Remember The Titans Character Analysis

The influence of others has the ability to change and shape people. Based in the 1980s, Remember the Titans is a true story following the football team of a newly integrated school. Gerry, one of the main characters, is the captain of the football team. The rest of the team looks up to him. When the school integrate, he was dead set against having them. With the help of the new Coach, who was also black, Gerry learned to accept his teammates and become a better football team because of it. By having Gerry go from discriminatory against his teammates who were black to accepting of them, Remember the Titans showed that through the guidance of others, people can change for the better. Originally, Gerry felt wary and threatened of his new teammates …show more content…
Coach Yoast, however, would not allow that. He forced him to stay on the team and try it out. Despite that, he continued to find ways to be against them and make his teammates against them as well. The next thing he does is convince people that the newly integrated players were going to steal their positions. Throughout the whole beginning, it was a battle between what he was supposed to do and his views. However, in the middle of the movie, things start to change. As time goes on, Coach Boone was brought out to be a more important character. Coach Boone is the new coach, who is black. He, rightfully so, has very strong opinions on who should play football and what their attitude should be. Through the first part of the middle, Coach Boone was dedicated to making the players who were white have the right attitude towards the players who were black. He combined both his practices and with different lessons. For example, he made them go on a very long run through the woods to get to the battleground from the battle of Gettysburg. Here he reminded them of all people that died fighting side-by-side regardless of race. This struck something within Gerry. He …show more content…
One thing that he did was he stopped a fight in the hallway. One guy got mad because a black person was talking to his girlfriend and her friends in the hallways. Although it was just a friendly discussion, the guy got mad and tried to start a fight, which ended up being him beating the other guy up because he wouldn’t fight back. Seeing this, Gerry rushed to break the fight up. Although now this just seems like something a nice person would do, it was a huge improvement because Gerry used to be the one starting those fights. Later on, during one of their football games, there was a missed play. Someone messed it up. This caused one of the black team members to break his wrist, not being able to play anymore. As captain, Gerry took a bigger look at the situation and came to a conclusion. Ray, the person who messed up the play was doing it because he still didn’t want people of a different race on the team. Ray was Gerry’s longtime friend, and they even went and talked to Coach Boone when they first met him about getting their positions stolen (to which Coach Boone didn’t respond very well to.) Immediately, Gerry turned on him, going to talk to Coach Yoast about kicking him off the team. Coach Yoast responded that he couldn’t because he had a rule about kicking people off the team and said that as captain, Gerry would