Last summer, as temperatures soared to the high 90s in Alabama, Terrell Goodson’s 10-year-old daughter only had one request.

“Dad, can you please teach me how to swim?”

Goodson’s answer to his daughter broke his heart. It was no. “I told her I don’t know how to swim myself.”

This summer, the pleas have started again.

Goodson, who’s 37 and works in the restaurant industry, says he would do anything for his daughter. But growing up in Alabama, he was just simply never taught to swim. His story is part of a common narrative, not a singular occurrence.

In the US, swimming ability is starkly divided along racial lines. White Americans are twice as likely to know how to swim as black Americans.

The consequences of this can be deadly: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black children aged five to 14 are three times more likely to die from unintentional drowning than their white counterparts. In the US, approximately 10 people die from unintentional drowning every day.

In 2010, a tragic incident in Louisiana shocked the country: six black teens who did not know how to swim drowned in a river trying to save a friend who slipped and fell into deep water. Parents, who also could not swim, were forced to watch on as they heard their children call “help me, please.”

Understanding why the disparity exists offers a unique look into US segregation history, and the ways in which white citizens and public officials reacted to the integration of public pools and public spaces more generally.

Dorothy Moore at home. Photograph: Rose Hackman

A culture of swimming off limits to black Americans

There is a determined, intense ray of light shining through the blue eyes of Dorothy Moore, an 84-year-old white resident of Montgomery, as she describes the public swimming pools she frequented in the 1930s and 1940s. Moore is hard of hearing but quick-witted as can be; in between swimming pool and activism tales, she makes a few suggestions for good civil rights books.



She remembers one pool in particular, situated in Oak Park, in the center of the city. “Oak Park pool wasn’t just a big, wonderful swimming pool. It was also a wading pool. Twice the size of this house,” Moore says, sitting on the sofa in her own sizable home, a stone’s throw away from the city’s still mostly white country club.

While Moore was growing up, Oak Park pool was an all-white swimming pool – the site of white, outdoor, recreational community life. Moore was a lifeguard there and later, once she married a man who would become one of the city’s most prominent architects, this is where she taught their children to swim.

Jeff Wiltse, a professor of history at the University of Montana who has written extensively on swimming disparities, says Oak Park’s pool and its alluring facilities were part of a first wave of investment into public pools that started in the 1920s and 1930s.

During that time, Wiltse says, thousands of public pools were opened across the country, creating a culture of swimming for millions of Americans. But the pools were segregated, and only a fraction of them were destined for black Americans.

When desegregation of public spaces was forced across the nation by federal ruling starting in the 1950s and gradually taking effect across the land through the 1960s, a few significant things happened to once booming public swimming pools, Wiltse says.

First, with the idea that black Americans were now set to benefit en masse from the existence of public pools, investment by white public officials dropped.

Second, black and white swimmers were still far from a step closer to sharing the same body of water. In the north, white swimmers abandoned public pools and headed to the suburbs, themselves a federally sanctioned all-white project. There, community pools were set up for residents and private swim clubs blossomed.

“Even more so than the earlier public pools, these private club pools out in the suburbs were completely off limits to black Americans,” Wiltse says.

A pool in Montgomery. Photograph: Rose Hackman

In cities, officials in the south took the threat of white Americans and black Americans swimming together seriously. Rather than risk mixing people of different races in the pool, public swimming pools in the south were closed down altogether.

Wiltse says that aside from racist preconceptions about black people carrying communicable diseases, this extreme reaction can mainly be explained through “white anxieties about black men interacting with white women in an intimate public space”.

This white fear, created around a mythology of dangerous, hypersexual black men and vulnerable, precious white women in need of protection, is one that held particularly dangerous meaning for black people in the south, where the mere interaction of black men or boys with white women was sometimes the cause for terror lynchings. The most famous case of this perhaps is Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was killed in 1955 in Mississippi after interacting with a young white female shopkeeper.

