[For this year’s
annual post-Charlottesville-trip series, I wanted to share tributes to various
folks who were important influences during my Cville years. Leading up to a
special weekend post on a peer of mine who’s aiming to become a Cville
influence in 2019!]
On one of the most insidious sites of American segregation, past and
present, and the Cville influence who reveals its true ridiculousness.
I learned to swim in the Charlottesville Public Schools, at the
intimidating, demanding, impressive, and inspiring hands of one Mr.
Williams Byers. 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
1950s, nearly 5 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.
Next Cville
influence tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Influential
people you’d highlight?
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