What was it like to talk to legendary Civil Rights leaders?
We interviewed the actual debaters-Henrietta Bell, Benjamin Bell, James Farmer Jr. It was a great honor to talk to James Farmer Jr. before his death. For children of my generation, James Farmer Jr. was second only to Martin Luther King as a Civil Rights leader. It’s amazing how he’s not known by the wider culture today. The courage of this man! He would step off of a bus in a Freedom Ride and take an ax handle across the face and lie down because he knew that by showing a kind of moral superiority and using goodness against racism, that the shame of seeing that would change hearts and minds. He was a deep and profound man. I asked him about Melvin Tolson, the character played by Denzel Washington, the great debate coach who later became a renowned Harlem Renaissance poet. I learned from James Farmer Jr. that, while training this powerhouse debate team, Melvin Tolson had been secretly organizing white and black sharecroppers. In eastern Texas on the Louisiana border and doing so in the
