John Steinbeck on the New Orleans Desegregation Crisis

Observations of John Steinbeck on the New Orleans desegregation crisis

John Steinbeck

Esteemed American novelist John Steinbeck traveled through New Orleans in late 1960 and witnessed firsthand the resistance to school desegregation. Steinbeck described his experiences in his 1962 book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 189, 193–95.

While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school. Behind these small dark mites were the law’s majesty and the law’s power to enforce—both the scales and the sword were allied with the infants—while against them were three hundred years of fear and anger and terror of change in a changing world. I had seen photographs in the papers every day and motion pictures on the television screen. What made the newsmen love the story was a group of stout middle-aged women who, by some curious definition of the word “mother,” gathered every day to scream invectives at children. Further, a small group of them had become so expert that they were known as the Cheerleaders, and a crowd gathered every day to enjoy and to applaud their performance. . . .

As I walked toward the school I was in a stream of people all white and all going in my direction. They walked intently like people going to a fire after it has been burning for some time. They beat their hands against their hips or hugged them under coats, and many men had scarves under their hats and covering their ears.

Across the street from the school the police had set up wooden barriers to keep the crowd back, and they paraded back and forth, ignoring the jokes called to them. The front of the school was deserted but along the curb United States marshals were spaced, not in uniform but wearing armbands to identify them. Their guns bulged decently under their coats but their eyes darted about nervously, inspecting faces. It seemed to me that they inspected me to see if I was a regular, and then abandoned me as unimportant.

It was apparent where the Cheerleaders were, because people shoved forward to try to get near them. They had a favored place at the barricade directly across from the school entrance, and in that area a concentration of police stamped their feet and slapped their hands together in unaccustomed gloves.

John Steinbeck

Suddenly I was pushed violently and a cry went up: “Here she comes. Let her through. . . . Come on, move back. Let her through. Where you been? You’re late for school. Where you been, Nellie?”

The name was not Nellie. I forget what it was. But she shoved through the dense crowd quite near enough to me so that I could see her coat of imitation fleece and her gold earrings. She was not tall, but her body was ample and full-busted. I judge she was about fifty. She was heavily powdered, which made the line of her double chin look very dark.

AP PHOTO ORIGINAL CUTLINE Women crowd the sidewalk and jeer as Mrs. James Gabrielle, with police escort, walks her daughter home after day in integrated William Frantz school in New Orleans, November 30, 1960. Few white children are in the school which one black girl attends. Crowd wants total white boycott.

She wore a ferocious smile and pushed her way through the milling people, holding a fistful of clippings high in her hand to keep them from being crushed. Since it was her left hand I looked particularly for a wedding ring, and saw that there was none. I slipped in behind her to get carried along by her wave, but the crush was dense and I was given a warning too. “Watch it, sailor. Everybody wants to hear.” Nellie was received with shouts of greeting. I don’t know how many Cheerleaders there were. There was no fixed line between the Cheerleaders and the crowd behind them. What I could see was that a group was passing newspaper clippings back and forth and reading them aloud with little squeals of delight.

Now the crowd grew restless, as an audience does when the clock goes past curtain time. Men all around me looked at their watches. I looked at mine. It was three minutes to nine.

Ruby Bridges entering school.

The show opened on time. Sound of sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.



The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.

Racist Cheerleaders

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his frightened child by the hand. His body was tensed as a strong leaf spring drawn to the breaking strain; his face was grave and gray, and his eyes were on the ground immediately ahead of him. The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check as a great rider directs a panicked horse.

John Steinbeck

A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear. No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow? (source: http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/tu_bush_media.html)

Ruby Bridges Integrating The William Franz Public School in New Orleans

“The Problem We All Live With,” Norman Rockwell, 1963 Oil on canvas, 36” x 58” Illustration for “Look,” January 14, 1964

From PBS: In November 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges Hall became the first African American child to desegregate an elementary school. Although she only lived a few blocks from the William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. Marshals had to escort Ruby because of angry segregationist mobs that gathered in front of the school. For an entire year, she was the only student in her class since white parents pulled their children from the school in protest. She wrote about her experiences in her book THROUGH MY EYES.

