Red Room Where the Writers Are

The black boys on my street not only toss the football back and forth, but ask me for books. Recently, I asked them to read from one of them, my daughter, Tennessee's latest book, The City Beautiful, a book of poetry. They zipped right through.

Encouraged, I promised them if they wrote a poem for me I would reward them. They couldn't meet the challenge. I suspect it is because nobody who resembles them, [such as] a black male author, appears on their reading lists at school.

So where do they go to discover a black male who can do the literary thing instead of doing the criminal thing, the Michael Vick thing, and the O.J. forever thing? When is the last time you saw a black male author interviewed on cable instead of a black man in an orange jumpsuit? The typical presentation of black men in the media looks like a police lineup, while white men are presented in a variety of roles.

After a year of watching movies [like] American Gangster and television's The Wire, I was delighted to see The Great Debaters, the movie about poet Melvin Tolsonand how his debating team, representing a black college, Wiley College, debated its way to a final showdown with Harvard University's debating team.

This movie provided viewers with a rare glimpse of African Americans as cerebral beings, even though Melvin Tolson's literary accomplishments were minimized.

Who was Melvin Tolson? Born in Moberly, Missouri in 1898, he is usually classified as a modernist poet. He taught at Langston, Oklahoma, was the town's mayor from 1954 to 1960, and was named poet laureate of Liberia in 1947. His major works are Harlem Gallery, (1965), and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), which earned him the title of Poet Laureate of Liberia. The most recent edition of Harlem Gallery is introduced by former U.S. poet laureate, Rita Dove.

John Taylor, writing in The Antioch Review, June 22, 2005, explored Tolson's wide range of interests:

"[He] self-expatriated to the Latin Quarter of Paris during the 1930s. There he would have consorted with Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas and Leopold Sedar Senghor, debated their new-found concept of Negritude (which he jokingly rechristens the "good ship Defineznegro"), learned Latin and Greek, reconsidered his Christian heritage, polished his French and picked up other languages, dropped in on Paul Valery's lectures on poetics at the College de France, met a surrealist or two (with whom he would have swapped unsettling similes), pored through novels by "the great laughers ... Gogol .../... Dickens .../... Rabelais," discussed Benin statuary with Picasso, perhaps watched a bicycle race, and otherwise hung out in Shakespeare & Company with Adrienne Monnier, Valery Larbaud, and James Joyce."

Directed by Denzel Washington, who, with this film, redeems his participating in two scabrous projects (Training Day, and American Gangster) The Great Debaters is a film that shocked me so that I said to my spouse, after viewing the film, "Finally, Hollywood does a film that blacks don't have to be embarrassed about."

The Great Debaters provides an opportunity for teachers to do what the local book reviews, academics, and the media are failing to do: Show a literary black male who wasn't just an ivory tower poet and an armchair academic but was engaged in the political controversies of the time, risking his life by organizing farm workers.

If educators really interested in improving the reading scores of American boys, they would take them to this movie by the busloads.

–Ishmael Reed's latest book is New and Collected Poems, 1964-2007, for which he received the Commonwealth Club'sGold Medal for Poetry.

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