A ‘PROMISE OF STRENGTH AND CLEANLINESS’
The place Scott loves welcomed swimmers as far back as 1895. That’s when a public bath at the Rec site drew a thousand of the “most interesting rough-and-tumble little fellows that ever went swimming, loved liberty and gave promise of strength and cleanliness in a nation,” according to The Inquirer. The neighborhood was then mostly white, home to large numbers of European immigrants.
A generation later, Azalee Akins, a Black woman born in South Carolina, moved to the neighborhood, one of tens of thousands of new arrivals from the South. Akins worked as a seamstress and raised two sons in a brick rowhouse two blocks from the Rec. Every evening, the pool opened on a segregated schedule: first for Black swimmers, then for white ones. It was prized turf in a transforming neighborhood.
Perhaps because of that, there existed “bad blood between the races,” that reached a “boiling point” every summer when the pool opened, said the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s Black paper. Tensions were particularly surging in the summer of 1941, when the city hired two Black lifeguards to patrol the waters for the first time.
On the evening of July 1, Akins’ 14-year-old son, Joseph, went for a swim. Unbeknownst to him, three white boys slipped past a guard and into the pool at the same time. When they found Akins swimming, they held him underwater long enough that he began gasping for air. After he escaped, he told his friends what happened.
Soon the streets near the pool erupted along racial lines. Groups of boys armed themselves with knives, milk bottles, and baseball bats, fighting each other and whomever else they found, according to news accounts. Hundreds of police arrived on the scene and about 20 people, all white, went to the hospital that night, the Associated Press reported.
Much of the upheaval at city pools at the time was rooted in the unspoken fear that Black men would interact with white women in “such intimate and erotic public spaces,” wrote Jeff Wiltse, a historian whose research is currently featured in the “POOL” exhibit at the Fairmount Water Works.
To make sure that didn’t happen, local white men in Philadelphia policed the pools themselves, often with brutality, said Victoria Wolcott, author of the book Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America. If pools were joyful places for white Philadelphians, they would be kept off-limits to their Black neighbors.