Protesters gather at William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana to protest desegregation in schools.

ONE YEAR IN AN ALL-BLACK SCHOOL

When it was time for me to start kindergarten, I went to the Johnson Lockett Elementary School. My segregated school was fairly far from my house, but I had lots of company for the long walk. All the kids on my block went to Johnson Lockett.

What I didn't know in kindergarten was that a federal court in New Orleans was about to force two white public schools to admit black students. The plan was to integrate only the first grade for that year. Then, every year after that, the incoming first grade would also be integrated.

In the late spring of my year at Johnson Lockett, the city school board began testing black kindergartners. They wanted to find out which children should be sent to the white schools. I took the test. I was only five, and I'm sure I didn't have any idea why I was taking it. Still, I remember that day. I remember getting dressed up and riding uptown on the bus with my mother, and sitting in an enormous room in the school board building along with about a hundred other black kids, all waiting to be tested.

Apparently the test was difficult, and I've been told that it was set up so that kids would have a hard time passing. If all the black children had failed, the white school board might have had a way to keep the schools segregated for a while longer.

Several people from the NAACP came to the house in the summer. They told my parents that I was one of just a few black children to pass the school board test, and that I had been chosen to attend one of the white schools, William Frantz Public School. They said it was a better school and closer to my home than the one I had been attending. They said I had the right to go to the closest school in my district. They pressured my parents and made a lot of promises. They said my going to William Frantz would help me, my brothers, my sisters, and other black children in the future. We would receive a better education which would give us better opportunities as adults.

Lucille, my mother, was convinced that no harm would come to us. She thought that the opportunity for me to get the best education possible was worth the risk, and she finally convinced my father.

MY MOTHER BREAKS THE NEWS

When September came that year, I didn't start first grade at William Frantz. The lawmakers in the state capital, Baton Rouge, had found a way to slow down integration, so I was sent back to my old school.

All through the summer and early fall, the state legislatures fought the federal court. They passed twenty-eight new anti-integration laws.

The federal court, led by Federal District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright, unyielding in his commitment to upholding the law of the land and his dedication to equal opportunity for all Americans, would block the segregationists again and again.

The anger all across New Orleans convinced Judge Wright that things might grow violent. He asked the U.S. government rush federal marshals to New Orleans to protect the black first graders. There were four of us in all. There was a fifth girl originally, but her parents decided at the last minute not to transfer her. Three of the remaining children, all girls, were to go to a school named McDonogh. I was the fourth child. I was going to integrate William Frantz Public School, and I was going alone.

On Sunday, November 13, my mother told me I would start at a new school the next day. She hinted there could be something unusual about it, but she didn't explain. "There might be a lot of people outside the school," she said. "But you don¹t need to be afraid. I'll be with you."

NOVEMBER 24, 1960

My mother took special care getting me ready for school. When somebody knocked on my door that morning, my mother expected to see people from the NAACP. Instead, she saw four serious-looking white men, dressed in suits and wearing armbands. They were U.S. federal marshals. They had come to drive us to school and stay with us all day. I learned later they were carrying guns.

"Federal Marshal Wallace Downs rides in auto with wide-eyed girl, Gail Etienne, to McDonogh 19 school in New Orleans, November 14, 1960. The first-grader was one of four entered in two previously all-white schools in the city. "

I remember climbing into the back seat of the marshals' car with my mother, but I don't remember feeling frightened. William Frantz Public School was only five blocks away, so one of the marshals in the front seat told my mother right away we should do when we got there.

"Let us get out of the car first," the marshal said. "Then you'll get out, and the four of us will surround you and your daughter. We'll walk up to the door together. Just walk straight ahead, and don't look back."

I remember looking out of the car as we pulled up to the Frantz school. There were barricades and people shouting and policemen everywhere.

As we walked through the crowd, I didn't see any faces. I guess that's because I wasn't very tall and I was surrounded by the marshals. People yelled and threw things. I could see the school building, and it looked bigger and nicer than my old school. When we climbed the high steps to the front door, there were policemen in uniforms at the top. The policemen at the door and the crowd behind us made me think this was an important place.

