Simone Manuel reacts at the Swimming Winter National Championships on Nov. 29, 2018 in Greensboro, N.C.
At the Olympic Games Rio 2016, Simone Manuel won an Olympic gold medal in the 100-yard freestyle and became the first Black female swimmer on Team USA to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.
She was glad to be an inspiration to others, she told reporters.
“But at the same time,” she added, “I would like there to be a day where there are more of us, and it’s not Simone, the Black swimmer. The title ‘Black swimmer’ makes it seem like I’m not supposed to be able to win a gold medal, or I’m not supposed to be able to break records.”
Eight days later, Team USA won the Olympic women’s water polo tournament, and goalkeeper Ashleigh Johnson became the first Black woman from the U.S. to win an Olympic gold medal in water polo.
These two women have followed in the very narrow wake of top Black athletes in aquatics in the U.S., including Olympic medalists Anthony Ervin, Maritza Correia, Cullen Jones, and Lia Neal.
It’s a short list—a list that these athletes would like to lengthen.
In Tokyo next year, the 2020 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic swimming and water polo teams will likely have several Black athletes, including Manuel, Johnson, Paralympian Jamal Hill, who won three medals in swimming at the 2019 Para Pan American Games, and 2019 Pan Am gold-medal-winning water polo player Max Irving.
They too want to inspire more kids to join them in the pool. Mostly, though, these aquatic icons want more Black kids to learn to swim for safety’s sake. It’s reported that 64 percent of Black children have little to no swimming ability, compared to 45 percent of Hispanic and 40 percent of White children, and Black kids ages 5-10 are 5.5 times more likely than Whites to drown in swimming pools.
To further diversify the sport, and make it safer, it’s important to look at the long history of systematic racism that has led to the dearth of Blacks having opportunities to swim.
This discrimination has “cast a long shadow to the present day,” said Dr. Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, by phone.
History of Pool Access and Segregation
Despite the attention Manuel, Johnson, and the other Olympic medalists have brought to Black athletes in aquatics, swimming is still too often thought of as a White sport.
But it was not always this way. For centuries, Africans were renowned for their aquatic culture.
“At their first encounter with sub-Saharan Africans in the 1400s, European explorers found a culturally aquatic people who learned to swim in the coastal and river villages of West Africa, both men and women, as soon as they could walk,” reads the introduction to “Black Swimming History” on the International Swimming Hall of Fame website. “For centuries, Africans were regarded as the world’s greatest swimmers.”
In the U.S., racism erased swimming from Black culture.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blacks and Whites swam together, but not by gender. They swam in municipal bathhouses built for working-class people who lacked in-home bathing facilities.
Thanks to working-class boys, who had fun rough-housing in these bathing pools, swimming soon became viewed as a recreational activity—a way to promote physical fitness instead of (or in addition to) cleanliness.
In 1913, Fairgrounds Pool opened in St. Louis, Missouri. It was a giant facility, with a circular pool and sandy beach. As a leisure resort simulating the seaside, Fairgrounds promoted swimming as a family activity, with its two pools open to both men and women. The pools attracted thousands from all socioeconomic classes.
But because men and women swam together in what was then considered a state of compromised dress, Blacks were excluded. They were not, however, excluded from other public facilities in St. Louis. The pool, wrote Wiltse in Contested Waters, was a “sexually charged public space.”
“The thought of Black men interacting with white women at a municipal pool—where erotic voyeurism, physical contact, and making a date were all possible—heightened these fears and compelled city officials to officially exclude Black swimmers,” wrote Wiltse.
Whites also harbored the misconception that Blacks were not clean and carried communicable diseases. And in an era where physical fitness mattered, muscular Black men threatened the delusion of White male superiority.
Between 1920 and 1940, pools like Fairgrounds proliferated thanks in part to the fame of Olympic stars Johnny Weissmuller, Ethelda Bleibtrey, who won three gold medals at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, and English Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle.
Every summer, these leisure pools became community centers where people from all walks of life mingled daily—and kids learned to swim.
“It was the fact that these pools were appealing, affordable, and accessible that enabled the swimming rates in the United States to grow significantly,” said Wiltse.
Class did not matter. But race did.
In the south, Jim Crow laws kept Blacks out of pools. In northern cities, when Blacks tried to enter these luxurious public pools, they were turned away for dubious reasons. When pool attendants did let Blacks in, White swimmers took matters into their own hands.
On the second day that the large Highland Park pool facility in Pittsburgh opened in August 1931, 50 Blacks were allowed entrance (having been turned back the previous day after attendants asked them for “health certificates”). Wiltse recounted in Contested Waters what happened next.
When the Black swimmers approached the pool, some of the estimated 5,000 people already in the water began shouting threats. The young men appealed to police officers stationed at the pool for protection but were told that once they entered the water, the police could (or rather would) do nothing to help them. Frightened but undeterred, they slipped into the crowded pool.
There, they were beaten or held under water until all 50 had left the pool facility. Similar violence occurred at pools across the northern U.S. Often, police either refused to intervene or arrested the Black swimmers for “causing” the disorderly conduct.
The message to the Black community was clear: People of color were not welcome at swimming pools.
Some municipalities built segregated pools. But the facilities for Blacks were rarely as nice as the pools for Whites—separate but definitely not equal.
