AUDASE

Who Gets to Go to the Pool?

By BRIT BENNETT NY TIMES

IN a 1948 speech to fellow Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond famously declared that the entire United States Army couldn’t force white Southerners to allow black people "into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

I’m always struck by his invocation of swimming pools as a battleground for racial segregation, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. After all, some of the most potent symbols of Jim Crow involve water, from segregated drinking fountains and toilets to swimming pools and beaches.

In a YouTube video of a pool party that took place in McKinney, Tex., on Friday, a white police officer appears to shove, handcuff and pull a gun on a group of black teenagers. He grabs a black girl by her hair and drags her to the ground. He puts a knee on her back as she screams. According to the McKinney Police Department, officers responded to calls of a "disturbance" involving multiple juveniles "who do not live in the area or have permission to be there."

The officer in question has reportedly resigned, and the department announced an investigation. Black teenagers at the party have told news outlets that before the police arrived, they were accosted by white adults who told the black children to leave the pool and "return to Section 8 housing."

After the episode got national attention, a local reporter shared a picture of a sign posted outside the pool: "Thank you McKinney PD for keeping us safe." If an officer pointing a gun at unarmed teenagers protects a community, then what danger do black kids at a swimming pool pose?

We don’t yet, and may never, know exactly what happened at this particular pool, but the image of an officer manhandling black children in swimsuits calls to mind the long fight over who can access water and who cannot.

Water has long been a site of racial anxiety. Integrating city pools has led to riots, such as in 1931, when young black men in Pittsburgh were held underwater, dragged out and beaten by white swimmers while police officers watched. Segregated beaches were an early battleground for integration in Mississippi. When more than 100 black people held a wade-in in 1960, a white mob attacked them with pool sticks, lead pipes and chains. A news account referred to the attack as the "worst racial riot in Mississippi history."

Segregating water is not just a Southern tradition. In California, Mexican-Americans were excluded from "whites only" restaurants, schools and of course swimming pools. In a 2010 Los Angeles Times interview, Sandra Robbie, a filmmaker curating a walking tour of Orange County’s civil rights history, described the segregation she saw growing up in the area. "Monday was Mexican Day," she said. "And the next day they’d drain the pool and clean it so whites could use it the rest of the week."

In "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools," Jeff Wiltse argues that the racial tension over integrated swimming pools boiled down to two major anxieties: contamination and miscegenation. Pool use had once divided along class lines, where the white middle class avoided swimming with poor European immigrants, whom they viewed as ridden with disease. After the Great Migration, this fear became racialized, where whites of all social classes feared that swimming with blacks would infect them. In Pittsburgh in the 1930s, black swimmers were pulled out of a city pool and commanded to produce a "health certificate" to prove they were disease free. White swimmers were not.　

Perhaps an even stronger anxiety, Mr. Wiltse notes, arose when city pools began to allow males and females to swim together. "Northern whites in general," he writes, "objected to black men having the opportunity to interact with white women at such intimate and erotic public spaces."　

In Baltimore, following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, a city solicitor argued that racial segregation must continue at city pools because "swimming brought males and females into ‘physical’ and ‘intimate contact.’ " Judge Roszel Thomsen agreed and upheld segregation in the city’s pools. He explained, Mr. Wiltse notes, that "swimming pools were ‘more sensitive than schools’ because of the visual and physical intimacy that accompanied their use."

In a white supremacist imagination, these anxieties are one and the same. Racial intimacy is contamination. To mix is to be infected.

I grew up in a beach town but I cannot swim. My parents tried to put me in swimming lessons as a child but I hated every part of it: dunking my head underwater, smelling chlorine, getting my hair wet. Water has always been natural and unnatural to me, a threat and an inevitability.

My mother does not swim either, although she dutifully drove my sister and me to our swimming lessons at the city pool one summer. She grew up in southwest Louisiana, where the closest bodies of water were rivers and gulf beaches. She went to a segregated school and attended Mass at a segregated church with a cemetery where black and white bodies rot in segregated dirt. My mother also went to a segregated beach. Separating physical spaces — like church pews or school buildings — is conceivable, but how do you segregate an ocean, water itself?

"It’s foolish," my mother says, "because water mixes. Water can’t decide which way it’s gonna go."

For decades, white swimmers feared sharing a beach with black people because they worried about catching disease, yet hired blacks to cook their food or nurse their children. Mr. Thurmond rallied against race mixing and yet, after his death, it was revealed that he had a daughter with a black woman who had worked in his family’s home. There’s a strange intimacy in racism, and water exposes the inevitability of this intimacy. Water touches me, then touches you.

Brit Bennett is a fiction writer living in California