THE FIRST DAY AT WILLIAM FRANTZ

All day long, white parents rushed into the office. They were upset. They were arguing and pointing at us. When they took their children to school that morning, the parents hadn't been sure whether William Frantz would be integrated that day or not. After my mother and I arrived, they ran into classrooms and dragged their children out of school. From behind the windows in the office, all I saw was confusion. I told myself that this must be the way it is in a big school.

That whole first day, my mother and I just sat and waited. We didn't talk to anybody. I remember watching a big, round clock on the wall. When it was 3:00 and time to go home, I was glad.

When we left school that first day, the crowd outside was even bigger and louder than it had been in the morning. There were reporters everywhere. I guess the police couldn't keep them behind the barricades. It seemed to take us along time to get to the marshals' car.

Later on I learned there had been protestors in front of the two integrated schools the whole day. They wanted to be sure white parents would boycott the school and not let their children attend. Groups of high school boys, joining the protestors, paraded up and down the street and sang new verses to old hymns. Their favorite was "Battle Hymn of the Republic," in which they changed the chorus to "Glory, glory, segregation, the South will rise again." Many of the boys carried signs and said awful things, but most of all I remember seeing a black doll in a coffin, which frightened me more than anything else.

MY FIRST WHITE TEACHER

On the second day, my mother and I drove to school with the marshals. The crowd outside the building was ready. Racists spat at us and shouted things like "Go home, nigger," and "No niggers allowed here." One woman screamed at me, "I'm going to poison you. I'll find a way." She made the same threat every morning.

I tried not to pay attention. When we finally got into the building, my new teacher was there to meet us. Her name was Mrs. Henry.

Mrs. Henry took us into a classroom and said to have a seat. When I looked around, the room was empty. There were rows of desks, but no children. I thought we were too early, but Mrs. Henry said we were right on time. My mother sat down at the back of the room. I took a seat up front, and Mrs. Henry began to teach.

I spent the whole first day with Mrs. Henry in the classroom. I wasn't allowed to have lunch in the cafeteria or go outside for recess, so we just stayed in our room. The marshals sat outside. If I had to go to the bathroom, the marshals walked me down the hall.

I HAVE TROUBLE EATING AND SLEEPING

There were times that winter when I did show stress. Nightmares would come, and I would get up and go wake my mother for comfort.

My mother would raise herself up in bed. "Did you say your prayers before you went to sleep?" she would ask.

If I hadn't, Mama would say, "Honey, that's why you're having a bad dream. Go back now, and say your prayers."

I would do as she said, and then I would sleep. Somehow it always worked.

Another problem that year was lunchtime at school. I often ate in the classroom by myself while Mrs. Henry took her lunch break with other teachers. The marshals sat outside while I opened up my lunch box. As time went on I wouldn't eat. First I blamed it on the fact that my other fixed too many peanut butter sandwiches. Then I began to wish and wish that I could go the cafeteria. . . I was convinced that kids were there. I began hiding my uneaten sandwiches in a storage cabinet in the classroom. In my magical way of thinking, not eating lunch would somehow get me to the cafeteria.

When roaches and mice began to appear in the room, a janitor discovered my old sandwiches. She [Mrs. Henry] was just sorry there were so many days when I hadn't eaten. After that she usually ate with me so I wouldn't be lonely.

THE END OF FIRST GRADE

Near at the end of the year, Mrs. Henry and I finally had company. A few white children began coming back to school, and I got an opportunity to visit with them once or twice. Even though these children were white, I still knew nothing about racism or integration. I had picked up bits and pieces over the months from being around adults and hearing them talk, but nothing was clear to me. The light dawned one day when a little boy refused to play with me.

"I can't play with you," the boy said. "My mama said not to because you're a nigger."

At that moment, it all made sense to me. I finally realized that everything had happened because I was black. I remember feeling a little stunned. It was all about the color of my skin. I wasn't angry at the boy, because I understood. His mother had told him not to play with me, and he was obeying her. I would have done the same thing. If my mama said not to do something, I didn't do it.

