First woman on debate team portrayed in film

Henrietta Bell Wells, the first woman on the debate team of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, which rose to national prominence in the 1930s and inspired last year’s movie “The Great Debaters,” has died. She was 96.

Wells died Feb. 27 at a nursing home in Baytown, Texas, near Houston, according to news reports. The cause was not given. She was the last surviving member of the debate team she joined in 1930, according to reports.

Born Henrietta Pauline Bell on Jan. 11, 1912, in Houston, she was raised by her single mother. She later recalled growing up in the South when African American shoppers weren’t allowed to try on clothes in stores. Her family’s home was searched by police after a race riot in Houston in 1917, she said in an interview last year with the Houston Chronicle.

Wells was valedictorian of her senior class at Phillis Wheatley High School in Houston. After graduating in 1929, she enrolled at Wiley College on a scholarship. The college had been founded soon after the Civil War by the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to provide higher education for African Americans.

When she was a freshman at the school in 1930, her English professor, Melvin B. Tolson, invited Wells to join the debate team.

Tolson was a noted poet and a keen debater who set the team on a 10-year winning streak.

“I was the only girl and the only freshman,” Wells said of the team in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. “They didn’t seem to mind.”

It wasn’t an easy commitment for her to make. Along with classes and debate practice, she supported herself by working at the Wildcat Inn, a campus hangout, and doing housekeeping at a campus dormitory.

Tolson’s teaching style was rigorous and testy, Wells recalled last year on ABC television’s “Good Morning America.” He would walk into class, slam the door and fire off a question. One she always remembered: “Bell, what is a verb?”

Before debates he gave Wells pointers on how to deliver her argument. “You’ve got to punch something in there to wake the people up,” she recalled him telling her.

The Wiley debate team won contests against far more prominent black colleges, including Tuskegee and Howard universities. The team broke new ground in 1930 when it took on law students from the University of Michigan in what is said to have been the first interracial college debate in the country.

“We felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation,” Wells told the Houston Chronicle. Neither side was declared a winner in that competition, she later recalled, but it opened the way to other interracial college debates.

Wiley scored its most famous victory in 1935 when the team beat USC, the national debate champion.

Last year Tolson and the Wiley team were the subject of “The Great Debaters,” with Denzel Washington as the inspirational coach. In the movie, the only woman on the team was based partly on Wells and was played by actress Jurnee Smollett.

Wells stayed on the debate team for one year and then dropped out because she needed to earn more money to support herself.

After graduation she returned to Houston and worked as a social worker. She also taught in the Houston public school system.

She married the Rev. Wallace L. Wells. He died in 1987. She had no immediate family survivors.

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mary.rourke@latimes.com