re: National Debate Championship winners

Participants in the Dozens are required to exhibit mental acuity and proficiency with words. In his memoirs Die **** Die! (1969), H. Rap Brown writes that the children he grew up with employed the Dozens to kill time and stave off boredom, in the way that whites might play Scrabble. Brown asserts playing the game is a form of mental exercise. Sociologist Harry Lefever states that verbal skill and wit is just as valued among African Americans as physical strength: "Verbal facility is thus a criterion that is used to separate the men from the boys".[1]