Henrietta Bell Wells

1912-2008

Social worker, educator

Henrietta Bell Wells died in February of 2008 just two months after the movie The Great Debaters revisited her extraordinary achievement as part of the first interracial college debate-team match-up in U.S. history in 1930. She was the last surviving member of the pioneering debate club from Wiley College, a historically black school in Marshall, Texas, and had provided first-person recollections to the actor-director Denzel Washington and other members of the movie's production team. "I never expected the movie to cause so much interest, so much attention to my inner life," she enthused in an interview with Carol E. Barnwell of Episcopal Life Online.

Wells was born to a single mother of West Indian heritage in Houston, Texas, in 1912. She grew up in the city's Fourth Ward, once called Freedman's Town, where freed slaves and their descendants had settled in the nineteenth century, and was the first African-American infant ever baptized at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in the city. The Houston of Wells's youth was a strictly segregated town, and she remembered when her home was searched during a period of martial law in the city following a 1917 insurrection by black U.S. Army recruits at nearby Camp Logan.

In 1929 Wells graduated as valedictorian of her class at Phyllis Wheatley High School, Houston's all-black high school. She won a scholarship from the YMCA to attend Wiley College in eastern Texas, which had been founded in 1873 by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate freed slaves, but the scholarship was not enough to cover all her tuition and living expenses. During her freshman year she worked three jobs, including one at a campus eatery called the Wildcat Inn and another with the school's dormitory housekeeping service. Her English professor, Melvin B. Tolson, suggested that she try out for his already-renowned debate team, and even though she told Tolson she had little time for extracurricular activities because of her class and work commitments, she agreed to audition and won a spot as the first woman on the team. She was also its only freshman.

Tolson was a Columbia University graduate and a published poet whose verse is usually grouped with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and during the 1920s he had turned Wiley's debate team into a legendary powerhouse on the black college circuit. Formally known as the Forensic Society of Wiley College, Tolson's debaters won impressive victories against elite schools, including Fisk and Howard universities and Morehouse College that were considered of a much stronger academic caliber than their small Texas school. Wells balanced her schoolwork and job duties with twice-weekly debate practices at Tolson's campus home, recalling in the interview with Barnwell that "Mr. Tolson was very serious and very strict; there were no frills, everything had to be correct. It was fun being the only girl on the team, but it was a lot of hard work."

Traveling to debate meets against other schools proved an especially challenging aspect for Wells and her five Wiley classmates. The school had to arrange for her to have a female chaperone, but the sight of formally attired African-American youths traveling in an automobile on the backroads of the American South during the Great Depression presented the real danger. Once they arrived at their destination, however, the troubles of the outside world receded from focus. "I never was afraid," Wells said about her time on the dais when asked by Tamala Edwards, a reporter for Philadelphia ABC News affiliate WPVI. "It's all business. This is business. You've got to win this debate. Sometimes its frightening to me that I was able to do these things and not be afraid."

Wells participated in the Forensic Society at Wiley for just one season, but it was a historic year for the team and for black collegians: after beating all the other debate teams from historically black schools, Tolson arranged for them to test themselves against University of Michigan law school students in what is believed to be the first interracial college debate. The meet was held in Chicago at the Seventh Street Theater, a black-owned venue, and was a sold-out event. "It was a non-decision debate, but we felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation," Wells recalled in an interview with the Houston Chronicle's Salatheia Bryant. At the start of her sophomore year, financial worries kept her from competing again, but the Wiley College debaters went on to several more winning seasons, including an impressive victory over the reigning 1934 national college-debate champions from the University of Southern California.

Wells graduated from Wiley in 1935 and became a social worker and welfare caseworker in Houston. She married Wallace Wells—who, in a coincidental twist, held a music degree from the University of Southern California—and they lived for a time in Gary, Indiana, where he was a church organist. After World War II, her husband studied for the Episcopalian ministry, and during the 1960s they were both employed at Dillard University in New Orleans, he as the dean of chapel and Wells as the school's dean of women. Returning to Houston in 1967, she became an elementary school teacher and was the first African-American on the faculty of Bonner Elementary School.

Widowed in 1987, Wells remained in the Houston area and was an active member of St. James Episcopal Church. She was an invaluable aid to the producers of The Great Debaters as the last living member of Wiley College's 1930 championship team, providing a first-person account as well as a rich source of period detail from the scrapbooks she had kept. She also took credit for convincing Denzel Washington to play the starring role as the formidable Melvin B. Tolson, noting that the Oscar-winning actor had "just wanted to direct the movie," as she revealed in the interview with Barnwell. "But I told him he was perfect for the part of Mr. Tolson—and if he wasn't the star, he would lose a lot of people." Washington took her advice and starred in the movie, which was released in December of 2007. Wells's character was renamed Samantha Booke, however, and the script has the Wiley College students debating against Harvard University's team, which never happened—though they did compete against England's Oxford University debate club when it toured the United States. "I hope I live up to the ideals in it," she told Bryant, just a few months before her passing at the age of ninety-six. "The movie is supposed to inspire young people to want to go to college, to try hard, to know it's not all easy but there's so much you gain from it."

At a Glance …

Born Henrietta Pauline Bell on October 11, 1912, in Houston, TX; died February 2008; daughter of Octavia Bell; married Wallace Wells (a church organized and Episcopal minister; died 1987). Religion: Episcopalian. Education: Earned degree from Wiley College, 1935.

Career: Social worker in Houston, Texas, and Gary, Indiana; Dillard University, dean of women, 1963-67; Bonner Elementary School in Houston, elementary school teacher, after 1967.

Sources

Periodicals

Houston Chronicle, December 23, 2007, p. B5.

Los Angeles Times, March 17, 2008, p. 1.

New York Times, March 12, 2008, p. A25.

Online

Barnwell, Carol E., "Henrietta Wells Remembers Well ‘The Great Debaters,’" Episcopal Life Online,http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81827_93522_ENG_HTM.htm (accessed June 17, 2008).

Bell, Gail K., "Tolson, Farmer Intertwined by Wiley Debate Team," Marshall News Messenger,http://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com, (accessed June 17, 2008).

Edwards, Tamala, "Tamala's Ties to the ‘Great Debater,’" WPVI-TV/DT Philadelphia, http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=5847470 (accessed June 17, 2008).

—Carol Brennan