Henrietta bell wells biography sampler
Tolson and the intellectual legacy of four former students — Hobart Jarrett, Henry Heights, James Farmer, Jr. and Henrietta Bell (Wells).
According to.!
Wells, Henrietta Bell
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