BY STEVEN LUBET
It was inevitable that the film “Remember the Titans” would be mentioned in the headlines of Herman Boone’s obituaries. He was the real-life African American football coach of a real-life integrated high school team in Alexandria, Virginia, that won the real-life 1971 state championship, and he passed away last month at age 84. The movie starring Denzel Washington as Boone, which was released in 2000, predictably idealized the characters and events, while getting the arc of the story mostly right. The film’s familiar narrative extols the role of scholastic sports in overcoming racism. It could apply equally to high school or college athletics, but the ultimate lesson is pretty much backwards (more on that later).
In an effort to address racial imbalance, Alexandria’s three high schools were merged in 1971 to create T.C. Williams High School. Boone was hired to coach the newly-integrated football team, edging out Bill Yoast, the white head coach at shuttered Hammond High School, who had been expected to win the job. Although disappointed, Yoast showed impressive grace by agreeing to become Boone’s top assistant. Together they led the Titans to an undefeated season in which they shut out eight of twelve opponents before winning the state championship game 27-0.
Bill Yoast and Herman Boone
At the time, Boone was the only African American head football coach in Northern Virginia, but race was not central to his coaching philosophy. “I’m not a black coach, I’m a coach who was born black,” he explained in a Washington Post interview in 2000. “If you’re going to play for me, you’re going to play based on talent and character.”
Boone demanded colorblind camaraderie from his players. On a pre-season training trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he noticed that the white and black players had boarded different buses. He ordered them to rearrange the seating so that the ride was as integrated as the team. By the end of training week, the players were hanging out together and forming cross-racial friendships. As Yoast later observed, “When those kids came back from that camp, they were together. The student body wasn’t, the parents weren’t, the community wasn’t. But those kids were.”
In the film, the Titans’ on-field success served as a catalyst for improved race relations in Alexandria. In an early scene, for example, a local restaurant refused to serve a group of black players who were celebrating a victory. By the end of the season they were handing out free meals to the same students. In another scene, the cheerleader girlfriend of one of the white players refused to shake hands with a black teammate, telling her boyfriend that he had to make a choice. As the championship game approached, however, she realized the error of her ways.
This parable, in which athletic success leads to racial enlightenment, has also been featured in films about collegiate sports. Examples include Glory Road, about the all black 1966 NCAA basketball champions at Texas Western College (now UTEP), and The Express, in which Syracuse University’s Ernie Davis overcomes prejudice to win the 1961 Heisman Trophy.
The stories are inspiring, but they get the civics lesson exactly wrong. It is easy for a town or school to rally around a winning sports team, but it should not take a championship to overcome racism. After all, only a small handful of teams ever win championships. Most teams are mediocre and half of them will always have losing seasons, no matter what their racial composition. Good will, racial equity, and non-prejudice should be the norm in every community, even if their teams are winless. The integration of restaurants, or the friendship of fellow students, should not depend on game scores. That sort of victory-based transformation will ultimately prove hollow, perhaps as soon as the competition cycle inexorably reverts to the mean.
To my knowledge, there has never been a film in which a losing team was the catalyst for racial harmony, which is too bad. In actuality, Herman Boone was far more deeply flawed than Denzel Washington’s portrayal allowed, and he reportedly left T.C. Williams under a cloud (unmentioned in his obituaries). But he did succeed in breaking the coaching color line while teaching his players to respect each other as individuals, without regard to race. Win or lose, that is a far better reason to remember the Titans.
Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
