Debunking The Stereotype That Blacks Don’t Swim

By then, the swimming pool had turned from a public hygiene project into a coveted leisure space, which was quickly becoming an American institution. At 440 feet in diameter, the circular Fairgrounds Pool was the largest in the country by a country mile. It was ringed by an artificial sand beach and had an inclined bottom that mimicked the gradual deepening of the sea floor. The recreation department even considered putting a wave machine in but nixed the idea because it was too expensive.

On hot summer days, thousands of people packed into the pool. None of them were black. This was not for lack of desire on the part of black residents of St Louis. Instead, the pool was forcibly, and at times violently segregated because city officials didn’t want black men interacting with white women in such an intimate space. Wiltse cites the Fairground pool as “one point of origin of the mixed-gender, racially segregated leisure society that came to predominate during the twentieth century.” The fear of black men interacting with white women in swimwear kept pools firmly segregated until the mid 1950s.

When some black people began to resist the race barrier, either through lawsuits filed with the backing of the NAACP or through actually entering a pool and trying to swim, they were often met with a host of legal tricks, violence, or a combination of the two. A common way of segregating a pool was for the city government to lease the pool to a private company to operate. Although the government couldn’t legally segregate, a private company could make whatever rules it wanted.

In smaller towns, they would often promise angry black communities their own swimming pool for years without delivering. In 1942, Montgomery, West Virginia closed its only municipal swimming pool for four years instead of permitting interracial swimming. When the Fairground Pool was desegregated in 1949, 5000 White people rioted and indiscriminately beat any black person they could get their hands on near the park where the pool was located.

An artistic rendering of Nick Gabaldon's last wave at the Malibu Pier. Gabaldon is credited with being the first documented African American surfer. Art: Peter Spacek

“The second period when swimming became popularized and democratized was in the 1950s and 1960s sixties,” says Wiltse. That era of popularization primarily occurred at the (literally) tens of thousands of private club pools in the nation’s burgeoning suburbs. As some historians have pointed out, the Post-War suburbs were lily-white. So, we basically see a replay of what happened in the first swimming pool boom–tens of thousands of new pools contributed to further the democratization and popularization of swimming, but all this was occurring in institutions to which Black Americans had no access.”

This era differed slightly from the first in that the segregation was often a function of larger social norms instead of explicit racism. “There was some overt racism during this period in denying black Americans access to pools, but in large part it was more a consequence of residential segregation,” says Wiltse. “…These pools were located in neighborhoods that Black Americans simply didn’t have access to.”

The late 1960s saw a public pool building spree in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods, but unfortunately for would-be black swimmers, the structures were little more than glorified bathtubs, often no more than a few feet deep and designed more to appease lower-class, urban populations than to provide quality spaces for people to swim.

During the same time period that they were denied access to pools, American blacks weren’t doing any better with beaches. Due to the growing concept of coastal land as valuable leisure space, as well as the same White/Black sexual concerns that surrounded swimming pools, black Americans were often only allowed to swim at out-of-the-way, segregated beaches in the American South.

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