Black People Can’t Swim
So there is this prevalent American myth that Black people can’t swim. When I was a child in the 1980s, overt racism was still quite fashionable in mainstream society, and I recall hearing white people laugh and make jokes about it on television.
Well folks, let’s dig into this one a little.
In the early 1900s, less than a generation from slavery, most beaches were privately owned by white people or publicly controlled by local governments. The private beaches banned Black people from using them. Similarly, public beaches nationwide were segregated by law. Even in places like Los Angeles, racial restrictions on public beaches were in place until 1927, and afterward, places like the Jonathan Club and other private white clubs and individuals still owned long stretches of beaches.
As recently as the 1970s, signs were up all over LA County beaches that read private beach. I just talked to a 60-year-old white woman who grew up in Santa Monica. She recalls that as a child in the 1970s, she was told those signs did not apply to her. The white public was able to access many of these so-called private beaches without repercussion. Black people were not. These signs were strictly enforced against them. Thus, while de jure segregation, that is segregation by law, no longer existed in Los Angeles County, de facto segregation, that is socially enforced segregation, remained strong. L.A. beaches and beaches across the nation were for white people. Black people could not enjoy the simple and affordable pleasure of putting their feet in the sand, spreading a towel, soaking in the sun, or going for a swim. There were a few notable exceptions such as the Inkwell in Santa Monica, CA but, even then, white Santa Monica Residents blocked every plan for property development for facilities for the Inkwell and were largely inhospitable to Black beach-goers.
Social justice-minded entrepreneurs such as famed educator Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach, Florida, Charles and Willa Bruce in Manhattan Beach, CA, Charles Darden, Norman Houston, and Silas White in Santa Monica, CA purchased beach property to develop safe, serviceable beaches for Black folks. However, many of them, even Silas White’s Ebony Beach Club at the Inkwell in Santa Monica, CA which had Nat King Cole as a charter member, was seized by the government through eminent domain. See my posts on Mary McLeod Bethune and Charles and Willa Bruce for more on this.
In the 1940s through the 1970s Civil Rights Activists staged beach protests called wade-ins. In the 1940’s Black people successfully won the right to a small section of “colored only” beach in Virginia Beach, Virginia called Butler’s Beach. In 1960's Biloxi, Mississippi a white mob attacked peaceful protestors with sticks, clubs, pipes, and whips, while local law enforcement did nothing to intervene.
Needless to say, beaches were deeply inhospitable to Black people for generations. They were foreign, unwelcoming, dangerous places belonging to white people. In my twenties, I was shocked to discover that there are many Black people, born and raised in Los Angeles, who have never even seen the ocean. I know of at least one man who was born, lived, and died in Los Angeles, deep into his 80s without ever seeing the ocean.
Of course, pools were also segregated across the nation and most Black people couldn’t afford an in-home pool. Pools, in fact, were among the most hotly contested battlegrounds of segregation. When Civil Rights leaders tried to integrate pools they were met with violence. White people threw nails at the bottom of pools in Cincinnati and beat up Black swimmers in Philadelphia. In St. Augustine, Florida, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested attempting to integrate a white motel. When protestors staged a swim-in in the wake of Dr. King’s arrest, the proprietor of that motel poured bleach and acid into a swimming pool while people were in it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed just days later, some say in response to these horrifying events. Once public pools were desegregated, governments quickly began shutting down because they were no longer a desirable place of privilege for middle-class white folks, and few pools were ever established in Black neighborhoods.
Black people, knowing their children didn’t know how to swim, admonished them to stay away from the water. Fear of open water and pools is passed down in many Black families. Pools are still difficult to access for most Black families and echoes of the past linger. In 2009, the owner of a private swim club in Philadelphia excluded Black children attending a Philadelphia daycare center, saying they would change the “complexion” of the club. In 2015, police in a wealthy subdivision outside of Dallas targeted Black teenagers attending a pool party. In Ohio, a landlord hung an old "Public Swimming Pool, White Only." sign on the pool gate the day after complaining that a Black resident’s little girl made the pool cloudy with the product in her hair. He replied that the sign was an antique and a decoration and had nothing to do with the little girl.
So it’s not that Black people can’t swim. We are, in fact, regular human beings that are just as buoyant as anyone else. It’s that many Black people don’t swim. Today, 64% of Black adults don’t know how to swim. And most devastating, Black children are 3 times as likely to drown as white children.
So white people denied Black people access to beaches and pools, depriving us of the simple pleasure and safety of swimming, and then laughed at us for it.
Simply vicious.
*Next up, if I can stomach it, the Morgans are rejected by the Santa Monica Beach Club, 1983.