Ruby Bridges Hall and her former elementary school teacher Barbara Henry

The next thing I knew, it was June. That incredible year was over. Oddly enough, it ended quietly. I don't remember any special good-byes as I headed off for summer vacation. I was sorry to leave Mrs. Henry, but I somehow thought she would be my teacher again in the fall and forever. (source: PBS)

The Clinton School Lecture Series Presents Ruby Bridges 9-20-11

Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

In March 1850, Louis Agassiz, celebrated Harvard natural scientist and widely admired Cambridge intellectual, arranged through the good offices of Dr. Robert W. Gibbes for a local daguerreotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, J.T. Zealy, to take a series of pictures of African-born slaves at nearby plantations. Zealy made the pictures in his studio, turned them over to Gibbes, who shipped them to Agassiz at Harvard, where in 1976, at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, they were found in storage cabinet.

Louis Agassiz

… Agassiz had visited several plantations in 1850 while in South Carolina to address a meeting of scientists in Charleston on the topic of the “separate creation” of the human races. That notion, which denied the unity of mankind, seemed to provide a scientific or natural basis for racial inequality and slavery. After the meeting, at which the Harvard scientist thrilled his Southern audience by endorsing the doctrine that mankind had no common origin, Agassiz expressed interest in examining African-born slaves.

… He wanted firsthand evidence of anatomical uniqueness and also to see if these distinct traits would survive in American-born offspring. “Agassiz was delighted,” wrote Gibbes, “with his examinations of Ebo, Foulah, Gullah, Guinea, Coromantee, Mandingo, and Congo Negroes,” satisfying himself that “they have differences from other races.” He asked Gibbes to arrange for the photographs, and took his leave.

“Jack (driver), Guinea, Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq., Columbia, S.C.”

… The Zealy daguerreotypes reflect the unusual circumstances of Agassiz’s request. They show a conventional studio setup with a patterned carpet and the headrest stand usually hidden behind the sitter’s back. The daguerreotypes themselves feature the gold-plated overmat and wooden case typical of the commercial artifact.

However, the persons portrayed here are standing naked: not “representative” in [Mathew] Brady’s sense of an imagined and desired America, but examples of specimens of a “type” — a type, moreover, of complete otherness. It is difficult to view these images now without a sense of outrage at the indecency of the poses and the system of bondage they reflect — the absolute power of masters over the bodies of their slaves. The response is heightened by the extraordinary fact of male nudity, of genitals presented directly to that daguerrean eye in what must have been a genteel Columbia, S.C., daguerrean gallery or “parlor,” of women asked to disrobe not for prurient purposes but for “science.”

“Delia, born in the USA of enslaved

African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo“

… Without a public mask to mediate their encounter with the lens, the eyes of the enslaved Africans can only reveal the depths of their being — for, as naked slaves, they are permitted no social persona. In the absence of the clues which define Brady’s portraits as formal, heroic, at once individual and illustrious, and yet in the presence of certain conventional signs — the carpet, the stand, the case and framing mat — we confront a disturbing contradiction. The illustrations are trapped within a system of representation as firmly as the sitters are trapped within a system of chattel slavery. And they powerfully inform us of our own entrapment. We know how to view conventional portraits — but to gaze upon naked bodies, male and female, of persons dispossessed of themselves, is another matter.

The effect even now can be confusing, erotic response mingling with moral disgust and outrage. Above all, the pictures suggest a potentially subversive power within the daguerrean effect of immediacy — including its eroticism — a power to subvert the very conventions of portraiture which the works of commercial studios shaped. Often we feel a similar effect in anonymous images found in old shops or studied in collections — an uncanny rapport with vibrant shadowy traces of persons on a silver-coated plate, who continue to live in spite of stilted poses and stiffness.

The Zealy pictures reveal the social convention which ranks blacks as inferior beings, which violates civilized decorum, which strips men and women of the right to cover their genitalia. And yet the pictures shatter that mold by allowing the eyes of Delia and the others to speak directly to ours, in an appeal to a shared humanity.

