It’s hard to watch the NFL playoffs with your kids and try to explain to them a time when African-American athletes weren’t welcome at the upper echelons of sports in the United States.
The NFL even seems to have solved its more recent failures in giving fair chances to black quarterbacks or head coaches. With all the billions of dollars generated by the NFL, every position short of the owner’s box seems to be as close to a colorblind meritocracy as we are likely to see.
So you might need to turn to feature films instead of NFL Films to remind the family of a bygone era that isn’t really that far gone. The suburbs of Washington could be awfully racist in the early 1970s, and “Remember the Titans” does a great job dramatizing the issue for a Disney audience.
The film from 2000 employs Denzel Washington’s unshakable moral and dramatic authority to portray events at a real- life high school in Alexandria, Va. (Just across the Potomac River from Washington, where, of course, another major reversal in American race relations will play out officially on Jan. 20.)
At newly desegregated T.C. Williams High School, a traditional white coach has just been passed over for a no-nonsense black coach for the football team. The white and black players are at each others’ throats immediately, reflecting the tensions in the hallways of the school itself.
One black and one white star on the team seem to hate each other the most, then earn each other’s respect. Yes, some of the sports-drama plotting is by now formulaic: locker room taunting, training montage, community confrontation, eventual victory and lessons learned. But football games themselves are formulaic — 60 minutes, a winner, a loser, a halftime show. How the games and the movies are played out is the key, and here Denzel Washington is more than enough to carry the day. “Remember the Titans” is a stirring family movie for anybody over the age of 7.
