Segregating America’s Favorite Third Place

Did you know, public swimming pools used to be popular third places in working class neighborhoods? Third places are free or affordable spaces outside of your home, and work, where you can socialize, and participate in community life.

Americans used to be obsessed with swimming. The federal government even spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a pool-building spree in the 1920s and 30s. The new resort-style pools were large and glamorous, and lots of them ended up in “poor, immigrant, working-class-white neighborhoods”, wrote Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.

Initially, many pools were segregated by gender not by race. By the time New Deal pool construction kicked off, white men and women were swimming together for the first time in U.S. history—thanks in part to the St. Louis Fairground Park, a massive 440-ft diameter pool that could fit over 10,000 people. When it opened in 1913, it became the first gender-integrated pool and the “largest pool in the nation”. The advent of mixed gender swimming meant that Black folks were no longer welcome…naturally. 

The prospect of white men and women swimming together was scandalous enough. The thought of white women in bathing suits flirting with and splashing Black men was simply unbearable for many, according to Victoria W. Wolcott, Professor of History, University at Buffalo, SUNY. White America’s cultural obsession with the sexual purity of white women fed into racist stereotypes of Black people as both “diseased and sexually threatening” wrote Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. 

White America was hyper-fixated on its greatest fear at the time: interracial sex between Black men and white women. After all, the public pool boom emerged on the heels of The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film depicting Black men as sexual brutes and Ku Klux Klansmen as heroes bravely defending the virtue of white women. Despite the subject matter, it was a groundbreaking film that became “the first true Hollywood blockbuster, earning more than $10 million (the equivalent of $200 million today)”. 

Black people weren’t just perceived as sexually menacing; they were also stereotyped as unclean. The alleged “dirtiness of black Americans” was something to be avoided, which meant even Black children were not welcome at the massive New Deal-era pools. By that racist logic, segregation was necessary to promote a “sanitized and harmonious vision of white leisure.”

In the South, police officers enforced Jim Crow laws which meant violators were arrested and thrown in jail. The North had few actual Jim Crow laws on the books so racial segregation was maintained through violence and intimidation. This was also an era of lynchings, or domestic terrorism. It’s no surprise that many white Americans viewed violence against Black youths and children as a necessary, if unfortunate, means of maintaining racial order and “public safety”. “Swimming pools and beaches were among the most segregated and fought over public spaces in the North and the South”, according to Wolcott. 

In Pittsburgh, police stood by while white swimmers threw rocks and beat Black swimmers who dared to enter the city’s whites-only pools—despite Pittsburgh not having an official policy of racial segregation, wrote Wiltse. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the city “put up a fence and stationed armed police” to keep out its sizable Black population.

Another segregation tactic was to simply build pools in white neighborhoods, according to The Guardian. Cities that built whites-only pools were legally required to build “a separate but equal one for [B]lacks” wrote Livia Gershon, but you can guess how often that happened. It didn’t—not in St. Louis where “all seven of the city's pools opened between 1913 and 1935 were for whites only”—and certainly not in smaller cities and towns where—often, the only pool available was restricted to white residents. St. Louis eventually built a small Jim Crow pool in a basement. But it was not equal to the luxurious Fairground Park complex with its “limestone-and-brick bathhouses”, 19 lifeguards and thousands of swimmers.

Refusing to build pools in Black neighborhood and banning Black youth from entering pools in white neighborhoods was a strategy employed by cities across the country. The effect was sobering. “Because they were barred from public pools, many African American children never learned to swim”.

Integrating America’s Favorite Third Place

We tend to think of pool desegregation happening all at once after Title III of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed racial segregation of public facilities. In reality, it happened at different speeds and at different times in different parts of the country. It was fiercely contested and often met with violence.

When the federal government desegregated six District of Columbia pools in June 1949, whites fought back. The Black children who attempted to swim were surrounded and forced out. Officials closed the pool and the physical violence spread to nearby Anacostia Park. 

In St. Louis, a 1949 attempt to integrate the whites-only Fairground Park pool, had a similar outcome. A small group of Black children swam without incident until white teenagers decided to climb the fence and threaten them. The children received a police escort out of the facility. Later in the day, thousands of white rioters and onlookers—armed with rocks, bricks, pipes and clubs—roamed the area randomly assaulting Black people they came across. According to TIME magazine, 400 police officers were dispatched to restore order. And St. Louis pools re-segregated the very next day. 

In Cincinnati, white swimmers threw nails and glass into pools to keep Black swimmers out. In St. Augustine, Florida, when a handful of white and Black protestors swam together in a roadside motel pool, the owner responded by pouring acid into it—in a now infamous photo. The swimmers were promptly arrested.  

Similar violence broke out across the country, wherever Black youth attempted to enter white people's most sacred space—the swimming pool. I know you thought it was church but you’d be wrong. Apparently, there was nothing quite like seeing a white girl in a two-piece and a black boy in swim trunks to make somebody’s racist white grandpa want to risk it all.

