My parents can’t swim because of racist cowards. Hate-filled white men decided to fill the public swimming pools with concrete than allow black and white people to enjoy the same refreshing cool chlorinated water at the same time. My parents grew up in a desert and they were poor. Not black people poor but white people poor. They were improvised. They lived in the black side of town. No one they knew had a swimming pool. There were no lakes or swimming holes that they could retreat to, to ward off the oppressive Arizona heat. My parents did not learn how to swim, because they were poor and black, without access to a swimming pool.
It is for this reason both my brother and I are good swimmers. All of my parents’ grandkids are good swimmers. Two even compete on swim teams. The stereotype about black people not being able to swim is true, because of overt racism and subtle racism.
The overt racism of men like James Brock (Pictured below. Like my Big Momma used to say: tell the truth and shame the devil) who was famously photographed pouring acid into the swimming pool where black and white young people were frolicking. Or when 200 white St. Lousians armed with bats, pipes, chains, and anything that can hold a point or bludgeon someone surrounded a newly integrated swimming pool to menace 30 black people who just wanted to go swimming. It is the cities that scuttled their pools instead of allowing them to be commingled with the screams of pleasure and fun from black and white children finding refuge from the summer sun. Overt racism concerning swimming pools was demeaning and dehumanizing and still persists today. In 2015 a black 15-year-old girl named Dajerria Becton was violently assaulted by a police officer. Her crime? Attending a pool party in the white part of town.
The subtle racism is far more pernicious and imperceptible for those who are not accustomed to seeing the clear telltale signs of racism. Poverty creates and accelerates disparity in parks located in higher social economic areas and lower ones. The subtle injustice of segregation concerning our taxes. My grandparents and many other black folks were plundered out of their tax dollars. Their hard-earned dollars were siphoned from their community to build, maintain, staff, and run a white-only community pool. This is robbery. This is theft. This is a subtle form of racism: trafficking nonwhite tax dollars to create and maintain white-only property.
Some black people can’t swim because some white people are racist.
“I’m your conscience, if you do not hear me
Then you will be history, Kendrick” — Swimming Pools (Drank) by Kendrick Lamar.
Overt Racism:
In my 40s I learned of the time that a Las Vegas hotel drained their swimming pool because Dorthy Dandridge stuck her toe into the water. Her protest against the segregation of the swimming pool, at the hotel that had contracted her to entertain their white hotel guests, resulted in a grand gesture for all everyone to witness. The hotel drained the pool. Her minute act of defiance, baptizing only one of her digits in the sacred white’s only water was met with an irrational act of disgust, disapproval, and displeasure. The hotel had deemed Ms. Dandrige’s flesh was sufficiently clean enough to entertain their guest, but the hotel found it revolting that her toe share the same water as these white guests.
I do not know how Ms. Dandridge could perform at such a hotel after such an intentionally cruel repudiation of her human existence. It is these overt acts of racism that caused many black people to avoid such a callous rebuke. White people truly do not understand how much effort black folks expend trying to avoid racism. Furthermore, this is the problem with our history. We know and celebrate Ms. Dandridge's modest act of defiance but the perpetrators of this vile insult against her are allowed to disappear into the abyss of history.
I want to know these white men’s names who believed that this was appropriate conduct. I want to learn how they communicated what they did at work to their friends, to their kids to their grandkids. I want to know if they were proud of themself at the time. I want to know if the passage of time allowed those embers of pride to continue to glow. When they died were they branded with this gruesome event like Ms. Dandridge was or was this even mentioned in their eulogy or obituary? These people caused real trauma and we have allowed them to flee like the Nazis who left Europe for Argentina and Brazil. We need our own Nazi catchers for those who have never been held to account for their evil ways. I know Ruby Bridges, I want to know all of the white women and men who believed yelling, cursing, intimidating, menacing, or threatening, a little black child was appropriate. Do they tell their kids what they did? Have they bragged about the time they called a little black girl, who had the audacity to get an education, a nigger to their grandkids yet? On God, f**k those people.
