Having won a four-year college scholarship based on a series of Marshall Texas' Central High School oratorical contests sponsored by the black Elks Clubs, James Farmer Jr's ability as a public speaker was established by the time he entered Wiley College in September, 1934. His cerebral father, Dr. J. Leonard Farmer, had been a Bible professor on the faculty since 1933. Although young James Farmer was only 14,he was recruited immediately by English professor and debate coach Melvin Tolson for the college's formidable debate team.

Pictures of James Farmer as a young boy. Photos courtsey of the Center for American History at the University of Texas.

Farmer, enrolled in Tolson's English class, was confronted by the man he would later call provider of "the banquet of my years at Wiley College," to use his analytical mind to dig deeper, study harder and read wider than the average student. The ideas thus gleaned would then be discussed in class where Tolson would play devil's advocate, forcing his students to defend their ideas against opposing views. And if Farmer failed to do so Tolson said he would flunk him. Then Farmer was offered the real challenge, "Speaking of opposing views," Tolson said, "My varsity debaters come over to the house every Tuesday and Thursday evening to prepare for the intercollegiate debate season. You come over too. Some of them, at least one, will try to make hamburger out of you - a young upstart and Dr. Farmer's son - so fight back, my boy, fight back." Thus was Farmer introduced to a skill that would serve him well the rest of his life.

Farmer had already spent two years on the Wiley campus, walking the length of it every school day on his way from the family home on the north side of the campus to high school on the south edge. He knew Tolson by reputation, certainly, and personally because Tolson and Dr. Farmer were more than college colleagues, they were friends as well.

Although it took Tolson seventeen years after he arrived at Wiley in 1923 - and the threat of dismissal if he did not - to finally finish his masters degree from Columbia University, he was already considered a formidable scholar when he suggested strongly that Farmer, who was reading Tolstoy's War and Peace "read the meat of knowledge, not just the broth." Tolson had graduated in 1923 from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, where his debate partner was Horace Mann Bond, who became one of the nation's leading educators.

Tolson began publishing poems while in high school and had several accepted for publication by the time Farmer enrolled in his English class. It should be noted that a class in debate was never offered for academic credit at Wiley. It was an extracurricular activity and Tolson coached it in addition to teaching a full load of classes. He was also the drama coach and founded the "Log Cabin Players" for town, gown and student theater performers. His playwright and poetic prowess caught the attention of men like poet Langston Hughes and literary critic and magazine editor V.F Calverton. Calverton, though white, had made a career of writing about the men and women of the Harlem Renaissance. He considered Tolson's creative abilities equal to those of other writers of the time.

Tolson organized a debate team shortly after arriving at Wiley College in 1924.The college published its first yearbook in 1925 and penned in the purple prose popular at the time a description of the team and its initial accomplishments.

Believing that the science of argumentation is the greatest instrumentation that can be used in the cultivation of mental alertness, a small group of students under the leadership of Prof. M.B. Tolson organized the Forensic Society of Wiley College October 28, 1924. Mr Hubert Norman was elected president and began immediately to arrange plans for entertainment for the ensuing year.

The activities of the organization resulted in the formation of a New Era in Wiley and brought to her campus the first inter-collegiate debate in her history. The Wiley team, which had been well coached by Prof. Tolson, received the trio from Bishop College. Clearness and force, combined with oratory, brought an overwhelming victory to the debaters of the "Purple and White." Wiley took the negative and defeated the Bishop trio. The question they debated was Resolved: That the Philippine Islands should be permanently given immediately the same privileges of self-government that Canada enjoys at present.

In 1939 Tolson was asked to prepare a report on his department for Jewell Allen, who wrote her masters thesis on Wiley College for East Texas Teachers College (now Texas A&M at Commerce). Among other departmental activities, Tolson described the debate program. Teams usually had three persons, even though only two would debate per round. The third person was called "the anchor man," according to Farmer, who usually took that role. "He was the person Tolson could use on both sides of a question. He would know all the arguments on both the negative and the affirmative."

