This sad history came to mind this week as St. Louis erupted in protests and looting following the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in the North Side suburb of Ferguson. Brown, a college-bound student, was shot to death by a police officer even though he was apparently unarmed. Soon after the shooting, the protestors were squaring off against police lines; after lining up, the protestors turned their backs on the officers in a symbolic gesture. It was like being in Sportsman’s Park, with black and white crowds facing off across an abyss.

There is no large city in America more burdened by racial tension and mutual suspicion than St. Louis. The racial and economic problems that have beset America’s cities are particularly intense in my hometown. Despite the city’s large black population, the single black person I met during my childhood in the 1950s was my parents’ housekeeper, Willie Brown. She would arrive at our house once a week and go to the basement to change into her maid’s dress. St. Louis is the city that produced Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and Josephine Baker. Yet when Michael Brown died, white and black residents quickly drew back to their default positions of mutual distrust: Black people took to the streets to express their anger, while white citizens expressed dismay at the chaos.

There are echoes of this throughout the city’s history. Almost a century ago, on July 2, 1917, the Illinois city of East St. Louis erupted into a week-long race riot—the worst in American history, with an estimated 300 deaths. The precipitating event was a rumor that a white man had been killed by a black man—a mirror of Michael Brown’s death.

In 1949, just a few blocks from my beloved Sportsman’s Park, the echo appeared again. Here stood the largest public swimming pool in the nation: Fairground Park Pool, opened in 1913. It had limestone-and-brick bathhouses and a circular pool that was 440 feet across. Nineteen lifeguards watched over the thousands of swimmers who came every day.

In those sweltering, fetid summers before air-conditioning, the pools were always crowded. Though it was a municipal facility and theoretically open to all, Fairground Pool was in practice an all-white, segregated preserve. But as the city's black population slowly began to expand into the North Side, pressure built to allow access for all. In 1949, a new Democratic mayor, Joseph Darst, took office in St. Louis. Elected on the coattails of another popular Missourian, Harry Truman, Darst put his campaign manager, John O'Toole, in charge of the city's pools and parks. O'Toole said he "could see no basis for keeping Negroes out of the pools. They are citizens like everybody else and have every legal right to enter any public facility." O'Toole announced that Fairground Park Pool would be open to all on the first day of the season, June 21.