His name is Renty, he was born in the Congo, and enslaved on the plantation of B.F. Taylor, in Columbia, South Carolina

… By allowing their subjects to gaze through the lens directly at us, the Zealy portraits immobilize the physiognomic theory which supports [Marcus Aurelius] Root’s confidence. Stripped of everything deemed intrinsic to selfhood and “character,” if not humanness itself, they are simply themselves — what we see. The photographer takes no pains to “portray” them or to elicit an expression.

Agassiz commissioned these images to use as scientific visual evidence to prove the physical difference between white Europeans and black Africans. The primary goal was to prove the racial superiority of the white race. The photographs were also meant to serve as evidence for his theory of “separate creation,” which contends that each race originated as a separate species.

By obeying his commission to present them as bodies rather than persons, as biological specimens, Zealy allows them to be as they are: black slaves constrained to perform the role of specimen before the camera. The absoluteness of their confinement to this role has the unintended effect of freeing their eyes from any other necessity but to look back at the glass eye staring at them. Their gaze defies the scrutinizing gaze aimed at their nakedness, and challenges the viewer of these daguerreotypes to reckon with his or her responses to such images.

Portrait of Louis Agassiz. In this photo he is seen demonstrating his theory of jelly-fish, corals and starfish. So where did it all go wrong for this workaholic who once declared he could not afford to waste his time making money and was ready to sacrifice everything to science? Two words sum it up: Darwin and racism. He was considered the most important scientific opponent of Darwinism, refusing to admit the evolutionary theory of the English naturalist.

Louis Agassiz's Public racism

Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz was one of the most influential researchers of the 19th century, promoting the Ice Age and boosting science in the United States.

Yet 200 years after his birth his legacy is almost invisible, tainted by his opposition to Darwinism and his publicly stated racism.

Agassiz's racism proved more problematic and is probably what has seen him vanish as a public face of American science. After arriving in the US, he felt confronted by black people and wrote to his mother that he felt physically ill in their presence.

Published at the height of polygenism's popularity, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's 800-page illustrated volume, Types of Mankind, reproduced the work of Louis Agassiz and Samuel Morton, spreading racist views to a popular audience. The work sold well and nine editions were printed. Some slave owners found justification for slavery in the Bible, and others used this new "science" to defend it.

He certainly believed in the separation of the races and his own theory was blacks and whites had different origins.

While it was not an unusual position at the time, his influence meant that his words had a major impact on the debate about racial equality and slavery.

"His behaviour stank," Kaeser told swissinfo. "His use of the media was hypocritical and his mixing of science and politics was unethical."

This probably goes a long way to explaining why Agassiz lies almost forgotten in Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while the tercentenary of the birth of Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is being celebrated around the world. (source: swissinfo, Scott Capper)

Racial Segregation May Be Over, But Racial Exclusion Lives On

From the UK Guardian, "Obama should realise that segregation may be over, but exclusion lives on: African-Americans have been hit harder by this recession than others, and the president should be wary of lecturing them," by Gary Younge on 19 July 2009:

On 29 June, 65 children from the Creative Steps summer camp in Philadelphia took a trip to the private suburban Valley Club swimming pool for a dip. The Valley Club knew they were coming and how many there were because the camp had signed a contract and paid $1,950 in advance for weekly visits throughout the summer. But somehow the arrival of the mostly African-American and Latino children was still a shock. As the black and brown kids got into the pool, the white parents pulled their kids out.

One child overheard a woman ask: "What are those black kids doing here?" Another reportedly expressed fears that the children might steal something. A few days later the club revoked the contract and refunded the advance. When asked why, the club's president, John Duesler, said: "There is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … the atmosphere of the club."

The story broke on the national stage just in time for the centennial conference of the oldest US civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While some asked whether the NAACP was still relevant, others gathered outside the Valley Club with placards.

There is a perverse comfort many get from displays of blatant racial injustice. A simple morality play starring villains and victims always draws a bigger, more indignant crowd than the more involved narrative of structural inequality. With all laws and most voices in support of systematic racial exclusion gone, such incidents allow everyone to express their outrage – safe in the knowledge that nothing much need change in terms of systemic discrimination.

