When America built pools
While public pools are a rarer sight today, governments built enormous pools during the twentieth century.
The New Deal led to the biggest burst of public pools in American history. The federal government built nearly 750 pools and remodeled hundreds more between 1933 and 1938.
New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses opened 11 pools funded by the federal Works Project Administration, and San Francisco opened Fleishhacker Pool, the largest of the era.
A 1933 survey of Americans’ leisure activities found that as many people swam frequently as went to the movies.
“Pools became emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure and beauty,” Wiltse writes.
Racial violence
Before the 1920s, swimming pools in the North were segregated along gender lines but not racial ones.
This changed as they became gender integrated.
Racial stereotypes around cleanliness and safety, as well as intense fears of Black men interacting with White women in bathing suits, turned pools into some of the most segregated public spaces in America, said Victoria Wolcott, a historian at the University at Buffalo and author of “Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America.”
In the late 1940s, there were major swimming pool riots over integration in St. Louis; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles, Walcott said. In Cincinnati, Whites threw nails and glass into pools, and in St. Augustine, Florida, they poured acid into the water to prevent Black swimmers.
The Kerner Commission, tasked with studying the underlying causes of disorder in cities during the 1960s, found in its landmark 1967 report that the lack of recreation facilities, including pools, was a “deeply-held grievance” among Black people fueling urban unrest during sweltering summers.
Abandoning public pools
Gaining entry to swimming pools was a top priority for civil rights groups, who saw recreation as a fundamental human right.
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he described the tears in his daughter’s eyes when “she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children.”
But the success of the civil rights movement integrating pools coincided with a surge of private pools and swim clubs.
Millions of middle-class White families left cities for the suburbs and built pools in their new backyards during the era. New suburbanites chose to organize country clubs with fees rather than build pools open to the public.