Diversity in swimming
[1] Large groups of working-class men and women flocked into their gender assigned public pools and rid themselves of the dirt and grime acquired over the course of their day, while wealthier middle- and upper-class citizens used their own private baths to clean.
The rise of club memberships and annual fees swept the United States around the time of the civil rights movement in an effort to exclude lower-income families from pools.
[3] The mid-1900s saw millions of white families leaving their homes to move into newly suburban communities, where they invested in country clubs and private recreational facilities of their own, ultimately withdrawing the taxpayer and monetary power needed to build, expand, develop, and maintain public pools.
[4] Over time, the number of public swimming pools in the United States decreased dramatically, reflecting the persistent legacy of racism and segregation in American society.
In the 1930s leaders of the National YWCA, under the leadership of Dorothy Guinn, researched the degree to which Black girls faced discrimination in access to swimming pools in the northern United States.
After a successful career as an athlete at Temple University, Inez Patterson began coaching Black girls to swim at the YWCA of Philadelphia and New York City.
[6] The last significant monetary investment in public pools was shortly after the Great Depression under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and since then, there has been a noticeable lack of state and federal funding.
Societal ideas about the hyper-sexuality of black women and men have perpetuated harmful narratives surrounding their presence and integration in public swimming spaces.
[11] These narratives made it to the legal courts, too; shortly after the decision of Brown v. Board, the NAACP initiated a local trial in Baltimore seeking to desegregate the city's municipal pools.
[1] As gender integration was implemented, racial segregation was simultaneously adopted due to the physical and visual intimacy of swimming attire and pool decks.
[12] Pools physically intimacy, stemming from the sharing of the same water, made way for racist assumptions determining that Black Americans were dirtier and thus had more diseases that white people could contract from swimming together.
Thus, the exclusion of African American participants from certain spaces, including access to pools, was often motivated by an underlying desire to maintain racial segregation and uphold notions of white superiority.
[13] A key impact of the Great Migration is the development of redlining and race restrictive housing covenants in the north to concentrate Black Americans in specific neighborhoods.
[14] As a result, Black families were forced to subdivide their apartments and cram in extra tenants to make the inflated monthly rent payments, which left little money or time for regular maintenance of their homes.
[16] The pools built and improved were described to be "examples of state-of-the-art engineering" with "massive filtration systems, heating units, and even underwater lighting" and also able to adapt to off-season recreation uses like tennis, handball, and volleyball.
[16] Pools were built in even the smallest towns and cities uniting the communities in recreation and companionship and serving as a reminder of the government's assistance during the crisis of the Great Depression.
So although pools built during the New Deal era served as symbols of progress, many have since fallen into rough conditions or been closed due to budget constraints and lack of proper administration.
The lack of sustained investment in public pools has caused detrimental effects on marginalized communities, where access to safe and affordable recreational opportunities are extremely limited.
Despite this judicial decision and government legislation, because many pools were unofficially segregated through violence and intimidation by white swimmers, the issue of access for the Black community in many ways persisted.
[20] In 1971, the court ruled that the city government could choose to not operate their desegregated facilities if the decision appeared neutral at face value and they are spreading "equal damage" on each person in the area.
[21][20] However, in reality the damage was not equal: the city closed all of the public pools that were affordable to lower income residents whom were largely composed of Black Americans.
[22] In July 1935, at the gender-segregated Paulson Pool, nine-year-old Frank Reynolds was punched and kicked in the dressing room by a gang of white kids then later held underwater by the same group.
Inside the pool park, a Black man and white youth were stabbed and ten plus others were injured during the ongoing violence that took place over the course of the entire day.
[23] When the pool closed to youths at 5 pm, a white mob that had been growing the entire day roamed the park with bats and clubs attacking every Black person in sight.
[26] This effort also included college students on Spring Break, where they joined forces with local Civil Rights activists to protest the segregation in Monson Motor Lodge.
[25] This image of Brock dumping buckets of acid on the swimmers made it all over U.S. newspapers and media, serving as the face of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida.
The next day, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which many believe was an immediate product of the national embarrassment that the Monson Motor Lodge incident caused.
Replacing it was a new hotel, Hilton Bayfront, with only a singular plaque commemorating the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the Rabbis, and the college students on Spring Break that catapulted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
[25] A Las Vegas hotel completely drained their pool in 1953 because nationally-renowned Black entertainer Dorothy Dandridge stuck her toe in the water during one of her performances.
Occasionally, the team, Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, and Olympians Maritza McClendon and Cullen Jones have worked together to provide free swim clinics to kids in the DC community.
