It's 1971 in Alexandria, Virginia and successful high school football coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) has just been deprived of the head coaching job at the new integrated T.C. Williams High School to make way for equally successful black coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington). Yoast debates pursuing opportunities elsewhere, but when most of his white players vow to sit out the season unless he coaches, he changes his mind and stays on as Boone's assistant.Throughout training camp and the season, Boone and Yoast's black and white players learn to accept each other, to work together, and that football knows no race. As they learn from each other, Boone and Yoast also learn from them and in turn, the whole town learns from the team, the Titans. Thus, they are prepared to pursue the State Championship and to deal with an unthinkable tragedy that threatens to sink their perfect season.Ryan Hurst, Wood Harris, Donald Faison, Ryan Gosling, Hayden Panettiere, and Kate Bosworth co-star.This makes for a good story, but not totally true. Northern Virginia Schools, which consist of Arlington and Fairfax County, the Cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church Schools were already integrated when T.C. Williams HS was built and opened. Langley HS, McLean Va, (Home of the Langley Saxons) which opened in 1966 had the first Black / African American Football Coach Charles Price, who later went to Groveton HS after developing a successful football program at Langley. Other area high schools--McLean, George C.Marshall, Falls Church and Herndon high schools--already had integrated football and other types of sports teams in the late 1960s. When you get out of Northern Virginia into Loudoun and Prince William Counties, then yes, absolutely they were segregated and it got worse the further into the Shenandoah Valley and southern Virginia areas. One of the worst being Warren County, which was the last school system in Virginia to allow blacks in schools, most had to walk to other jurisdictions being denied education well into the late 60s and early 1970s. The specific factual occurences in the movie is not what it is about. The film is more of a compilation of the attitudes and actions, and overall feel for integration of the areas schools.Although a lot of the scenes in the movie Remember the Titans are fictional or exaggerated, I feel that omissions of examples of what did or did not happen, other than the facts stated above, are unfair. It gives the impression that if the schools had been integrated for a while before the Titan's perfect season (which they were) then there wasn't a problem. This is not the case. Although many scenes and instances were pure fiction, for creative effect, there were problems. For example..."a brick WAS NOT thrown through Coach Boone's window", is a true, but an unfair statement if left to stand alone. Because in fact, it was a toilet commode that was thrown through his window. If you would like to know more "Hollywood vs. History" type facts concerning this movie, this link is a good place to start:
What year did the movie take place?
1971