SLATE COLUMN: …For a time, swimming was America’s national pastime. Between 1920 and 1940, local, state, and federal authorities built nearly 2,000 municipal pools in towns and cities across the United States. You could find them in metropolises like Chicago and Philadelphia or small Kansas towns with fewer people than city tenements. These were communal, public spaces, and Americans loved them. In 1937, St. Louis, Missouri, counted 1.4 million swimmers in its municipal pools, writes historian Jeff Wiltse in Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, who also points to a 1934 article in Fortune magazine that estimated that upwards of 30 million Americans swam in pools a total of 350 million times each year.
By the 1960s, however, the millions of Americans who had previously spent their summer days at public pools had abandoned them. The era of the municipal pool was over. The reason, explains Wiltse, was desegregation. The rise of public swimming had coincided with the Great Migration and the hardening of the racial caste system, North and South. Middle-class whites who were willing to swim with working-class immigrants—a major shift from the early 20th century, when pools were segregated by class—refused to share water with blacks. They didn’t just fear racial contamination—citing well-worn statistics about black mortality rates in Northern cities—they feared miscegenation. “They feared,” writes Wiltse, “that black men would act upon their supposedly untamed sexual desire for white women by touching them in the water and assaulting them with romantic advances.”…
Racial exclusion at private pools—bolstered by residential segregation—continued through the 1960s until it was broken by court order in 1973. But this was only a small deterrent to Americans who didn’t want to swim with blacks. As backyard pools became more affordable, hundreds of thousands—and then millions—of Americans began to build them. Whites would maintain a kind of segregation by withdrawing from the world of public swimming. By 1999 there were 4 million such pools, a permanent part of suburban life… (more)
EDITOR: The Manor House Apartments from its very outset was among the first, if not the first, suburban apartment complex to be integrated. Nevertheless, as a concession to its first manager, until he moved on a couple of years later, the African-American residents were told they were not to use the pool.
Are we ashamed? Not really. Sometimes we can’t accomplish everything in a single stroke. We are proud to have integrated before others.
Perhaps our residents had to become used to having Blacks on the complex before they were willing to share the pool.
Before the Commador Berry Bridge we had to take a ferry in order to enter New Jersey from Chester Pa. On our trips to Wildwood my mother and I watched the city of Chester build an above ground municipal pool for the all black city. On a Friday the pool was packed! On Sunday when we came home the pool was completely DESTROYED and was never rebuilt.
EDITOR: How was it destroyed?
Granted we did not witness the destruction. The fence around it was pulled down, the life guard tower was knocked over and the pool itself looked like it was pulled and pushed apart. One side was caved in, one end pulled off and water everywhere. This damage was not done by “outside” jealous vandals either, it was committed by those who used it and lived close by.
And this would have been around 1966 to 68.