"It may sound odd to say, but in some ways rigid segregation was an ally," says the NAACP chairman, Julian Bond, "because things were so clear. There were signs, there were places where you knew you could not go if you were a person of colour. And having lost that clarity it's sometimes difficult to focus on who's the enemy, what's the ill here."

And so it has been in Philadelphia that a faceless enemy and a litany of institutional ills has long been paving the way for the clarity surrounding the situation at Valley Club.

The Valley Club was founded in 1954, the year the supreme court ruled on Brown v Board of Education making racial segregation illegal. This was no coincidence. That decade had seen a rash of efforts to integrate pools, which had sparked white flight. "When pools were desegregated, white people abandoned them en masse," explains Jeff Wiltse, associate history professor at the University of Montana and author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. "There was a boom in the construction of private pools where middle-class whites could still exclude non-whites … I don't know the details of the founding of the Valley Club, but both the time and the place in which it was built fits right into that story."

Meanwhile, the public facilities that remained catered for the poor and the non-white, and were rapidly downgraded. This year Philadelphia has closed more than a third of its pools owing to budget cuts. So the kids from Creative Steps did not make that trip by chance. Politics and economics brought them there – and then intolerance kept them out when they arrived.

When they got home, they had other problems to deal with. The stampede to the suburbs (Philadelphia has lost a quarter of its population since 1950) has left an impoverished "minority-majority", where one in five families lives in poverty. Unemployment, already in double figures, has risen by almost 50% in the last year.

According to the coalition to save libraries (the mayor had planned to close more than a fifth of those), this was already set to be a bleak summer in the "City of Brotherly Love". Further budget cuts mean there are 1,700 fewer positions for summer camps and 3,700 fewer summer programme slots for children, and 772 fewer recreational jobs and 400 fewer summer internships for young people this year. "These cuts are devastating for youth in our communities," says Sherrie Cohen, an organiser with the coalition. "With less structured opportunities in our neighbourhoods, kids are left to get into trouble."

These cuts are not specifically aimed at minorities. But they disproportionately affect the poor, and since minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor, they hit black and Latino families hardest. Herein lies the intersection between race and class – without an understanding of which little sense can be made, and no effective challenge mounted, against modern racism.

Given the large numbers of white people who are poor and the large numbers of black people who are not, it is not helpful to frame racial disadvantage purely in terms of isolated, dramatic events that humiliate black people. Poor white people in Philadelphia have little stake in whether black kids can swim in Valley Club or not, but they have a big interest in keeping pools open, which would benefit far more black kids than does admission to one suburban pool. In those connections lie the potential for class solidarity between races

It is this context that makes elements of Barack Obama's speech to the NAACP conference problematic. Having paid homage to the heroic role of the civil rights movement and recognized the inequalities bequeathed by segregation, he started on parenting. "We've got to say to our children, if you're African- American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher," he said. "If you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that's not a reason to get bad grades; that's not a reason to cut class; that's not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands – you cannot forget that. That's what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses. No excuses."

The audience lapped it up. Such admonitions are commonplace at any aspirant black American dinner table, where parents tell children they will have to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to get just as far. These are the mantras with which I was raised, and may well one day repeat. But I would not like to see them elevated to national policy. Nor was Obama speaking at a dinner table, but at an event that produce headlines like: "School the new cool. O to parents: It's not just about rap," in the New York Post; and "Obama tells fellow blacks: 'No excuses' for failure," in the New York Times.

A leader who has spent billions bailing out banks, bombing Afghanistan and occupying Iraq while poverty and unemployment rise should be wary of lecturing others on priorities. He, of all people, should understand that we can only play with the hand we're dealt.

It goes without saying that even those in the toughest circumstances have choices. But as the situation in Philadelphia illustrates, and as Obama pointed out elsewhere in his speech, those circumstances are becoming tougher and those choices fewer for black American families, who have been hit far harder by this recession than others.

