Desegregation in Sports

The film Remember the Titans centers around the newly desegregated high school football team at T.C. Williams High School.  Throughout the film, the players as well as coaches are faced with the problem of forcing the two races to work together towards a common goal.  From the start, it looks as if all hope is lost for anything positive coming out from integrating the school together.  Before the season even starts, the two coaches, Coach Boone and Coach Yoast seem to be polar opposites of one another.  When Coach Boone goes to the house of Coach Yoast to try to get him to be the Assistant Coach/Defensive Coach, there is a struggle as to decide how best to handle playing time for the football team.  Coach Boone states, "The best player will play.  Color won't matter."  After a slight pause, Coach Yoast says "From the looks of the situation that we got here, it looks like that's about all that does."  It is clear from the get go that there are going to be major challenges in trying to put this football team together.  Coach Boone then asks Coach Yoast to stay as Assistant Head Coach to "help smooth things out for the city."  Yoast: "You mean work under you?" Boone: "If that's the way you see it."  The two coaches are having a hard time seeing the "rank" of one another because Coach Boone, the African American head coach, is not used to being at the top, with a white coach under him.  And Coach Yoast, the white coach, is not used to having to "work under" an African American head coach.  The class divisions that have been previously set up throughout American history up to this point always had whites as being "superior" to African Americans. 

Desegregation in sports came around the year 1947 and is mostly known by the career of African American baseball player Jackie Robinson (lecture 11/1/11).  The sport of professional baseball is a good example of civil rights liberalism that took place in the late 1940s.  Jackie Robinson, a World War II veteran, made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  When Robinson joined professional baseball at first, he knew that his presence may generate hostility.  Robinson promised not to retaliate against racist taunts that were used against him (Hist page 444).  What Jackie Robinson had to go through was very different from anything that professional athletes have to go through now.  Fans threw debris at Robinson, some rival players ever attacked him, and to take it even further, he was often stopped from eating with his teammates on the road (Hist page 444).  In spite of having to deal with all of this, Robinson was amazing.  Robinson "won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and the league's Most Valuable Player award in 1949" (Hist page 444).  Robinson was later the first African American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  The progress that Jackie Robinson made allowed for other stars of the Negro Leagues to enter the majorly white leagues.   

In the Major Problems document "Nisei Soldier Honored with the Gold Star--and by Jackie Robinson,1944," it is discussed that Nisei soldiers sometimes received decorations for bravery.  The soldiers were sometimes defended by Americans who opposed racism (Major Problems document "Nisei Soldier Honored with the Gold Star--and by Jackie Robinson,1944").  Jackie Robinson was one such American who honored Nisei soldiers for the courage that they showed.  The fact that Jackie Robinson was helping to decorate war heroes goes to show the amount of publicity that Robinson had even before he entered the all-white baseball league.   

Nowadays, when one watches professional sports, it is clear that many, if not the majority, of professional athletes in almost any sport are African American.  During the time frame of the 1940s when Jackie Robinson entered the all-white baseball league, it was not the norm to see a professional team that was mostly African American.  Even in the time frame of Remember the Titans in 1971, T.C. Williams High School was the only school mentioned in the movie that had African American players integrated with white players.  All of the teams that the Titans played were all-white teams.  The changes that have come to professional sports by today can somewhat be attributed to Jackie Robinson and the desegregation in sports that took place in the mid-1900s.