Wiley College initiated intercollegiate debating among Negro institutions in the Southwest. For ten years the forensic representatives of the college went undefeated, meeting debaters from Fisk, Morehouse, Virginia Union, Lincoln, Wilberforce and Howard universities....(T)he debaters also participated in the first inter-racial debate ever held in the history of the South. It was held in Oklahoma City against the University of Oklahoma City in 1930. Since that time Wiley debaters have engaged in many such contests against Michigan University, Texas Christian University, and the University of California, Southern California and New Mexico.

One of those early debaters was Henrietta Bell from Houston, the first - and apparently only - woman on a Wiley debate team. Again at the invitation of Tolson, who told her he had always wanted to "try a woman," she joined the team in 1930. Her well-kept scrapbook had photos and the records of all the debates in which she participated.

Unlike today's practice where there is one subject per year selected by the forensic fraternity Pi Kappa Delta, in the 1930s there were a number of possible topics. The two coaches would agree on a subject prior to a debate, then flip a coin to see which team would begin with the affirmative side, which with the negative. For example, in 1933 debate coaches were given four questions among which to choose. Top vote getter was "Resolved: that the nations should agree to prevent the international shipment of arms and munitions." Second most popular and one that would also have been debated in 1934-35 was one limiting the income of the presidents of corporations, next was one that considered whether complete medical services should be provided at public expense, and finally, one that the federal government should provide a policy of social planning. It would have been necessary for debaters to be prepared on all possible topics.

"Our debate squad reads hundreds of magazine articles and scores of books on government, economics, sociology, history and literature," champion debater Hobart Jarrett wrote for an article on WEB DuBois's The Crisis. "Then we must learn to handle our knowledge with readiness and poise growing out of mastery of the platform....groping for words or an error in grammar is an unpardonable sin. Sometimes our coach will put a debater on the platform during practice and cross-examine him for an hour. The debater must escape from the most perplexing dilemmas and antinomies."

Although it dictated policies for all colleges, Pi Kappa Delta was a segregated organization, a decision made by "gentleman's agreement," according to one of the PKD founders, J. Thompson Baker of Southwest College in Kansas. In 1934, Baker wrote a history of the forensic organization which appeared in successive issues of The Forensic, its monthly journal.

One mystery grew out of the convention [of 1920] which has never been explained.... The question of greatest interest was over the admission of Negroes. It was argued heatedly in committee and general meeting. So evenly were the delegates divided that it was finally agreed not to write an exclusion clause into the constitution...but to leave it to a gentleman's agreement that no local chapter would recommend a Negro for membership. The chairman of the committee is positive that an exclusion clause was never adopted.

Imagine his surprise some time later to see a new set of membership blanks which specified that the applicant should not be of the African race. The writer has never learned by what right or upon whose authority this clause was inserted. Observation through a number of years has now made it an accepted practice of the society. Perhaps this Ex Curia method was the best way to settle this troublesome question.

Shut out of Pi Kappa Delta, Tolson created his own Greek-named speech and debate fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, which would serve historically black colleges. By the time Miss Bell, called by Tolson simply "Bell," was asked to join the five-member team, Wiley College and Tolson had garnered such a formidable reputation he was able to schedule debates with the best black colleges and universities in the nation, institutions twice or three times the size of Wiley, which had less than 500 students. From Chicago to Houston, his teams could fill the largest halls available to them with paying patrons. Profits from these encounters not only paid the team's expenses, important in the midst of the Great Depression, but also added to the general revenue of the struggling institution they represented.

By the spring of 1930, when his team was ready to go on tour, Tolson decided it was time to break new ground. Somehow he managed to schedule a series of non-decision debates with the law students of the University of Michigan, an all-white institution. "It was the first time, as far as Tolson knew, colored debaters met a northern university of the Anglo-Saxon race," a coup duly noted in the 1930 Wildcat. Bell and her partner, junior Harry Hines, met the white students at Chicago's massive 7th Street Theater, the largest black-owned hall in town, because no white-owned facility would host a racially mixed audience. Miss Bell remembers the auditorium being so full some of the audience had to stand. In addition to Hines and Bell, Tolson brought along as the anchor man alternate, Henry Heights, in case he determined Heights to be better prepared on a subject or side than his varsity team. He was never used. His day in the sun would come four years later.

