What Happened When Washington D.C. Desegregated Public Pools In 1949

Although the 20th century saw a rise in municipal public pools, only a fraction of the thousands of new public pools across the country allowed Black people to swim. According to The Conversation, beaches and swimming pools ended up becoming one of the "most segregated and fought over public spaces in the North and the South."

NPR reports that there was also a concerted effort among cities to build pools in "poor, immigrant, working-class-white neighborhoods" and they actively avoided building pools in neighborhoods that had a predominantly Black population.

And although some cities didn't pass official policies of racial segregation, segregation was enforced through public violence. When Highland Park pool opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1931, when Black boys tried to get in the pool, "they were oftentimes beat and dunked and punched" if they even made it into the water. Eventually, white people set up "sentinel guard at the entrance to the pool," and if Black people tried to access the pool, they were badly beaten, "sometimes with clubs."

White people in the United States justified segregating pools with the racist belief that Black people "were dirtier than whites" and they wanted "white swimmers to avoid being infected." And since gender integration in pools was occurring at roughly the same time, Dr. Jeff Wiltse claims that there were also racist and patriarchal concerns of keeping white women separated from Black men.