behindâ (âWoman Wins Debateâ, 1928). The Sunâs coverage of community forensic activities was commensurate with coverage from other newspapers throughout the country. In the early 1920s, the Chicago Defender also covered college and community debate activities. In 1923, the Grace Lyceum in Chicago had a debate on the topic âSlavery has been more of a help than a hindrance to the American Negroâ (âYoung Women Win Debateâ, 1928). An event sponsored by the âOlder Girls and Young Womanâs Conferencesâ and the young menâs council, the teams were split on the basis of gender. The young men argued the affirmative position and the girls argued the negative position. The young women won. In 1924, another Chicago paper, the Broad Ax, covered the annual Elbridge L. Adams Prize Debates held at Hampton Institute (âDouglass Society Wins Adams Debateâ, 1924). That year the Douglass Literary Society beat the Dunbar Literary Society debating the topic, âResolved: That compulsory military training should be abolished in secondary schools.â The Douglass Society team argued the negative.
In 1932, the Sun reported that there had been âa revival of intercollegiate debating activities among the schools of the South Central Association of Colleges for Negro Youth.â Among those schools were Southern University, Straight College, Alcorn State University, Leland College, and the University of New Orleans. The subject under consideration during the spring 1932 debating season was âResolved: That Great Britain should give India complete and immediate independenceâ (âSouthern Debaters Winâ, 1932). These young Black students were engaged in debates over British imperialism and the ethics and value of anti-colonialism in the 1930s. The broad national coverage of community and college debate activities in the Black Press suggests that locally and nationally Black communities valued vigorous debate and discussion and also that they took great pride in seeing young African Americans engage in these activities. The topics also suggest that conversations in Black public culture attended to more general questions of history and social relationships between the sexes as well as debates about contemporary political issues like mandatory military training and the ethics of colonialism. The debates themselves, audience participation, and coverage in the Black Press all participated in raising community literacies and consciousness around these important political issues that certainly had implications for Black communities living in the thick of Southern Jim Crow regimes.
Interracial debates constituted another major aspect of the Black Pressâs coverage of Black participation in debate. In May 1923, Lewis Burrell, a debater and team captain at Pleasantville High School in Pleasantville, New Jersey, led his white teammates to victory debating Haddonfield High School on the question âResolved: That the Merchant Marine of the United States should be subsidized by the federal governmentâ (âLeads White Team Matesâ, 1923). In the 1930s, these interracial exch...
