The racial history of American swimming pools

Small section of this interview. Racism often shows up at swimming pools.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90213675


MARTIN: What is it about the swimming pool, Jeff, that was such as flashpoint for these racial tensions?

Dr. WILTSE: Yeah, there - excuse me. There are two things. One is, well, I mean, basically it boils down to swimming polls being very intimate spaces, both physically intimate and also visually intimate. And so physically intimate, in the sense that you're sharing the same water. And there has always been fears, in terms of using swimming pools, about being exposed to the dirt and the disease of other swimmers.

And back during the 1920s and 1930s, and it really continuing on even further up from there, there were racist assumptions that black Americans were dirtier than whites, that they were more likely to be infected by communicable diseases. And so, in part, the push for racial segregation and racial exclusion was for white swimmers to avoid being infected by the supposed "dirtiness" of black Americans.

But I argue that the primary and the most crucial cause for racial segregation was gender integration, that most whites did not want black men, in particular, to be able to have access to white women at such an intimate public space...