It Was Once Illegal for Black People to Swim

Our Way Black History Fact provides insight into what life was like when U.S. segregation extended into the oceans.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/civiccipher?utm_source=search

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, right now it is time for our way Black
History fact and today's way Black History Fact comes from
NPS dot gov, that is the National Park Service. This
is the history of segregation in the United States and
how it extended into the oceans. All right, it's all share.
We all love spending a warm day on a beautiful beach. However,

(00:20):
there was a time when public beaches were not open
to all to enjoy. Public beaches, like many other public
facilities such as schools, swimming pool theaters, and restaurants, were segregated.
The segregation came in the form of local and state laws,
as well as understood social norms. Collectively, these laws and
social norms were known as Jim Crow in many places
along the Gulf Coast. The rest the request by African

(00:42):
Americans for access to public beaches often fell on deaf ears.
Without access to public beaches, many were denied the joy
and safety of swimming and playing at public beaches. Many
Black children drowned as they swam in unsafe and unsupervised
bodies of water. In areas where African Americans were allowed
to access public beaches, most were very remote, polluted, and
hazardous areas. A rare exception to this was the eastern

(01:05):
end of Perdido Key, which is preserved by the National
Seashore today as Johnson Beach. Similar to peaceful protests at
restaurants known as sit ins, doctor Gilbert Mason Senior led
a series of protests against segregated beaches called weade ins.
He believed all Americans should have equal access to public
beaches maintained with taxpayer dollars. For these wade in protests,

(01:25):
Mason and his followers would wide into the Gulf waters
of Biloxi, Mississippi beaches. Those peaceful protesters were met in
many cases with violence from white rioters, and many were
also arrested. The Justice Department finally won a lengthy battle
over these segregated beaches in Mississippi in nineteen sixty eight.
The hard fought battle resulted in public beaches being open
to all, regardless of color. Wade in style protests, like

(01:48):
the ones in Mississippi occurred in other parts of the
country as well. These protests provided a way for black
Americans to speak out against segregated beaches. The efforts of
these brave advocates for change ensured the public beaches are
open and accessible to all Americans to enjoy. Okay, now
I'm going to shift gears here because that seems like

(02:10):
a neat little story, happy ending or whatever. But I
want to give you a little bit more insights, so
I'm going to share a bit. This is from the Guardian. Okay,
summers have long been America's most segregated season. Nowhere is
this more evident than along the nation's beaches and coasts,
one of the chief destinations for vacationers and pleasure seekers,
and a perennial site of racial conflict and violence. The

(02:33):
infamous nineteen nineteen Chicago race riot, which lasted seven days
and claimed thirty eight lives, began on the shores of
Lake Michigan, when white Youth gang members stoned to death
a black teenager named Eugene Williams after he had accidentally
drifted across a color line in the water. And its aftermath,
African Americans learned to avoid the city's lakefront. As a child,
black Chicago and Dempsey Travis remembers quote, I was never

(02:56):
permitted to learn to swim. For six years, we lived
within two blocks of the lake, but that did not
change my parents' attitude to Dad and Mama the Blue
Scott the Blue Lake always had a tinge of red
from the blood of the young black boy. In the
decades that followed, local governments across the US and acted
a host of policies and practices designed to segregate places

(03:17):
of outdoor leisure by race and effectively exclude people of
color from public beaches. In the South, those methods were
quite explicit. Coastal cities such as Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina,
and Miami, Florida prohibited African Americans from stepping foot on
any of their public beaches and for years ignored black's
demands for public beaches of their own. White's indifference to
the health and humanity of black communities often had deadly consequences.

(03:40):
Throughout the Jim Crow era, shockingly high numbers of black
youth drowned each summer while playing in dangerous and unsupervised
bodies of water. When the white officials did respond to
Black demands for beaches and parks of their own, they
invariably selected remote, polluted, often hazardous locations. In Washington, d C.
Officials designated Buzzard Point, a former dumping ground located downstream
from a sewage plant. It has a suitable location