In just minutes, a panel of debaters from George Wythe High will take the stage to face off against a team from Thomas Jefferson. Tension is brewing. At the foot of the stage, some nerves are shaken on the Wythe team. The debate team’s opening speaker, Chelsea Lee, is a no-show. One of her teammates once again worries aloud to coach Lindy Bumgarner.

“For the last time, it doesn’t matter,” Bumgarner says to the team, her voice a mixture of sternness and reassurance. “Chelsea might have had a problem with her baby, so we’ll keep her and her baby in our thoughts and prayers, and we’ll move on.”

But soon enough, it’s a moot point. “Thank God!” gasps one of the students as Chelsea rushes into the auditorium and down the side aisle with eight minutes to spare. Having taken a class at the city’s technical school in North Side, she was caught up on a GRTC bus back to Wythe on the South Side. She’s clutching her handwritten copy of the team’s introductory speech, which she memorized on her bus ride.

The students on both teams make their final preparations, arming themselves with papers and notes, and eventually assemble around tables on opposite ends of the stage. Their attire runs the gamut, from polo shirts and jeans to suits. Joseph Gray, T.J.’s captain, sports a black tie and slacks with a white shirt and white-leather basketball shoes. Dre’mon Miller, Wythe’s co-captain, dons his Sunday best — an electric-blue dress suit with blue-and-white wingtip shoes.

Two empty podiums, in pools of light, face each other. It’s time for a debate to begin.

Words, Not Weapons
The idea of a debate program for Richmond high school students was hatched partly in a locker room of the Downtown YMCA during the late summer of 2007. That’s where two friends, Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Herring and novelist David L. Robbins, ran into each other and started talking about ways to engage urban high-school students.

Herring’s premise: What if we could help at-risk high schoolers bypass the tragic statistics that seem to ensnare so many of their peers? What if we could teach them the value of using words instead of weapons?

Out of that conversation Robbins coined the name the “Pen Project,” leaning on the adage that “the pen is mightier than 
the sword.”

The writer and the prosecutor saw a chance to channel raw talent into promise. “If the kids who have sharp tongues and equally sharp wits can learn to communicate constructively, imagine just how valuable and how much of an asset they’ll be,” Herring explains.

Herring and Robbins had more talks and riffed off of one another, dreaming up a free-form program.

“We had great big lofty ideas at first,” Herring says. “We wanted to incorporate music. We wanted to incorporate poetry. We figured, however the kids come to us with an idea to express, we’ll take it and turn it into something constructive.”

So, in September 2007, Herring began planting the seeds for a pilot program. He hired Bumgarner as a special-programs director to oversee the Pen Project and other outreach efforts that could help chisel away at juvenile crime and mold student leaders.

Herring’s office formed a partnership with Richmond Public Schools and began work on a pilot version of the Pen Project to run at Wythe during the second half of the 2007-2008 school year. To drum up interest, the prosecutor and his staff visited Wythe’s English classes. They asked the teenagers to submit poetry, essays or even drawings that said something about who they are and why they wanted to join the program.

“A lot of it was ‘closet’ writing,” explains George Wythe’s assistant principal, Kim Allen. Students brought in journal entries or poetry they had kept to themselves. Others were allowed to turn in artwork as long as they wrote an explanation of their efforts.

Presented with encouragement and a creative outlet, Allen says, some of the teens seized the moment. “A lot of times teenagers have feelings and things that they’re not sure how to 
express — or if there’s an appropriate way to express them,” she says.

About 25 students submitted works. Some revealed the anger, loss and sense of injustice students were carrying around with them.

Porscha Wright, who’s 16 and expects to graduate next year, submitted a poem in rhyming verse that shared the experience of her stepfather’s murder when she was 13:

A shot to the heart — they might as well did me too
Look at all the pain they put my family through

It was early in the process, but the school officials, Robbins and Herring’s staff could see the first signs of students’ transformation. “There’s nothing that vexes these students more than a sense of powerlessness,” says Robbins, who earned a law degree before turning to fiction writing.

By the beginning of 2008, Herring and Bumgarner ended up with about nine kids in the pilot version of the Pen Project.

The Wythe students were allowed to dabble in various forms of expression. One assignment challenged them to write poems on the topic of whether it is acceptable to use violence for 
political reasons.

Bumgarner even took the group on a field trip to an open-mic night at a coffee house on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. For some of them, it was their first experience at the downtown university. The youngsters took their turns at the microphone, sharing their own words alongside college kids.

Porscha recited the poem about her stepfather’s killing and also performed a rap about partying and money.

It wasn’t long before Herring recognized that the original scope he and Robbins had brainstormed was too broad. He jokes that Bumgarner stayed patient while he experimented further with the structure.

“I had all these notions of sharing the principles of constitutional law with the kids,” he says. “And for the first 10 minutes they were into it. Then you saw their eyes glaze over, 
because there’s only so far you can go with 10th-graders on first-
amendment analysis.”

He went on, “What it whittled down into was the kids wanting to engage each other in competitive but constructive argument.”

In planning the pilot program’s culminating event — a banquet at a pizza parlor — it was decided that the commonwealth’s attorney would challenge the Wythe students to a contest using the Lincoln-Douglas style of debate.

Under the Lincoln-Douglas format — modeled after a series of debates in 1858 between U.S. Senate candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas — a coin flip determines which team argues “pro” and which argues “con” on the topic at hand. Each team has a chance to present opening statements and evidence, to cross-examine its opponents and to rebut the arguments made by the other side.

They set a topic: Hip-hop and rap music are detrimental to youth and should be banned.

Herring’s team drew the task of arguing the affirmative while the Wythe team would argue the negative.

Bumgarner says the preparation was “research-light” to put the emphasis on the idea of debating rather than the mechanics. And to keep it friendly, neither team was declared the winner.

“When you focused them on a topic and competing together against the coaches, they liked that,” she says.

And that sealed it. The next school year, the Pen Project would become an urban-debate league.

Form and Function
Because Bumgarner already had experience with the concept of urban debate, she used the existing Washington, D.C., league as a model when she and Herring moved to include Thomas Jefferson High this school year.

Bumgarner agreed to coach the Wythe students while Herring and another attorney worked with the T.J. students.

Urban debate arose in 1985 when an Emory University professor, Melissa Maxcy Wade, sparked a partnership with two Atlanta public high schools to create a league, according to the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues. Around the same time, similar efforts cropped up in Philadelphia 
and Detroit.

Today, there are approximately 40 such city leagues in the nation, says Kevin Kuswa, a professor of rhetoric and communications at University of Richmond.

As director of UR’s nationally competitive debate team, Kuswa keeps an eye on powerhouse programs around the nation — at both high-school and college levels. In 2001, he came to UR from Austin, Texas, where he had helped establish an urban debate league.