Town after town in the south filled their pools with dirt, cemented them up, sometimes even bulldozed them. If desegregation meant equal access to public goods, then floor line equality – where nobody had access to anything – was seen as the preferable path.

In Montgomery, history’s ghosts speak for themselves. You just need to know where to look.

A trip to Oak Park confirms the pool no longer exists. The space it used to occupy is now covered in plush grass, a small picnic area with benches, and solid-looking, medium-sized trees that betray the decades that have passed since the pool was permanently closed down.

But at least the park is now open; the pools weren’t the only public spaces to be closed down on 1 January 1959 in Montgomery, when public officials were faced with a lawsuit from black residents forcing desegregation. For more than 10 years following this date, all of the city’s parks and its zoo were closed down too.

“It was miserable,” Moore, the 84-year-old former lifeguard and activist, says. Along with other women and men and with the help of a local television station, she eventually managed to pressure the city into reopening the parks a decade after they closed. But by then, the pools were gone.

Oak Park entrance seen from where the swimming pool once was. Photograph: Rose Hackman

YMCA boom made segregation a private practice

As public pools were drained, the city sidestepped new laws by immediately enacting a secret plan it had entered into with a formerly small organization – the town’s local YMCA.

The YMCA, a non-public institution that was still able to create segregated chapters and all-white or all-black spaces, started providing services to the city’s residents where the city no longer was.



In exchange for taking up such a role, the city offered the YMCA tax exemptions, free water for its pools, free use of parks and reduced sales of property. Membership at the YMCA exploded. Although the city was one-third black at the time, only one out of every nine of its members was black, with the remaining eight white.

The YMCA went from one branch and 1,000 members in 1957 (and no pools) to 18,000 members and eight pools in 1969, including outdoor summer programs and summer swim programs, which were completely off-limits to black children.

And while the YMCA was forced to change its segregating practices in 1970 with a successful suit brought against it, the city’s YMCA deal had managed to almost perfectly emulate former public segregation practices privately.

Morris Dees, one of the attorneys on the suit and a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, says that by the time the secret deal was exposed, much had already been lost.

“These parks were quickly taken over. The police department took one of them, housing was built on another. The parks were desecrated, you know. The city just sold them off,” he says.

People need pools to learn how to swim

Today, there are four public swimming pools in operation in Montgomery, which is home to 226,000 residents, 39% white and 56% black. None of them compare to Oak Park in size or in flashy amenities.

At Houston Hills, Montgomery’s sole outdoor pool, aquatic director Jeff Barlow says many of the pool’s young black attendees – around 350 a day – arrive at the beginning of the summer not knowing how to swim. By the end of the summer, they are confident, enthusiastic swimmers.

Barlow, a black Alabama native who went to aquatic management school and has a degree in business administration, says he learned how to swim in a river. “That’s where we went as kids,” he says. Teaching children how to swim is his passion. “The more exposure you get, the easier it becomes,” he says.

Getting people to learn how to swim involves providing desirable, appealing swimming facilities people will want to go to, Wiltse says, not simply swimming lessons, or 10-step programs to compensate for inequalities.

On my hot summer afternoon visit to Houston Hills, children and teens eagerly rushed to the pool’s dive board to show off their tricks and skills for the camera. Cheers erupted from the water from fellow swimmers. Barlow and his colleague Sonya Johnson laughed and issued encouragement.

This summer, Goodson, the Montgomery father who cannot swim, says he is determined he will find a way for his now 11-year-old daughter to learn. At least half of his family does not know how to swim, he estimates, but there are cousins who do. He is hoping one of them will be able to lend a helping hand.

Goodson says he knows that Montgomery closed its pools years ago to keep black people out. He says he has tried to read up as much as possible on the history of Montgomery, and race relations, but few people in his surroundings want to speak about it.

“They say I am crazy,” he says. “So now I stay quiet. But I know things.”