James Farmer

from 1/5/08 from pseudo-intellectualism
from wikipedia:

James Leonard Farmer Jr. (January 19, 1920 – July 9, 1999), a Black civil rights activist who was one of the "big four" leaders of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Marshall, Texas in 1920, Farmer was an excellent student who skipped several grades in elementary school. After he completed high school at the age of fourteen he attended Wiley College. He considered careers in both medicine and the ministry during his undergraduate days. However, after he received his bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1938 he also realized he could not stand the sight of blood, so he enrolled in Howard University's School of Religion, receiving the Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1941. When World War II began the pacifist Farmer refused to serve, especially in a segregated army. He opposed war in general, and more specifically objected to serving in the segregated armed forces. Farmer was deferred from the draft because he held a divinity degree. After his time at Howard University he began traveling the Midwest speaking about racial equality and pacifism. Farmer decided to fight the Southern Methodist Church's policy of segregation rather than become an ordained minister.
In 1942, Farmer along with a group of students co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality, an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in America through active nonviolence. The organization was also known as CORE. Farmer was the first leader of the Congress of Racial Equality but after several years he became inactive.
During the 1950s, Farmer served as national secretary of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. SLID later became Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1960 Farmer became reelected as the director, which was around the same time the civil rights movement was gaining power. The organization was first called the Committee of Racial Equality and then became the Congress of Racial Equality. Farmer then served as the national chairman for the Congress of Racial Equality from 1942-1944 and then was reelected for the position in 1950. From 1961-1966 he was elected the national director. Farmer was so involved in his work that he even remained interested in the organization during the times he was not leader.
In 1961 Farmer, who was working for the NAACP at the time, was called back to lead the Freedom Rides for the Congress of Racial Equality and who had taken a hiatus from leading the group, returned as its national director. He also helped organize the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides led to the desegregation of bus terminals and interstate buses. He immediately planned a repeat of CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a trip of eight white and eight black men challenging segregation in transportation in the upper South. This time, however, the group would journey to the Deep South, and Farmer coined a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, participants journeyed to the deep South, this time including women as well as men, and tested segregated bus terminals as well as seating on the vehicles. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens. Although the Freedom Rides were attacked by whites, the Freedom Rides became recognized and the Congress of Racial Equality received nationwide attention. Also, Farmer became a well-known civil rights leader. The Freedom Rides led to the capturing of the imagination of the nation through photographs, newspaper accounts, and motion pictures. After the Freedom Rides, concerned whites and blacks decided it was time for racial segregation and racial discrimination to come to an end.
By the mid 1960s Farmer was growing disenchanted with emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments in CORE and resigned in 1966. He took a teaching position at Lincoln University and continued to lecture. In 1968 Farmer ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, but lost to Shirley Chisholm. However his defeat was not total; the recently elected President, Richard Nixon, offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
James Farmer co-founded Fund for an Open Society (www.opensoc.org) in 1975, which has as its vision a nation in which people live in communities which are stably integrated; where political and civic power is shared by people of different races and ethnicities. He led this organization until 1999.
Farmer retired from politics in 1971, but remained active lecturing and serving on various boards and committees. He published his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, in 1985. Farmer lived to see CORE move closer to its centrist roots in the 1980s and 1990s. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Farmer taught a class on the civil rights movement at Mary Washington College (now The University of Mary Washington) in Fredericksburg, Virginia until his death in 1999.

The Real Great Debaters

from 1/5/08 from pseudo-intellectualism I was doing research on the history behind the great debaters and found that the Marshall News Messenger, (in Marshall, Texas, the home of Wiley College) supplies an audio transcript of many of their articles.
why can't the nytimes do that? why can't we do that for our school kids? what happened to using to technology to enhance education rather than in just measuring it?
I used the audio as a background for a slide show of images from the movie and their real life counterparts, Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (played by Denzel) and James Farmer and Hetman Sweatt (two of the student debaters)

the transcript By Phil Latham
Sunday, December 16, 2007
I cannot write an objective review of "The Great Debaters."
I had intended to do just that, but it did not take more than a few minutes into the movie Thursday night for me to figure out that simply was not going to happen.
Having been publisher and editor of The Marshall News Messenger for almost 11 years now, I have seen too much, know too much, talked to too many Wiley graduates, heard too many stories.
So it would be meaningless for me to, say, give it "two thumbs up!" or talk about how it moved me and all those around me, or how I got the chill bumps watching and listening to the debaters, though I knew exactly how the story was going to end.
First things first, calling this a movie "inspired" by a true story is the perfect word to use. Inspiring fits in every single sense of that word. The movie and the facts do differ a bit, though perhaps not all that much. Historically, it is significant that the team debated the University of Southern California and not Harvard, for instance. It is also important to note that USC is not the only top college debated — and beaten. Those include Texas Christian University and the University of California.
But in tone and spirit, this movie is 100 percent, dead-on, accurate. What's more, it does so without falling into cliches. People rise and people fall. The debate team may be successful, but that does not come without a real price and real pain.
I don't want to give away too much of the movie, but it is also clearly implied that the success is by no means complete. Well, no surprise there, really. After all, the debate team had to come back to the Jim Crow South.
It struck me somewhere in the movie that this was a perfect allegory for the entire history of Wiley College — though I confess I don't know it as thoroughly as I should.
Wiley College was founded in the beginning as nothing more than a dream. As a reality the dream faced real struggles for survival, it faced loss, disappointment, victory, then more struggle.
The cycle goes on today. In just the time I have been here I have seen all of that and sometimes it happens in rapid succession. Resources are tight for tax-supported institutions and the scramble for student tuitions is a battle even among colleges that are far more well-heeled.
I believe it is assumed that there is some sort of safety net for Wiley College, some magic that is going to keep the college afloat no matter what. Maybe some think just because Wiley has endured for 134 years it always will.
This kind of mindset might keep you from slipping $10 — or $10,000 if you have it — into an envelope and sending it to help Wiley meet the challenges of the next generation of "great debaters."
Indeed, maybe Wiley will always survive, but the question for Marshall — and I'm talking about all of Marshall here — is will it thrive? Merely having a set of buildings on University Avenue doesn't mean much.
We need to ensure that the educational spirit that flowered in the time of Melvin B. Tolson is continued or rekindled if need be.
"The Great Debaters" can and will be a huge boon for the city of Marshall. The movie could have made Marshall look terrible — it does show racism, but what you see is typical of what happened in Jim Crow days — but it passes on that and accentuates the positive in the story.
As a community, we owe Wiley College for the past, for the present and, perhaps most of all, for the future that is to come.
We've waited long enough to pay up. I suggest we get to it.

