The great debaters

The great debaters

In English class January 17, we saw the movie “The great debaters”. The movie was about four afro-american students in the 1930s. They joined the debate team at their school. The team won more or less every competition they joined, and their goal was to compete against a “white school”, Harvard.  However on the way to success they met some challenges they could not solve with good and convincing arguments. They met some challenges not only the students had to face, but also the rest of the population in the US. Therefore I am in this blogpost going to focus on two questions based on the social problems. Firstly “How was life for the afro-americans during the 1930s?”  and secondly “what is the Jim Craw Law?”.

How was life for the afro-americans during the 1930s?

I am going to focus on how the afro-americans in precisely this movie lived, and how their life was like. To start with, during the 1930s white people and black people were segregated. For instance, they had to go to different schools. This led to that the debate team only debated against “black schools”. Also especially in the southern states in the US the black people were seen as less valuable for a long time. They did not have as good jobs as the white people. Moreover the black people had to show so much undeserved respect to the white people. An example of that is when the father of one of the main characters hit a pig with his car, he has to pay the owner of the pig (a white man) over twice as much as the pig is really worth. Because if he does not pay, he risks the life of his own and his family. My point is, is that the life of afro-americans in the 1930s was not easy. They had to follow everything the white people told them to do.

What is the Jim Crow Law?

The Jim Crow law, was laws in the US between 1876 to 1965. The laws states that black and white Americans were equal but segregated. That meant that the black and the white Americans had to go to different schools, different hospitals, restaurants, hotels, etc. However it states that they were supposed to be equal, but that was not the reality at all. The black Americans were treated much worse than the white. They were victims of public discrimination.