The same goes for the elected city officials who were convinced that the most rational and prudent course of action was to destroy a public pool instead of integrating it. Some made a spectacle of driving a cement truck to the pool and filling it in with cement. They were cheered on by segregationists. Others were less bold, they just quit maintaining the pool so that they had a plausible reason to close it when the pool eventually was in a state of disrepair. The closest thing I have seen to this in my life is when the human waste that is the current Governor of Florida hired a woman to trick asylum seekers, in Texas, to get on a plane so he could drop them off in Martha’s Vineyard. Then this psychopath did the right-wing circuit of TV shows about what he had done. He was greeted with a bunch of attaboys and you sure owned the libs with that one. He used one million dollars of Florida taxpayer money to own the libs. Money that could have been used for after-school programs, gun violence prevention, housing assistance, etc. This oxygen thief used taxpayer money to humiliate brown people for joy, amusement, and adulation from white people.
I can see the city council members, mayors, and defiant racist owners receiving jovial receptions in the Elks Lodge, Rotary Club meetings, and other civic clubs white men used to belong to during this era. Every slap on the back, energetic handshake, free drink, and toast in their honor a dab of salve for the wounds their hate actions inflicted upon them. Ron DeSantis is a coward and so are all of these white men who shuttered pools instead of integrating them.
F**k them too.
Also, F**k the mobs of angry white people who lined the perimeters of municipal and public pools with weapons and spittle on their jowls. Hissing venom, barking insults, hammering and clubbing any black person who dared to go swimming: man, woman, or child. These pathetic losers spent their summer days roving outside of pools just to make sure only white people enjoyed their cooling waters. This type of unrestrained white terror took place in St. Louis, Pittsburg, and other cities and towns around the country. The police provided no protection. Lawless, violent white thugs, and terrorists made it their mission to deny black folk entry to swimming pools and we don’t know their names.
The Subtle Racism
During segregation and Jim Crow United States Government considered black folk full citizens every April 15th. Black people had to pay the same amount of taxes as everyone else, even though they did not have the same benefits, privileges, and rights as everyone else. Despite not being able to vote, black folks were still taxed. White people plundered black taxpayers. They used their tax dollars to create better schools for their children while giving black citizens crumbs. White folk used taxpayer money to erect a variety of public goods, but black people were barred from using them. In some instances, black people were allowed conditional access to these public works. For example, black people could take the bus but they had to sit in the back of the bus and give up their seats to any white person who demanded it.
Public swimming pools use to be separated by gender. There were pools for women and pools for men. However, once they integrated the pools along gender-lines white people forbid pools from being used by black people. Yet, black dollars were used to maintain these new gender-inclusive swimming pools. This is and was theft. Various hurdles had been constructed to disenfranchise black people from being voters. Black people were not effectively represented at any level of government. This allowed the grift of black tax dollars to flourish.
The systemic violence of absconding with black taxpayers’ money is an overlooked aspect of our failure to reckon with our disgraceful legacy of swimming pools in America. It is prima facia evidence of theft.
Then we must also deal with the other culprit that denied black folk the ability to swim: poverty.
Many black people were intentionally segregated in areas where little economic opportunity existed. Many black people found work as domestics and laborers. Even those who had good government jobs, like working for the US Post Office, still did not have the economic ability to afford a pool. The education that many blacks received was subpar. My Grandparents had 3rd-grade educations.
White people erected barriers that artificially barred economic parity between industrious black folk and mediocre white men. It was through poverty white people were able to maintain a quality way of life. A white man could afford to hire a black domestic who watched the kids, cooked, cleaned, and did the shopping. They could hire a black man to perform maintenance on the house and keep the yard. It was keeping black people in poverty that afforded white people with a luxurious way of life, in spite of them not earning the wages that could support this lifestyle absent an improvised caste of people.
My parents can’t swim, but they made sure that my brother and I attended our swim lessons with religious zeal. I did not understand their fanaticism when it came to my swim lessons until I became much older. My parents kept my brother on a tight leash. Many fun activities and trips with my friends and their families were politely declined. The exception was a trip to the Apple Valley municipal pool. My parents would go into their purse or wallet and give me a crisp five-dollar bill (which was a lot of money back in 1983) and tell me to have a great time.
Like I have said in my past essays: my parents were and are subversive. After the election is over, I am going to find a pool and swim some laps in their honor.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.