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having to figure out where the surroundings were at before I could make a home in them.

And a lot of that was information gathering, whether that be reading the news, but often in conversation with people in those locations, in those neighborhoods to figure out that most basic and difficult question, which is where am I? And to do that, you needed all the help that you could get and you needed to rely on all the information sources you could get.

And one of the things that I learned to do, I think, is to resist easy answers to that question and to try and piece together from a kind of a mosaic all the different sides of a place.

We're used to thinking about listening as an essentially passive act, where we sit back in our chairs and take it all in.

Debaters know that it's a much more active process than that.

So when a speaker is speaking, a debater has paper and pen ready, and they're doing at least three things.

I think

What did you notice in the course of the debate be-- what went on in the course of the debates between those two men?

I think the first is, um, they had extraordinary background stories in debate.

Malcolm X learned to debate in prison, um, through a pr- a program that was established by forward-thinking prison designers and administrators.

James Farmer, on the other hand, had, um, a wonderful coach at the historically Black college that he attended, um, who's also the subject of the film C- The Great Debaters, um, with Denzel Washington.

And I wanted to tell those stories because they were, first of all, the stories of two men's education, and not just education as young people, but as citizens.

It was in debate that they found the voice with which to speak about the most important issues of the time.

The second thing I noticed is, um, and this is, I think, quite antithetical to the spirit of our times, which is both were African American civil rights leaders with quite different views about how to achieve equality.

... as, which is Sartre's phrase?