Word War 2

Last week: Like too many other kids from Kansas City's urban core, Marcus Leach was drifting toward obscurity at Kansas City's "academically deficient" Central High. Then he found his future in a game of endless possibilities -- only to find his greatest victory stymied by a fifty-year-old Missouri rule.Marcus Leach has a plan to end racism. And if it's not enacted, the world will end in nuclear holocaust. It's late on a Saturday night in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and things aren't looking good for humanity. Marcus is digging through documents, trying to find the perfect piece of evidence to sway the panel of "policy makers" now staring at him.

Things had started out so well. His fellow advocate for humanity, Brandon Dial, had laid out the pair's case brilliantly. At a clip of more than 300 words a minute, Brandon offered a slew of statistics and called for an extension of the Civil Rights Act to assure "equitable and culturally sensitive" mental-health care.

Doing so, Brandon had argued, would push the nation toward freedom from racial divisions. "The walls of racism can be dismantled," he exclaimed.

If racial inequalities were not obliterated, Brandon had warned (citing scholar Clarence Munford), their underlying hatred would continue to grow until it exploded into "the ultimate catastrophe ... nuclear conflict in the coming century."

But their plan has fallen under vicious attack. A pair of political enemies has offered the judges nine reasons why they should vote against it.

Now Marcus has just one minute to prepare a final speech answering all of his opponents' claims.

He leans over a table, scratching notes onto a blank sheet of paper. A toothache has settled in. His jaw feels as if it'll explode. He's going to lose.

Then he remembers a bit of text written by Todd May, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina. He stuffs it in with the rest of his documents and, as a buzzer sounds, takes his place behind the podium.

Marcus speaks at a rate that seems inhuman, flicking each sheet of evidence onto the floor as he finishes reading it.

Then he gets to May's idea: "Your job as an intellectual is not to dictate the movement from above, but to stand alongside the people and their struggle," Marcus says.

The implications are clear to everyone. Both Marcus and Brandon are blacks from one of the poorest parts of Kansas City. Their opponents are whites from the opulent suburb of West Des Moines -- and in order to eradicate racism, they need to step aside and empower its victims.

Time runs out, and the officials pore over their notes. Fifteen minutes pass. Then thirty. The officials tally their ballots and pause, drawing out the tension in the room, before declaring their support for Marcus and Brandon's plan.

Civilization has been saved.

More important, Marcus and Brandon have won the debate round. For a seventeen-year-old kid like Marcus, winning here is worth more than world peace.

The win means he gets to trade a dull, dark drive down Interstate 80 for another night in Cedar Rapids, where he'll compete the next day for a chance of winning the prestigious Iowa Caucus, a tournament of 51 debate teams from high schools across the country.

It's almost midnight. In a white van, the Central High School debate squad ventures across Cedar Rapids in search of an open restaurant. Marcus leans forward in his seat and slaps his knee.

"Who bling-blinged that final speech with just a minute of prep?" he shouts.

"Marcus!" the girls reply.

"Who bling-blinged that speech with a minute of prep and a sore tooth that felt like a broken mouth?"

"Marcus!"

He sits back and rubs his cheek.

"Man, I thought we were gonna lose that round," he says. But he had remembered what the May evidence would suggest about his opponents. "I was, like, 'Nigga, you white! You can't dictate the revolution!'"

And it is a revolution. Since the creation of the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues (commonly called the UDL) in 1997, more than 12,000 urban kids -- most of whom are black -- have taken up competitive debate, a game of strategy and power that's been dominated by affluent white kids for more than a century.

Representing Central, which state education bureaucrats have branded one of the worst high schools in Missouri, Marcus Leach has emerged as one of the top debaters in the country, says Linda Collier, director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City's top-ranked debate program. He and his teammates have been consistently competitive on the national high school debate circuit, a network of elite and tough tournaments held across the country.

The Iowa Caucus is one such tournament. Its competitors have flown in from hundreds of miles away -- from Nashville's Montgomery Bell Academy (Senate Majority Leader William Frist's alma mater), from the pricy Pace Academy in Minneapolis and from Chicago's wealthy North Shore suburbs.

Central's debaters are the only blacks competing in the late October contest. And after their Saturday-night victory over West Des Moines' private Dowling High School, Marcus and Brandon are among a mere eight teams left battling for a heavy bust of George Washington.