Remember the Titans is Awful

Rating: 1/10 (19 April 2008)

This movie is more extremely annoying. In 1971, I was in 10th grade at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington County, Virginia. We were about 5 miles from T. C. Williams (Titans) and we played them regularly in every sport (including track, which was my sport). I have personal knowledge of the events in that film. First of all, the idea that T. C. Williams had just been integrated is incorrect. Schools in the area had been integrated for 15 years. By 1971, it was routine to have blacks and whites in the same school. Come look at my yearbooks and I'll show you. What happened at T. C. Williams was this: the Alexandria school system decided to change the status of three schools..........Hammond HS, George Washington HS, and T. C. Williams HS. Hammond was reduced to a junior high, and its students were sent to Williams. GW was closed and its students were sent to Williams. Everyone in the ENTIRE AREA knew that Alexandria had just created a super sports school and it was true. With the best athletes from three schools combined into one, there was no beating T. C. Williams. We played them in football that year and they beat us about 49-0, but it sure as hell had nothing to do with integrating a school and everything about creating a super school. Next, the idea that Alexandria was a small, backward town with rampant racial prejudice is laughable. Alexandria is a MAJOR suburb of Washington, DC. You can stand in Alexandria, look across the Potomac River, and see the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, etc. It was and is a rich suburb of DC, and racial prejudice was about as far from being mainstream as I am from marrying Miss America. In my school, the white kids were afraid of the black kids. We didn't initiate fights, we tried hard to avoid them, but sometimes they were forced upon us by angry groups of students who roamed the halls and you sure as hell better look out if you didn't cringe to the side and let them pass. There is one scene in the movie where a white football coach calls the T. C. Williams coach a "monkey" on local TV. Good Lord.........that sort of thing would NEVER have been put on a Washington, DC sports channel and that is where ALL the channels received in northern Virginia originated (with the exception of channel 20 which had no news at that time). The people who made this movie had an agenda. I know the facts. I was there. I ran track in that T. C. Williams stadium and they beat the hell out of us because they were a super school. It is both sad and annoying that people will watch this movie and believe that how things are portrayed is actually how they were. They absolutely were not!