The Great Debaters Premiere

from 1/5/08 from pseudo-intellectualism About Melvin Tolson from wikipedia

Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (February 6, 1898–August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several poetic histories. He was a contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance and, although he was not a participant in it, his work reflects its influences. Liberia declared Tolson as its poet laureate in 1947.
Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was the son of a Methodist minister and an Afro-Creek mother. His family moved between various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until finally settling in the Kansas City area. He graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919 and enrolled in Fisk University. He transferred toLincoln University that year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924, then moved to Marshall, Texas, to teach speech and English at Wiley College. While at Wiley, Tolson built up an award-winning debate team; during their tour in 1935, they competed against the Harvard College. Denzel Washington directed the film The Great Debaters, based on this event, released on 25 December 2007.
Tolson mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Herman Sweatt at Wiley. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but also to stand up for their rights, a controversial position in the U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century.
He took a leave of absence to earn a Master's degree from Columbia University in 1930-31, but didn't complete it until 1940. Tolson began teaching at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma, in 1947; that year, Liberia declared him its poet laureate. He also entered local politics and served four terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. One of his students at Langston was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer, who later became the founding publisher of The Black Scholar.
Tolson was a man of impressive intellect who created poetry that was “funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious,” as Karl Shapiro had said of the Harlem Gallery. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at Langston University. Langston Hughes described him as “no highbrow. Students revere him and love him. Kids from the cotton fields like him. Cow punchers understand him ... He’s a great talker.”
In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. He died in the middle of his appointment after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He is buried in Langston.
From 1930 on, Tolson began writing poetry, and in 1941, Dark Symphony, often considered his greatest work, was published in Atlantic Monthly. Dark Symphony compares and contrasts African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection, Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, Cabbage and Caviar, after he left his teaching position at Wiley in the late 1940s.
His Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem.
In 1965, Tolson's final work to appear in his lifetime, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African American life and is a drastic departure from his first works. The poems he wrote in New York were published posthumously in 1979 as A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. It is a mixture of various styles as well as free verse. The racially diverse and culturally rich community presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits may be based on or intended to be
Marshall, Texas.

Quotes of Tolson

"England and France and Italy now exploit 500,000,000 colored peoples. For what? For dollars. For profits in gold and oil and rubber and agricultural products. But at home the masses of the population in these countries tear out their lives against economic injustices. That's the cancer that will eat away these dishonorable governments."
May 28, 1938
In fact, the first slaves sold at Jamestown were not black men – but white women. They were sold for tobacco.
The Indians did not have jails. Justice among the Indians was impartial. Just the opposite was true among white men. The Indian was not treacherous and cruel in the beginning. He learned that from the white men. At Plymouth, in 1620, the Rev. Mr. Cushman pleaded with the white "Christians" to be as kind and sincere as the red men. Nov. 25, 1939
Life consists of caviar and cabbage. Plenty of cabbage. Somebody called Washington the City Beautiful. In spite of the Negro tenements where the rats jitterbug all day and all night, and the lice do the lindy hop!
Sept. 28, 1940
There can be no democracy without economic equality. Thomas Jefferson said that when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. There can be no brotherhood of man without a brotherhood of dollars. I have another theory. It is based on economic and racial brotherhood. I presume to call this the Merry-Go-Round of History. On the merry-go-round all the seats are on the same level. Nobody goes up; therefore, nobody has to come down. That is democracy, as I see it. In a brotherhood, all the members are equal.
Oct. 19, 1940
I once heard Dr. Aggrey, the black South African, call Africa the question mark of the centuries. This bloody question mark has faced every civilized nation. No white nation has been moral enough to answer the Africans with justice and democracy.
Nov. 21, 1942

This is a short excerpt from Melvin B. Tolson's epic poem, "Dark Symphony," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1940.

"Black slaves singing One More River to Cross
In the torture tombs of slave-ships,
Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus
In jungle swamps
Black slaves singing The Crucifixion
In slave-pens at midnight,
Black slaves singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In cabins of death,
Black slaves singing Go Down, Moses
In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs."