Though the age of school segregation ostensibly ended with the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education, many schools in the South resisted integration, with the overwhelming support of the white communities these schools served openly defying a move in that direction. In the film Remember the Titans, we learn that the courts were stepping in and ordering desegregation as late as 1971. In the film, T. C. Williams High School of Alexandria, Virginia is integrated under court order and so too is its football team. Virginia is part of the south, and despite the civil laws of the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Crow is still very much a de facto way of life there. The challenge of bringing white and black players together on the football field, a context in which a failure to cooperate means instant defeat, falls to an out-of-town black coach named Herman Boone. The hiring of Coach Boone means that white candidate, Bill Yoast, is passed over, and the racial fires are stoked even higher.
In Remember the Titans, nearly every decision made by the major characters has a racial connotation. This is no surprise; the nation was rocked by race riots in Watts in Los Angeles, California, Newark, New Jersey, and other parts of the country in the 1960s. The civil rights movement had won important victories, but the promise of racial equality was not being met. Within the black community there was a division between those who supported civil disobedience tactics: the purposeful boycotts, marches, and sit-ins that were led by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and those who grew impatient and were or became more militant. The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott and other similar crusades were able to win local reforms, but many of the large cities attracted a more militant social stratum to the cause of the civil rights movement. The Black Nationalist Nation of Islam and the black socialist Black Panthers are exemplars of the extremes of this movement. Ironically, it is the white players of the Titans who announce a boycott when they hear that Boone will be their new coach. These players and their parents believe they can hurt Boone politically as a coach, perhaps even squeeze him out, if these white boys leave the team. However, Coach Boone, an avant-garde and precocious leader, hires Yoast to be his assistant in act of reconciliation, in order to soothe the team and get his season underway.
The central theme of Remember the Titans is that integration can bring about the very positive human quality of cooperation, which is just the opposite immediate reaction by those forced into this situation. Essentially, we are all in the same boat, black and white. The film doesn't shirk from an examination of white privilege, however. One white lineman, still in a rage over the integration of the team, lets a black quarterback be sacked mercilessly. There is no redemption for this character. The most prominent "native" football player, Captain Gerry Bertier, on the other hand, begins to accept integration and even a black player named Julius as a personal friend. Gerry later confronts his girlfriend and his parents about their racist attitudes. When Gerry finds himself in a hospital, it is Julius that he asks for above everyone else.
A more problematic but interesting character is Sunshine, an unexpected transfer student and even more unexpected football player. Sunshine is essentially a California hippie who even hints at homosexuality. Being a California liberal, Sunshine is truly "color blind," though one wonders how such a thing could be possible given the immense importance of racial politics nationwide and even in California. Still, one’s family training can be stronger than outside forces, and the audience does get to meet Sunshine’s progressive father, however briefly, when the two make their acquaintance with Coaches Boone and Yoast. The sense the viewer gets is that this thoroughly modern, twenty-first century character was dropped into the film rather unconventionally, as a sign of things to come for America.
The film continues, as Disney films must, toward a suitably dramatic conclusion. Coach Boone even brings the team to the Gettysburg field where the longest and bloodiest Civil War battle was fought in order to make an important point to the players in the middle of the night. Boone engages them in a little historical revisionism, telling the Titans inaccurately that 50,000 men died (there were actually about 10,000 battle deaths) in order to conquer race inequality. Gettysburg, like the Civil War generally, had less to do with the notion of black freedom and much more to do with national unity. Boone tells his players that they today are fighting the same battle the men at Gettysburg did, which sounds downright bizarre given the massive difference in stakes and politics between a bloody nineteenth century battle and a high school football game. Boone's natural charisma does carry the moment, though, when he says that the souls of the slain are saying "I killed my brother with malice in my heart. Hatred destroyed my family."
Remember the Titans is ultimately a tame, feel-good movie with problematic racial politics. The players, for the most part, do learn to respect one another. To the film's credit, it is primarily the white players and other white characters that are aggressive segregationists when it came to public schools as it truly was in our country’s history. The two sides of racial tension are not morally "equated" through the presentation of belligerent blacks provoking racist whites either, however, in the school halls or in the town. Regardless, Boone's attempt to conquer the racial divide through football seemingly puts the impetus on ending the problem of racism into blacks, while it is, of course, whites and white institutions that are actually responsible for hundreds of years of racism against blacks.
Moreover, Boone "wins" through individual action. The civil rights movement, though it had great leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, was necessarily a collective endeavor. Sit-ins, bus boycotts, and even test cases did not happen spontaneously, but were meticulously planned out by black leaders and hundreds, if not thousands of rank and file black and white activists who had already organized themselves in their own communities for the good of the people. Coach Boone was not nearly so organized. He was thrown into an extremely difficult situation and he patiently and often while biting his lip, took the “high road.” Boone has to prove to himself as a coach, as a man, and as a leader, and only then does he get accepted as a black man, and by extension so, too, do the black players on the team. The film does a good job addressing the ugly effects of racism on a personal level and the difficulty in breaking through institutionalized racism in our public spheres. However, this particularly light version of racial politics is ultimately not surprising, given the production company that made the film, that is would be “Disneyfied.”