If I'm looking for someone I don't know to give me advice on raising my kid, there's always Supernanny. What I want from a president are the resources that will enable any child to enjoy their summer where they please without having the doors closed on them by budget cuts or bigotry. No excuses. No excuses. (source: UK Guardian)

Public Pools' Contentious Past: "Just Don't Touch the Water"

Excerpt: Contested Waters, "Just Don't Touch the Water"

FORT LAUDERDALE July 4, 1961 a small group of other civil rights activists waded into the whites-only beach off Las Olas Boulevard. The "wade-ins" that started that day were a turning point in Fort Lauderdale history. A year later, a judge refused the city's request to stop the protests and the city decided to open the beaches to everyone.

INTRODUCTION--In 1898 Boston's mayor Josiah Quincy sent Daniel Kearns, secretary of the city's bath commission, to study Philadelphia's bathing pools. Philadelphia was the most prolific early builder of municipal pools, operating nine at the time. All but three were located in residential slums and, according to Kearns, attracted only "the lower classes or street gamins." City officials had built the austere pools during the 1880s and early 1890s—before the germ theory of disease transmission was popularly accepted—and intended them to provide baths for working-class men and women, who used them on alternating days. The facilities lacked showers, because the pools themselves were the instruments of cleaning. Armed with the relatively new knowledge of the microbe, Kearns was disturbed to see unclean boys plunging into the water: "I must say that some of the street gamins, both white and colored, that I saw, were quite as dirty as it is possible for one to conceive." While the unclean boys shocked Kearns, blacks and whites swimming together elicited no surprise. He commented extensively on the shared class status of the "street gamins" and their dirtiness but mentioned their racial diversity only in passing. Nor did racial difference seem to matter much to the swimmers, at least not in this social context. The pools were wildly popular. Each one recorded an average of 144,000 swims per summer, or about 1,500 swimmers per day.

Fifty-three years later, the scene at a municipal pool in Youngstown, Ohio, was quite different. A Little League baseball team had won the 1951 city championship and decided to celebrate at the local pool. The large facility was situated within the sylvan beauty of the city's Southside Park, not in a residential slum. The pool itself was surrounded by a broad deck and grassy lawn, both of which provided swimmers ample space to play games or lie in the sun. The pool was clearly intended to promote leisure, not cleanliness. To celebrate their baseball victory, coaches, players, parents, and siblings showed up at the pool, but not all were admitted. One player, Al Bright, was denied entrance because he was black. The lifeguards forced him to sit on the lawn outside the fence as everyone else played in the pool. The unwritten rule was clear, one guard told the coach, "Negroes are not permitted in the pool area." After an hour had passed, several parents pleaded with the guards to let Al into the pool for at least a couple of minutes. Finally, the supervisor relented; Al could "enter" the pool as long as everyone else got out and he sat inside a rubber raft. As his teammates and other bystanders looked on, a lifeguard pushed him once around the pool. "Just don't touch the water," the guard constantly reminded him, "whatever you do, don't touch the water."

Cairo, Illinois

How is it that so much had changed in those fifty years? At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together. As the opening vignettes suggest, this social, cultural, and institutional transformation occurred during the first half of the twentieth century and involved the central developments of the period: urbanization, the erosion of Victorian culture, Progressive reform, the emergence of popular recreation, the gender integration and racial segregation of public space, and the sexualization of public culture. In short, the history of swimming pools dramatizes America's contested transition from an industrial to a modern society.

June, 1964. Black children integrate the swimming pool of the Monson Motel. To force them out, the owner pours acid into the water.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools. Desegregation was a primary cause of the proliferation of private swimming pools that occurred after the mid-1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, tens of millions of mostly white middle-class Americans swam in their backyards or at suburban club pools, while mostly African and Latino Americans swam at inner-city municipal pools. America's history of socially segregated swimming pools thus became its legacy.

Throughout their history, municipal pools served as stages for social conflict. Latent social tensions often erupted into violence at swimming pools because they were community meeting places, where Americans came into intimate and prolonged contact with one another. People who might otherwise come in no closer contact than passing on the street, now waited in line together, undressed next to one another, and shared the same water. The visual and physical intimacy that accompanied swimming made municipal pools intensely contested civic spaces. Americans fought over where pools should be built, who should be allowed to use them, and how they should be used.

