McKinney and the Roots of Black Exclusion from Pools in America

The most recent instance of American police brutalizing black bodies comes to us via a cell phone recording from McKinney, Texas. Brandon Brooks, the 15 year old white teenager who filmed the incident reported, “I think a bunch of white parents were angry that a bunch of black kids who don’t live in the neighborhood were in the pool.” It is being reported that white adults confronted the teens, telling them to “go back to Section 8 housing” before physically assaulting them. Additional footage, possibly taken before the police arrived, shows two white adult women attacking a young black woman whose hair they have in their grasp while the young woman’s friends try to pull her free.

Here’s what happened after that:

This could have happened anywhere, but the fact that it happened at a neighborhood pool provides a unique opportunity to delve into forces that have shaped an interesting facet of civic life in the United States. Pools have long been sites of racial discrimination and violence in America. In 1948 South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond made his run for the presidency. His most enduring quote from the race, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the [n-word] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Of all the things Thurmond feared, integrated swimming pools stick out as perhaps the most awkward among them. Jeff Wiltse has written extensively about the topic in his book, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in the United States, which details the politics of swimming pools during segregation.

Wiltse explains that although municipal pools had become popular in the northern United States as early the 1800s, it was rare that a pool was built in a neighborhood populated primarily by black people. But in the 1920s and 1930s Wiltse describes a “pool-building spree” in which thousands of often quite lavish pools were built in the United States. Pools quickly became enormously important to public life to the point that they attended pools as frequently as they attended movies.

One example of the elaborate pools being built at the time was located at Fairgrounds Park in St Louis, Missouri. The Fairgrounds Park pool was the first pool on record to be officially gender integrated in the United Sates. No sooner did gender integration occur than racial segregation ensued. In places like St. Louis, Baltimore, and Washington D.C black people were systematically denied access to swimming pools, but for a few underfunded and often dilapidated ones that were dwarfed by their whites-only counterparts.

Where segregation had not been encoded into law, such as in Chicago and New York, white swimmers excluded black people from accessing pools. When they did get in, they were often violently beaten and held under the water until they retreated. At some pools, guards were installed at entrances to prevent black access. Police, when they were present, participated in the exclusion and the violence necessary to enforce it. In his New York Times review of the Wiltse book, Dick Cavett (of all people) notes, “The victims, not the assailants, were often arrested for creating disorder.”

The late 1940s and 1950s saw fights over the integration of pools across the country. Fairgrounds Park would again be the scene of violence when after the first day on integration, it was reported that, “bands of white hoodlums took off after any Negroes found anywhere near the park, beating and kicking them.” At least one municipality, Marshall, Texas actually voted to close a public pool rather than integrate it. When it was reopened, no longer as a public pool, it was once again whites-only.

The Marshall incident was one of many ways that white people managed to keep black people from sharing the same pools after they were legally desegregated. All around, white attendance at pools that blacks could access dropped dramatically. White swimmers retreated to private pools. Small backyard pools and eventually larger ones became popular with white suburbanites.

Craig Ranch North, the master planned community in McKinney, Texas where the recent incident took place is entrenched firmly in this tradition of a white retreat from integrated public life. When the teens were told to go “back to Section 8 housing,” the reference was to McKinney’s legacy of excluding black people from its more affluent west side. All of the public pools in McKinney lie to its east, but the west end of McKinney has a number of private pools in predominantly white master planned communities like Craig Ranch North.

So far the news coverage coming from mainstream sources including NBC and NPR is stressing that we don’t know what exactly precipitated the events that would later be caught on camera. What we do have are a lot of consistent accounts from young people who were present at the party before somebody called the police.

We also have a distribution of pools that was shaped by a history replete with white supremacists intent on barring black people from access to pools that they would share with whites, often with the violent help of the police. There is a lot of well deserved outrage being directed toward the police officer who threw the 14 year old girl to the ground, straddling her with his knee in her back before pulling his gun on some teens who protested. But to ignore the context is to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of the situation and to encourage another “bad-apple” media circus while the root of the problem remains unchanged.