Saturday, October 7, 2000; Page A21
As a retired T. C. Williams teacher, I have an assignment for Stephen Hunter. I would like him to sit between coaches Herman Boone and Bill Yoast while revisiting his review of the movie "Remember the Titans" ["Fumbled Opportunity," Style, Sept. 29]. They could explain to him what the movie is about, as well as what we were trying to do in Alexandria in 1971.
Hunter's "reality" certainly is not mine. I was there and part of an extensive human relations training program for parents, administrators, students and teachers to help facilitate the desegregation of mostly white Hammond and mostly black George Washington into the newly opened desegregated T. C. Williams. I believe the citizens of the schools and the city worked hard to understand the "complexities of human nature" that Hunter says the film lacks.
Hunter criticizes the film for taking license with the "facts." I can only tell him that it doesn't matter whether the game with Marshall High School was not the state championship game. What matters is that if these two coaches had not been able to resolve their differences as they did (which was forthrightly and entertainingly depicted in the movie), I'm not sure that the rest of us would have accomplished the task either.
Thanks to this successful, talented, fun group of student athletes and their coaches for their role in facilitating the desegregation process of the city of Alexandria.
--Hazel Rigby
In his review of "Remember the Titans," Stephen Hunter writes that the movie's "chief failing is its reinvention of that city [Alexandria], a sophisticated, multicultural suburb with an actual French restaurant or two, as a small, isolated Southern town somewhere between Selma, Ala., and Meridian, Miss. "
Is Hunter's point that Alexandria was too "sophisticated" to desegregate? A satisfying bite of foie gras at one of Alexandria's French restaurants during the dark days of segregation would not have wiped away the bitter taste of that barbaric practice.
Hunter should have stuck with the facts: Until the early 1970s all schoolchildren in the South--from the high-income suburbs of Washington to sharecropper villages of the Mississippi Delta--lived under the shadow of legalized apartheid.
--Jason Forrester
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