For the past two days in class we have been watching Pride. In this movie a man named Jim Ellis starts a swim team in a recreational building that will soon be torn down. There are always kids outside playing basketball and when the pool is finished he invites them in. Soon they start practicing and slowly become a team, and they get a new addition to the team, a girl. They go to their first meet and lose to the other teams, being to cocky and thinking that they're better than the other white teams. While they are there, the other coaches and people in the stands treat them horribly, one even getting kicked in the head during a race and it not being called a foul. On the ride back they think nothing of it and blow it off, but Jim can't understand while they wouldn't care and talks to them about it, leaving the mood serious. The next day the kids are all practicing in the pool before the coach even wakes up. They start training and become a real team. Soon the recreational building is sanctioned to have meets, and many people showed up to the first one. The coach was very surprised by all the support their team got. Even a swimmer's sister who wants to tear down the building shows up for support. The team that showed up to race them cancelled and left due to some of the boys getting 'sick.' The Ref there didn't call it a forfeit because he also wanted to leave and called a reschedule. After that meet at their home, they went to more and were earning 2nd and 3rd places in meets. They were about to have an interview by the pool with news crew when they found the front hallway torn up and the words "we ain't done" on the wall in spray paint. They heard something in the pool and found three men in there who had previously tried to hurt two boys on the team. Jim started to beat them up, he threw one into the pool and held him under one of the boys from the team jumped in and stopped him. After this incident Jim lost faith in himself and they found out about an arrest record that he had. They went to the meet without coach because he put himself on probation because of his actions. At the meet they win two events against Mainline, a school that treats them like dirt. At the end they have 96 points which allows them to qualify for the top three places to win. The last race is a relay that will have four people swim from the team. The team wins by a split second against Mainline, taking home the trophy with them. They overcome the racism and their own fears to come victorious over all.
In this movie they were treated so horribly by prejudiced people because of skin color. It would make me so angry because when they talked to them it was like they were uneducated, and how they looked down upon them. There was also the trouble with a man who was a the leader of a small gang, who one of the boys on the swim team had previously been apart of. It showed how easy it was for someone living there to be swept up into it and not being able to get out because of fear. This movie showed me how hard it was for African Americans in the 1960s.