Michigan was not the only white team Tolson's team encountered that year. On March 21,1930, Wiley College debated Oklahoma City University, a Methodist-related college, as was Wiley. "This was the first time that white and colored students ever discussed a proposition in the South from the same platform," Tolson wrote in a column for The Washington Tribune. "Avery Chapel was packed with black and white citizens who came to see the signal event. When the two teams took their places on the platform, they were received with tremendous applause. The vast audience seemed to realize that history was being made." Shortly thereafter Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth invited Wiley to its campus. "Dr. True had a splendid team, and we were never received more agreeably anywhere."

By the time Farmer joined Wiley's team, Tolson was having trouble finding black colleges to debate. "[Negro] schools were afraid of debating us. Every time they did they got their pants kicked. How do you think they felt, getting spanked by a little Jim Crow School from the badlands of Texas." said Benjamin Bell, (no relation to Henrietta Bell) in an article in the Spring 1997 issue of American Legacy Magazine. Bell was a member of the 1936-39 team. He is also the unfortunate source of a recent widely-spread rumor - that Wiley College met and beat Harvard College, with Felix Frankfurter as one of the judges. The story first appeared, with Bell's attribution, in Sherman's American Legacy article. But there is no evidence that a debate with Harvard ever happened. Farmer, Melvin Tolson, Jr., Hamilton Boswell, Hobart Jarrett and Henrietta Bell Wells all say the debate Bell remembers was probably with Oxford University of England. "If dad's teams had debated Harvard, I would know it," said Tolson Jr. The Harvard myth has been picked up by the local and national media and is likely to become a "fact" since it is apparently in a movie presently being funded by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Denzil Washington, who is also playing Tolson.

The most memorable Wiley College debate was not with Oxford (or Harvard) It was with the 1935 national champions, the Southern California Trojans. By the time the school year began in 1934, Tolson was at the top of his game as debate coach. Making his second goodwill tour, Tolson and his team of Farmer, Jarrett and Heights scheduled a sojourn through the Southwest. Included on their extended schedule were The University of New Mexico at El Paso, the University of California at Oakland and San Francisco State Teachers College, 5,000 miles in all. The big occasion came the night of April 2, 1935 before an audience of 2,200 at Southern California's Bovard Auditorium. The night before the debate Tolson would not let his team leave the dorm rooms where they were housed, according the Farmer. He was afraid the team would be intimidated because the speech department of the University of Southern California was bigger than the whole of Wiley College. He need not have been concerned.

Both teams, dressed in tuxedos, took the stage, with Wiley on the affirmative side. The Pi Kappa Delta-sponsored question for 1934-1935 was the one concerning the prevention of international shipment of munitions, which was probably the subject of the Southern California encounter. "From the time Floyd C. Covington, who presided, opened the program until its close the vast audience was held in rapt attention by the scholarly presentations of both teams," described Tolson. Farmer, a freshman at the time, was an alternate and observer. His memory of the team and that night was remarkable. Hobart Jarrett, the intellectual junior from Tulsa, Okla., was described by Farmer as "a polished, dignified, cultivated young man wearing rimless glasses." Height's college career had its ups and downs "He kept getting expelled for drinking," said Farmer, of Tolson's most charismatic debater. "When Heights stood up to give his rebuttal he would say, 'When I was a boy in Wichita Falls, Texas, I noticed something about those jackrabbits. The jack rabbit never runs in a straight line; he jumps from one side to another' - and then he gave a little hop. Then he turned round slowly and looked at his opponent, and the audience roared.'"

Using what became known as "the mighty Tolson method," the Wileyites were victorious. Tolson spent a lot of time training his debaters in the tactics and strategy of arguments. "He drilled us on every gesture, every pause," Jarrett wrote in an article for the May 1935 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. "Our debate squad reads hundreds of magazine articles and scores of books on government, economics, sociology, history and literature. We are taught to be prepared for anything."