Abandoning America’s Favorite Third Place

Then a curious thing happened.  Public pools started closing. When an NAACP lawsuit succeeded in integrating the St. Louis Fairground Park pool in 1950, only seven white swimmers showed up the following day. “That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer,” wrote Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. According to McGhee, “The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.” Imagine that.

When Jackson Mississippi closed four out of five public pools and leased the fifth to a whites-only YMCA, the Supreme Court upheld the decision since city officials were “spreading equal harm.” The New York Times headline that ran the same day was “Courts Say Cities May Close Pools to Bar Racial Mix”. 

This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S. This left Black families with few options, especially when the highest court in the land took the position of “…you say it’s racist? Well, prove it,” concluded McGhee.

Meanwhile, the mass pool closures continued. The state of Mississippi closed over half of their public pools by 1972. And as white flight occurred away from the country’s public pools, a wave of privatization began. “Millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people,” wrote McGhee. That led to the rise of members-only private swim clubs. In the District of Columbia alone, 125 swim clubs sprang up in the decade following integration.

In 1959, there were over 10,550 private swim clubs nation-wide. That number grew to 23,000 in 1962. Today, there are over 10 million private pools in the U.S. and only 300,000 public pools, according to New York Times editorial board member, Mara Gay. Ultimately, white Americans’ obsession with racial purity spawned an entire industry catering to their need for control. This went in lock step with white flight from urban areas. Homeowner associations built private pools in the suburbs where pool segregation persisted thanks to housing discrimination and redlining. “Or they built at-home residential pools, so they could really enclose themselves off from the larger public,” wrote Wiltse.

The racist legacy of privatization persists to this day. “White-only clubs became factories for producing high-level competitive swimmers, while lack of resources boxed Black Americans out of the sport,” Wiltse added.

It turns out, closing public pools and filling them in with concrete didn't affect Black and White kids equally. That’s because both groups don’t have equal access to private swim clubs. When white Americans rejected integration and turned a “once public resource” into a “luxury amenity”, Black kids began to drown at higher rates. 

Today, “64% of Black Americans have little to no swimming ability” which means “the children in that household only have a 19% chance of learning to swim themselves.” According to CDC data from 1990-2010, Black children drowned at 5.5 times the rate of white children. 

It’s bitterly ironic that many white Americans genuinely don’t understand ‘why Black people don’t swim’ when their own white parents and grandparents were determined to keep it that way—as if they haven’t personally benefited from resource hoarding—as if their families aren’t responsible for generations of Black children dying at higher rates from accidental drowning.

The fact that “when Americans try to beat the heat in the summertime, many find they have no municipal pool in which to swim” was a “deliberate choic[e] made decades ago by white residents who preferred no public pool at all to an integrated one.” This summer, when you’re stuck at home with no way to cool off, remember that. 

Rest in peace to yet another third place lost to racism. 

Sources:

“Birth of a Nation” opens in New York. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/birth-of-a-nation-opens-in-new-york#

“Civil Rights Tour: Recreation - Anacostia Pool, Swimming for all” DC Historic Sites. https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/914

Curtis, M. C. (2023, August 5). America’s deteriorating public pools are a public health crisis. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/08/public-pools-closed-swimming-drowning-public-health-crisis-climate-change.html

Gershon, L. (2019). When cities closed pools to avoid integration. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/when-cities-closed-pools-to-avoid-integration/

Graham, F. P. (1971, June 15). Courts say cities may close pools to bar racial mix. New York Times, pp. 1–1. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/15/archives/court-says-cities-may-close-pools-to-bar-racial-mix-54-ruling-backs.html

Hale, G. E. (1998). Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/73675/making-whiteness-by-grace-elizabeth-hale/9780679776208/

Jones, L. (2014, August 15). Echoes of Michael Brown's Death in St. Louis's Racially Charged Past. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/how-an-integrated-swimming-pool-incited-race-riots-in-st-louis/375943/

Macabasco, L. W. (2022, October 19). ‘A story of social justice’: a history of racial segregation and swimming. Art | the Guardian. https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/23/pool-exhibition-segregation-swimming-philadelphia

Marta Gutman; Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in New York City. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2008; 67 (4): 532–561. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2008.67.4.532

McGhee, H. (2021, February 17). Public pools used to be everywhere in America. Then racism shut them down. Marketplace. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/

NPR. (2008, May 6). Racial history of American swimming pools. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2008/05/06/90213675/racial-history-of-american-swimming-pools

Toran, A. (2021, February 23). Unwelcome waters: Segregated public pools and the lasting effect they have on the Black community. Louisville Courier Journal. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/02/23/segregated-public-pools-has-lasting-effect-black-america/4539339001/

Wiltse, J. (2010, July 20). Swimming in the long shadows of segregation. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/column/swimming-in-the-long-shadows-of-segregation/article_89dec8a8-83a4-57ca-8991-6c79b288fc54.html

Wolcott, V. W. (n.d.). The forgotten history of segregated swimming pools and amusement parks. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-history-of-segregated-swimming-pools-and-amusement-parks-119586

Additional Reading:

Hale, G. E. (1998). Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. Penguin Random House.

McGhee, H. (2022). The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World.

Wiltse, J. (2007). Contested waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Univ of North Carolina Press.