I’ll bet you didn’t know that when Congress voted on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, Connecticut voted to keep slavery.
Actually, it didn’t happen that way. But if you saw Stephen Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln,” the screenwriters made it happen that way because they thought it would be more dramatic.
I’ll bet you didn’t know Jackie Robinson hit a home run off a racist pitcher to clinch the 1947 National League pennant for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Actually, it didn’t happen that way. The Dodgers clinched the pennant on an off day when the team chasing them lost, but the filmmakers thought it would make for a better story.
Then there is “Remember the Titans,” a football movie many people love.
The problem is, it was a lie from beginning to end.
Where do we begin?
First, the movie is almost completely about racism. T.C. Williams is portrayed as an integrated school playing all-white schools in what comes across as a Deep South racist community.
Of course the actual community was Alexandria, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and all the other schools were part of suburban Northern Virginia, maybe the most liberal part of the entire South at that time.
Every school they played had been integrated for at least five years.
T.C. Williams opened six years before the season in question — as a completely integrated school.
Race was never part of the story, but it was pretty much the entire movie.
Other schools hated to play the Titans in 1971, but it had nothing to do with race. The city of Alexandria had combined its three high schools, sending every 11th and 12th grader in the city to T.C. Williams and creating super teams.
The Titans won all 13 games in 1971 by a combined score of 357-45. Their defense shut out nine of their 13 opponents.
Indeed, the sickeningly false portrayal of the state championship game has the white quarterback lateraling the ball to a black receiver for a last second touchdown that allowed the Titans to come from behind to win.
The actual game, played in Roanoke, had T.C. Williams defeating Andrew Lewis, 27-0.
Remember the heartbreaking accident that cost the Titans their best defensive player prior to the final game?
Oh, he got hurt, but it was later in the winter and he actually played in the game.
Don’t get me wrong. The Northern Virginia schools had a great deal of racial tension, but it happened years before 1971. In fact, I attended high school in Fairfax County, and our school of 3,300 got four black students in 1965 and 300 or so in 1966. My three youngest siblings went to junior high school at the school that had been the black high school before that.
In fact, by 1979 I was a sportswriter for the Alexandria Gazette covering high school basketball and football games, some of them at T.C. Williams. Alexandria was more like Pennsylvania than Alabama, although the movie would never tell you that.
You want the truth?
Watch this video, but don’t waste your time on the movie.