In the audience that April night was Hamilton Boswell who had graduated from a Los Angeles high school. He was so impressed with the Wiley performance he decided to enroll at the obscure little college in Marshall. He, too, became one of Tolson's debate stars.

Tolson saw the interracial debates, which consistently drew larger audiences than segregated ones, as a breakthrough in the troubled race relations of the country. "When the finest intellects of black youth and white youth meet, the thinking person gets the thrill of seeing beyond the racial phenomena the identity of worthy qualitites." For that all too brief hour, maintained Tolson, the mixed audience seemed to forget their differences, applauding one team as readily as it applauds another. "In the South I have seen ex-slaves shaking hands with the grandsons of the masters after the debate."

Jarrett, who also took on a major role in the civil rights movement as the chief negotiator with Nashville's merchants following the 1960 sit-ins of Fisk students, also saw interracial debates as a signal event in his college career.

Interracial debates are a real adventure for both Negro youth and white youth. For centuries the Caucasian has believed that his superiority lies in his brain power. Debates involve a direct clash of intellects. There was a time when white colleges thought that debating against a Negro institution was mental dissipation, but that view has passed forever. Negro teams have shown that they are as capable as their white opponents despite the library handicaps that limit research. I know several instances personally in which white coaches and debaters of white universities have admitted the superiority of certain Negro debate teams.

Negro teams faced one obstacle never encountered by their white counterparts. Almost every debater during this period either observed or was threatened with lynching. Jarrett's experience occurred on the way to Memphis. "The Wiley debaters are on the road and the road leads through the tremendous circle of mobsters. But there is a mulatto in the car. Coach Tolson tells him to take the steering wheel. The darker debaters [and Tolson, who had a dark complexion] get down in the car. The night is friendly, protecting. The mulatto salutes nonchalantly the grimfaced members of the mob, allaying their suspicions. And the debaters reach Memphis and read about the mob in the morning newspapers."

Boswell told of being warned of a lynching in progress in Carthage while returning to Marshall from a debate in Beaumont. At first Tolson elected to detour around the town, but later changed his mind and decided to travel straight through town with Boswell, who is also a mulatto, driving. Benjamin Bell accompanied Tolson to Ruston, Louisiana, where Tolson was to make the commencement address for a high school graduation. In it, he excoriated the audience on the implications of the lynching, the previous day, of four blacks in a nearby town. Tolson ended the speech with, "Where were you good folks when these men were lynched?" Bell said the sheriff, chief of police, and several members of the school board, all white, were in the audience. The local black residents advised Tolson and Bell to leave as quickly as possible by a back road, advice they followed. Farmer, relating some of those experiences to a meeting of the National Conference of Methodist Youth at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1936, told of a partisan debate over a motion to call on the U.S. Congress to pass an anti-lynching law. Southern delegates were opposed, citing the usual arguments supporting state's rights. Finally, Farmer said, he got the attention of the chairman, made an impassioned speech and ended with his peroration, "Everyone here wants to stop lynching. The only question is how long do we have to wait. How long, oh Lord, how long? The purpose of this motion is not to damn the South and the many decent people who live there. It is not to open old wounds, but to heal those who have scabbed over while still festering underneath. The motion seeks not to whip the South or hurt its people. The motion is to stop lynching now!" Farmer said he sat down to thunderous applause and a voice vote to pass the amendment.

