Attitude Reflects Leadership

One of the most important aspects of this movie is the interaction between the black and white players and how the interaction changes throughout the movie.  When the players were at first forced together, there was stereotyping and mistrust between the white and African American players.  This is one of my favorite parts of the movie and it reflects how the attitude that a person has will have a great effect upon the organization or team that they are working with.  Gerry confronts Julius for being a selfish player and never playing for the team.  Julius argues back that he plays in this selfish way because Gerry only cares about the white players, and could care less about the black players.  The line "attitude reflects leadership" in this context means that the attitude of the player is dictated by how the leader behaves.  There is a great lack of motivation between both the black and white players.  The lack of objectivity that Gerry has forces him to see the black players as not as good as the white players.  With the preconceived notions that they both have, it will take a long time and a lot of hard work to bring these two to work together.

The historical connections that can be made for this scene in the movie have to do with Project "C" that took place in 1963.  Trying to build on the success of nonviolence, in1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a campaign in what was argued as the most segregated city in America, Birmingham, Alabama.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC started the campaign Project C, which stood for confrontation (Hist page 454).  The group organized marches in which they protested segregation even though Birmingham's mayor outlawed these such protests.  More than 20,000 black people were arrested, which included thousands of children.  The police in Birmingham used brutal force such as police dogs and electrical prods against the African Americans that chose to march.  The campaign ended in a somewhat bitter victory for the civil rights protesters (Hist page 454).  When I first read about this in the textbook, I felt that it was necessary for the SCLC to fight against segregation in Birmingham because it was the most segregated place.  If the group was able to be victorious in Birmingham, then they could probably be victorious in almost any other place.

I see a connection here to this scene in Remember the Titans to the campaign Project C.  The connection is that if Coach Boone wanted to bring the black and white players together, then he would need to first bring Gerry and Julius together because they are the leaders of both of the races.  Gerry is the leader of the white players and Julius seems to be the leader of the black players.  If Coach Boone is able to succeed in bringing these two together, then he would probably also succeed in bringing the rest of the team together because the rest of the team will follow in the steps of Gerry and Julius.  Another connection that I see here is one with the Major Problems document "Multiracialism (and Detente) on TV: Star Trek, 1967."  The document shows the multiracialism that was present in the television show Star Trek (Major Problems document "Multiracialism (and Detente) on TV: Star Trek, 1967").  There is also obviously multiracialism here in Remember the Titans as well.  This is even more evident in this scene because the audience sees the great distinction between the polarization of the characters of Gerry and Julius.  One final Major Problems document that I see being prevalent in a discussion of this scene is the document "Journalist Tom Wolfe Describes the New Politics of Confrontation, 1970."  In the document, Wolfe describes that African Americans started using the confrontation tactic to impose fear in the face of white Americans (Major Problems document "Journalist Tom Wolfe Describes the New Politics of Confrontation, 1970").  During this scene of the movie, I think you can really see that, for the first time, Gerry is scared of Julius.