In 1965, in my sophomore year of high school, I began attending the newly completed high school in the city of Alexandria, Va., T.C. Williams High. While the newly released Disney movie, “Remember the Titans,” makes good viewing, it bears little resemblance to the true story of 1971 or those earlier first years at my high school. In presenting its salutary message of racial understanding and human compassion, the movie plays fast and loose with history.
The opening of “T.C.,” as it was known, brought an end to the period known as “freedom of choice” in our school district, and ushered in full integration of the public schools, closing the all-black high school, Parker Gray. Thereafter, until 1971, there were three city high schools: Hammond, George Washington, and T.C. Williams.
The movie depicts Alexandria as a Hollywood-stereotypical Southern town, circa 1950s. But by the late ’60s and early ’70s, Alexandria was a cosmopolitan bedroom community for the rapidly expanding federal establishment, both military and civilian, in and around Washington, D.C.
T. C. Williams opened with a merged teaching staff of both black and white (and a peppering of Hispanic and Asian) teachers. Coaches Bill Yoast and Herman Boone, the protagonists in the movie, were both coaches on staff from the beginning of the school. They were, in fact, both gifted coaches, and gave T.C. a number of years of first-rate teams. Kids I went to school with came from all over —many were military brats, others were diplomats’ children. Then-Congressman Gerald Ford’s son, Mike, was in my graduating class, and Bill Alexander (whose father was a congressman at the time from North Carolina, and who now practices law in Raleigh) was in the class behind mine. We prided ourselves on our cohesiveness as a school from the beginning — all of the teams had star players who were both black and white; my class president, Bill Euille, was black (and went on to become an Alexandria city councilman), and I have no memory of segregation in the cafeteria or elsewhere during school. We ate together, went to Hot Shoppes after football games together, and danced to The Temptations together at school dances. The movie does a disservice to the many students and teachers who made racial harmony a reality in the earliest years of the school.
In the spring of 1968, during a college visit to Wake Forest, I heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Riding home on I-95 past Richmond, I could see the smoke as it burned, and I listened to reports of the U Street riots in Washington. Alexandria and T. C. Williams remained calm, and the school and city were held up as models of how integration should be accomplished.
While I graduated in 1968, my sister entered as a freshman in the fall and was there until graduation in 1972. I watched Gerry Bertier, the very talented co-captain of the football team memorialized by the movie, receive his diploma from his wheelchair to the applause of the entire football stadium. His initial accident did not occur during the football season, but he did, in fact, die a few years later in a second car accident near Charlottesville, Va.
What happened in 1971 to cause all the controversy? At that time the city merged all the juniors and seniors from all three integrated high schools into T.C. to make it a two year “senior” high school. My sister’s graduating class had 1,000 students in it. There were lots of unhappy kids and parents as a result of this. But it had nothing at all to do with racial tensions.
In “Remember the Titans,” the accents are as thick as Alabamians’, the racial tensions are reminiscent of Mississippi and Little Rock, and the school building bears no resemblance to the real T.C. Williams. But the football cheers, chants, team spirit and antics are true to form — those are the Titans, and all who attended T.C. have gotta love ’em, historically accurate or not, deep down in our hearts.
Today's News