The phenomenal success of Tolson's teams, who rarely lost a debate whether their opponents were black or white, was attributed to that mighty Tolson system, Farmer said. Tolson himself described it in a column he wrote for the Washington Tribune. "That wise old bird Emerson said there's a crack in everything God made, and I was going to find the crack in the systems of other coaches." Twice a week Tolson would gather his debaters in his living room, arguing points and practicing until late in the night. Young Melvin, Jr., still in grade school, would hide behind a screen in the corner of the room and listen until he fell asleep and had to be carried to bed. "Those sessions were exciting and they were as emotional as you can get. The word tactics was always coming up. 'What are you going to do? What strategy are you going to take?'" Farmer remembered. Tolson, finding the cracks in other debater's cases, was the one plotting the debating strategy, according to Farmer. The Wiley teams simply memorized his arguments and wrote them on file cards they could pull out to meet a point made by an opponent. Tolson was so good at finding holes in the logic of others his debaters rarely had to do it on their own. "And then we had to debate Tolson in practice. He socked it to us! We socked it to him right back," Farmer said. "He'd say 'Which side do you believe in? All right, take the other side.' He did much more than polish my delivery."

Tolson said after the debate with Southern California he realized that there was more to life than winning victories. He wrote "I had taught my boys to go after the ugly truth and let the judges and respectable audiences go hang. That's not so easy as you think. It endangers one's job." He also taught them those debate skills would be useful the rest of their lives, something Farmer discovered in the late 1960s when Malcolm X's Black Power rhetoric began threatening the non-violent path to integration sought by Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. "I debated Malcolm X four times and beat him," Farmer said. " I'd think, 'Come off it Malcolm, you can't win. You didn't come up under Tolson.'"

The debates with Oxford University were probably anti-climactic. The first time the Oxford debaters toured the United States was in September and October, 1924. They drew great crowds where ever they went but they tended to be more showmen than true debaters. As the Englishmen prepared to tour again in 1937, the year Wiley College was scheduled to meet them, The Forensic had an article about English debaters. "This year...the Oxford team has scheduled twenty-six debates." Another group of British debaters, from Cambridge, also toured the United States. They tended to be older, having finished their undergraduate degrees. Speaking of the Oxford team, The Forensic continued, "They require a financial guarantee to cover their expenses, [as high as $300 per appearance] Many institutions have found the investment a profitable one." The English style was to entertain, so debates were often witty, funny, but tended to get off the subject. American debaters were more serious, stuck to arguments and presented evidence to support them.

In one of his "Caviar and Cabbage," columns in the Washington Tribune, Tolson wrote of two incidents on one of the trips through Arkansas on the way to Fisk University in Memphis, "things I could not explain." Farmer, who was along on the journey, also remembered them. Tolson and four debaters were packed into Tollon's undependable Ford.

The fog covered everything - everything. Our choking, coughing car moved along at a miserable rate of speed.

Suddenly we came to a huge sign which informed us; "Railroad Crossing ahead." we rode on and on. The young man at the wheel, who was an inexperienced driver, kept looking for the crossing; then someone cracked a joke about the slow train through Arkansas. Unexpectedly we came upon the headlight of a train, barely visible. I thought nothing of this for the train was so far away. I simply dropped the remark, "A train."

The young driver stopped the car. At that split second the Memphis Express thundered by, filling the night with the sound of some prehistoric monster. Nobody spoke for at least five minutes. The driver's hands were paralyzed at the wheel....And the curious thing is this: the old car had stalled at that very instant and the driver had not intended to stop....We learned later that the Memphis Express was making a trial run to secure the right of carrying the United States mail. At that particular crossing the train was averaging 69 miles an hour.

Later on the same foggy night time trip Tollon said one of the men, sound asleep, began screaming - obviously having a nightmare - flung open the door and leapt from the car, causing the driver to stop again. Only then did they discover they were twenty yards from a broken levee on the Mississippi River. "We had stopped the car twenty yards from death. We were on a road that plunged into an abyss. I had a cold sweat and my knees buckled."

Farmer was only 18 when he graduated in 1938, an event he called "'anticlimactic." His father had accepted a position at Howard University School of Religion, teaching New Testament and Greek. Farmer said he remembered Dr. Benjamin Mays, dean of the School of Religion, arriving on the train in Marshall where his mission was to recruit the brilliant Dr. Farmer. James Farmer, Jr. would study for the ministry. When the Farmer family left the campus they gave the family piano to the Tolsons. Less than ten years later, Melvin Tolson was recruited to teach at Langston University in Oklahoma. By then debate was no longer a popular activity.