Are We Really Desegregated?

After the white coaches and players show up to the football team meeting that is being held by Coach Boone, the announcement is made that the boys will be attending football camp before the start of the season.  When all of the white and black coaches and players show up to leave to go to camp, an interesting situation occurs.  When the players get ready to leave on the two buses, Coach Boone notices that the buses are segregated.  There is one bus with African Americans players and another bus with white players.  Although the school is integrated as T.C. Williams High School, it is very clear that the players are still segregated.  Coach Boone goes onto each bus and tells everybody to get off the bus.  After everyone is off the buses, Coach Boone tells the team that he wants everybody that is trying out to be on offense on one side and everybody that is trying out for defense on the other side.  There is then an offensive bus and a defensive bus that has both white and black players.  Coach Boone takes it even farther by pairing up each player with somebody else in a "buddy system."  It is not a surprise that most of the pairings are of one black player and one white player.  This is a common theme that is brought up throughout the first half of the film.  Although the school is integrated together, Coach Boone feels like he needs to forcefully make the black and white players spend time with one another.  Coach Boone is having to forcefully desegregate his football team.

This aspect of the film can be tied to desegregation on almost any level.  First, one could consider the desegregation of the military by President Truman in 1948 (Hist page 443).  Second, one could also consider desegregation in sports which was previously discussed in the Blog post "Desegregation in Sports" (Hist page 444).  And of course, one could also discuss desegregation of schools, which was discussed in my post on Brown v. Board of Education (Hist page 444).

Something else that can be discussed about in this part of the movie is the bus boycotts that took place in the 1950s.  The resistance of white southerners did not prevent African Americans from trying to push for equal treatment on all levels.  Civil rights activism actually increased in the 1950s, despite an increased amount of violence as well.  After a successful bus boycott in 1953 in Baton Rouge and the public disgust over the Emmett Till murder, a major breakthrough occurred in 1955 (Hist page 445).  In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a "whites only" section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  The Major Problems document "Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Defends Seamstress Rosa Parks, 1955," shows that the African American community completely backed what Rosa Parks did (Major Problems document "Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Defends Seamstress Rosa Parks, 1955").  In fact, after Rosa Park's arrest, the African American community in Birmingham, Alabama, which had been planning the event for some time, boycotted the city's bus system.  Even though there was much revenue lost, the white owners of the city bus system refused to integrate the seating (Hist page 445).  One major difference between the bus boycotts during the 1950s and the bus scene in Remember the Titans is that Coach Boone had to forcibly make the players get off of the buses.

Once the offensive/defensive buses were set up, the group was on their way to football camp.  One other interesting thing to note about this scene is what happened on the defensive bus on the way to camp.  One of the African American players, called "Blue," began singing the song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and tried to get some more of the African American players to sing along with the song.  This is an interesting song choice to have the African American players sing as their sort of "anthem."  The song was of course chosen for a reason and it is easy to understand that the African American players are saying that there isn't any mountain or valley that is high or low enough that can stop us.  This song becomes one of the iconic song of the movie.  Julius, one of the African American players who will end up playing linebacker like Gerry, tells Blue "Shut up! I don't wanna see your smilin or shufflin or hear your minstrel show singing on this bus."  A good point can be made here that Blue, one of the happy African Americans that can't seem to be brought down, is told to be quiet by Julius, who is one of the angry African American players who will quarrel with Gerry throughout the first half of the movie.  In a lecture at the beginning of the year, we discussed minstrelsy shows so that is another connection that can be made with what Julius said to Blue.