Editor's note: The following includes excerpts from ACPS Express, published Friday by Alexandria City Public Schools:
T.C. Williams High School Coach William “Bill” Yoast, of Remember the Titans fame has died, the City announced Friday.
Yoast, 94, passed away at Aarondale Retirement and Assisted Living in Springfield, Va. The former coach was immortalized in the movie about the 1971 integration of Alexandria’s high schools.
"Coach Yoast served our country in WW2, and then served generations of students in @ACPSk12 ," Mayor Justin Wilson said on social media Friday. "Our City is better off and grateful for his legacy. RIP, Coach."
ACPS announced "Today we remember legendary #RememberTheTitans Coach Bill Yoast, who has passed away. Along with Coach Herman Boone, Yoast helped transform the @TCWTitans into a model team and model school, leading the newly integrated football team to win the state championship in 1971."
Image courtesy of ACPS
T.C. Williams remembers Bill Yoast
Yoast — a legendary coach at the all-white Francis C. Hammond High School before he became defensive coach at T.C. Williams High School — put politics aside to work with T.C.’s first African American head coach, Herman Boone. The two pulled together to solidify a diverse group of students into the most successful football team in the state that year.
More importantly, the football games, and Yoast and Boone’s relationship, brought together the formerly divided city of Alexandria to support their winning integrated school team. Yoast later served as an assistant coach on T.C. Williams football teams that won Virginia AAA titles in 1984 and 1987.
Yoast has been remembered as a quiet, humble "people person." He didn’t shy away from discussing issues even during the difficult times Alexandria was going through, and was instrumental in helping pull the city together.
Even though Yoast and Boone were as different as “night and day,” Boone said, “He and I found a way to talk to each other and trust each other.” In the end, Boone said Yoast was the best friend he ever had.
"It was when the integration plan was announced. We thought it was a joke. But it turned out to be better for us than Brown v. Board of Education. It was not easy. People were not accepting integration. But you could see it in Bill Yoast. You can’t fake believing. You can lie about things, but you cannot fake your beliefs.”
In 1971, the Alexandria City School Board’s decision to swiftly integrate the two upper grades of the two all-white high schools with the one all-black T.C. Williams happened amid racial unrest, riots and more subtle discomfort.
This month is the 65th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision requiring school districts to integrate. Virginia engaged in a campaign to avoid integration called “The Massive Resistance,” that delayed Alexandria’s efforts for five years. When the city finally did begin to integrate, Yoast’s decisions made in a politically volatile climate helped bridge racial divides.
In fact, Boone said he and Yoast didn’t like each other at first — not until they started working together. The system was very divided, according to Boone, who said the families from the different schools didn’t like each other. There were a lot of rivalries that spilled out around the football games.
By the end of the Titan’s season, however, President Richard Nixon told The Washington Post, “The Titans of Alexandria saved the city of Alexandria.”
After graduating from Coffee High School, Yoast joined the U.S. Air Force for three years. Yoast started college at Georgia Military College and then Mercer University in Macon, Ga., where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physical Education. His master’s degree was from Peabody College, in Nashville, Tenn.
After working in Sparta, Ga., as a coach for football, basketball, baseball and track, Yoast moved to Roswell and taught track and football for seven years. It was then he moved to Alexandria, where he coached Francis C. Hammond High school and led them to regional champs in 1969 before coaching at T.C. Williams High school. He spent three decades coaching in Alexandria.
Yoast and his wife, Betty, had four daughters and seven grandchildren. He enjoyed golfing, fishing and working out. Yoast, born in 1924 in Florence, Ala., was played by another southerner, South Carolina actor William Patton in Remember the Titans.
