Jumping Into a Pool of Elitism, Racism

It was a pool party unlike any ever seen in St. Augustine, Fla. Splashing around at the Monson Motor Lodge on the bay front, just a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. checked out, were some young black folks and several white motel guests. It was all captured in a photo that ran on the front page of major newspapers across the country when the lodge's manager, Jimmy Brock, started dumping cleaning acid into the water. It was 1964 and the pool was designated For Whites Only.

When we think about the civil rights movement in this country we most often recall grainy black-and-white news reels of marches and lunch counter sit-ins. We rarely think of swimming pools, but they were as much a part of the movement's ground zero as any plot.

Moreover, the fight to desegregate pools, which played out all over the country, spoke directly to stereotypical thoughts and fears about people of color: we were dirty, black men wouldn't be able to contain themselves around white women covered only by bathing suits, and we couldn't swim anyway. What utter nonsense.

It is against that backdrop that the recent incident at a suburban Philadelphia swimming pool, where a group of black and Latino kids had their paid admittance to the pool run by a white group summarily revoked, stung like the opening of an old sore. It was also more evidence (add to it the arrest we learned of Tuesday of black Harvard professor Henry Gates for breaking into his own house) that talk about a post-racial America in the wake of Barack Obama's election to the Oval office is mere fancy.

What happened at the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley outside Philadelphia last month, when minority kids from a non-profit called Creative Steps were kicked out of the club's pool despite having paid nearly $2,000 in fees to use it for several Mondays, was ugly and harmful. Some club members reportedly uttered racist comments overheard by some of the suddenly unwanted guests before snatching their own children out of the water as if it had been polluted.

How refreshing it was to hear Tuesday that Tyler Perry, the actor and film and television producer, was so outraged by the incident that he decided to soothe whatever wounds those kids suffered by giving them an all-expenses paid vacation at Disney World.

What happened outside Philly was, however, also an indictment on the sport of swimming, which has produced so few black swimmers on the sport's biggest stage, the Olympics. Swimming has been as exclusive a sport as one can find. Despite the municipal pools in existence that can serve communities of color, the sport of swimming has struggled to provide equal opportunity. That is why USA Swimming a few years ago created an office for diversity headed by John Cruzat, a former career military officer.

After all, people of color can swim given the chance. Had Smokin' Joe Frazier been properly trained he would not have appeared on the verge of drowning in the old TV series Superstars.

Cullen Jones in Beijing became the third African-American swimmer from the United States to medal at an Olympic Games and the second African-American gold medalist ever. Anthony Irvin became the first in the 2000 Olympics when he tied Gary Hall, Jr. in the 50-meter freestyle. Maritza Correia won a silver medal in Athens in 2004 in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay to become the first black female to win a medal for the U.S (Correia was born in Puerto Rico).

Suriname's Anthony Nesty at the Seoul Games (no pun intended) in 1988 became the first black man to win an Olympic gold in swimming when he barely beat the U.S.'s Matt Biondi to win the 100-meter butterfly. The first black Olympic swimming medalist is Curaçao-born Enith Brigitha, who won bronze for the Netherlands at the 1976 Montreal Games in the women's 100-meter and 200-meter freestyles. Nesty now coaches at his alma mater, Florida. Jones and Correia help USA Swimming to get out the word and hopefully change some antiquated minds.

Only about 2 percent of USA Swimming's quarter-of-a-million members are black, however. That's sad. It sounds like the country club sport it's been made out to be. But unlike golf and tennis, swimming is more than mere recreation.

Increasing opportunities to swim isn't just another issue of fairness. It is also about safety. National statistics show that black kids in the United States drown at a rate almost three times greater than the overall rate. The reason isn't because of some wrongheaded belief about the buoyancy of black people; it is because nearly 60 percent of black kids in our country cannot swim, which is almost twice the figure for white children, USA Swimming found in a survey it conducted a few years ago, which led to the creation of its diversity program.

"It's just the right thing to do -- making an effort so every kid can be water-safe," USA Swimming's boss Chuck Wielgus told the Associated Press last year. "And quite frankly, it's about performance. We're something of a niche sport and for us to remain relevant, considering the changing demographics of the population, it's important we get more kids involved at the mouth of the pipeline."

It's important, too, because one of the best things about sports is that they can be used to break down stereotypes. The Jackie Robinson experiment proved that black men and white men could make up a successful team in any endeavor. Doug Williams and Tony Dungy showed black men could lead.

The Huntingdon Valley pool debacle threatened to set us all back by decades.