On one of the most insidious sites of American segregation, past and
present.
I learned to swim at the intimidating, demanding, impressive, and inspiring
hands of one Mr. Byers (I wish I knew his first name, but to us he was always
Mr.). A big African American man with a shaved head and booming voice, Mr.
Byers was definitely scary to this young 7 year old AmericanStudier; I can
still remember how, if I came out of the locker room with even mildly wet hair,
he would wrap my head in a towel and dry so vigorously I thought my head might
come clean off. But he was also incredibly good at his job; not only at
teaching young kids to swim, but also at lifeguarding: he had been struck by
lightning at least a few different times while trying to get the last swimmers
out of a pool as a thunderstorm arrived. And he could be tender and caring as
well, both in his lessons and when the unexpected occurred—it was while at a
lesson with Mr. Byers that we watched the Challenger explosion, and I distinctly remember his calming
presence in that terrible moment.
Thanks to Mr. Byers, my memories of that tragic historical moment are a bit
less traumatic than they might otherwise have been. But thanks to a more
long-term and just as tragic American history, Mr. Byers wouldn’t have been
welcome at—wouldn’t have been allowed entrance into—many of the swimming pools
in his (and my) hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. De jure racial
segregation endured in Charlottesville as long as it did anywhere in the South;
the public
schools only gave in and desegregated in the late 1960s, nearly 15 years
after Brown v. Board of Education (and
after closing
for a year in a last-ditch effort to avoid having to desegregate). De
facto segregation continued for far longer still, as illustrated by the
city’s swimming pools in the early 1980s of my childhood—most of the private
pools and clubs prohibited African American members or visitors, making the
city’s public pools almost entirely and exclusively African American as a
result. Even where the segregation was not so overt, it tended to follow this
overarching trend—my family’s pool, Fry’s
Spring Beach Club, had desegregated in 1968, but in my memories it was
still almost entirely white (despite being located near predominantly African
American neighborhoods).
We like to think that such de facto segregation is a thing of the past in
America, but quite simply that’s not the case—as recent controversies involving
proms,
neighborhood covenants,
and, yes, swimming
pools amply demonstrate. But even where segregation is no longer either the
law or the rule—and that’s most American places, of course—its potent legacies
linger. As documented in this NPR interview
and the
book to which it connects, the history of race and swimming pools has
produced a number of complex and ongoing effects—including the striking
statistic that more than 50% of African American schoolchildren are not able to
swim. Which is to say, not only would Mr. Byers have not been allowed to practice
his craft at many of the pools in our shared hometown, but his lessons would
also have been far less likely to make it to his young African American
brethren. That’s not a history that we Americans much like to think about—but both
for its own sake and for its present ramifications it’s vitally important that
we do so.
Final American swim tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on these histories or issues? Other summer links you’d
highlight?
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