Integrating St. Augustine's "white only" beaches. "I remember the wade-ins because the bump hasn't gone off my jaw yet. They started yelling obscenities at us, but we went on — myself and a group of teen-age girls. We were afraid but we felt we just had to go on." — Dorothy Cotton, SCLC.

This is a very different view of urban space than presented by historians John Kasson, Kathy Peiss, and David Nasaw. They characterize commercial amusements at the turn of the twentieth century—such as Coney Island, dance halls, and movie houses—as social melting pots that rather painlessly dissolved earlier class and gender divisions but reinforced racial distinctions. According to Nasaw, "'going out' meant laughing, dancing, cheering, and weeping with strangers with whom one might—or might not—have anything in common. . . . Only persons of color were excluded or segregated from the audience." Kasson makes essentially the same point when he concludes that commercial amusements "help[ed] to knit a heterogeneous audience into a cohesive whole."

Woman by sign blown down during hurricane: Virginia Beach, Florida (1950). Virginia Beach is off the coast of Miami in Dade County.

Just the opposite was true at swimming pools early in the twentieth century. Northerners' use of municipal pools throughout the Progressive Era reinforced class and gender divisions but not racial distinctions. Cities strictly segregated pools along gender lines, and people from different social classes almost never swam together. In many cases, middle-class northerners fought vigorously to ensure that working-class swimmers did not intrude upon their recreation spaces. By contrast, blacks and working-class whites commonly swam together, often without conflict.

Segregationists trying to prevent blacks from swimming at a "White only" beach (June 25, 1964)

All this changed during the 1920s, when northerners redrew the lines of social division at municipal pools. Different social classes of whites and both sexes plunged into the same pools and simultaneously excluded black Americans. This social reconstruction had many causes. The Great Black Migration contributed to the onset of racial segregation at pools by intensifying residential segregation in northern cities and heightening perceptions of black- white racial difference. Conversely, economic prosperity and the decline in European immigration mitigated perceptions of class and ethnic difference. Middle-class northerners generally became willing to swim in the same pools with working-class whites because they did not seem as poor, foreign, or unhealthy as before. Also, municipal pools became more appealing to the middle class during the 1920s because cities redesigned them as leisure resorts and typically located them in open and accessible parks rather than residential slums. At the same time, municipal officials began permitting males and females to swim together because they intended the new resort pools to promote family and community sociability. The concerns about intimacy and sexuality that had necessitated gender segregation previously did not disappear during the 1920s; rather, they were redirected at black Americans in particular. Whites in many cases quite literally beat blacks out of the water at gender-integrated pools because they would not permit black men to interact with white women at such intimate public spaces. Thus, municipal pools in the North continued to be intensely contested after 1920, but the lines of social division shifted from class and gender to race.

Historians have largely ignored this racial contest over public space in northern cities after 1920, focusing instead on housing, work discrimination, and schools. John McGreevy, for example, recently concluded that "racial violence in the North centered on housing and not, for the most part, on access to public space." This book tells a different story. The imposition of racial segregation at municipal pools was a violent and contested process in the North. Blacks and whites battled one another with their fists as well as with bats, rocks, and knives. Racial segregation succeeded not because black Americans acquiesced, but because white swimmers steadfastly attacked black swimmers who entered pools earmarked for whites and because public institutions—namely the police and courts—enforced the prejudice of the majority rather than the rights of minority.

Tallahassee, Florida: Swim team at Robinson Trueblood Swimming Pool on Dade Street was built by the city in response to wade-ins by blacks at all white pools. It was the only pool where blacks could swim and train as lifeguards.

The social reconstruction of municipal pools between 1920 and 1940 marked a fundamental shift in northern social values and patterns of social interaction. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the difference between people with "black" skin and those with "white" skin was a less significant social distinction than class. Furthermore, what we now think of as "race" was a less significant public social division than gender, class, and even generation. That changed during the 1920s, when race emerged as the most salient and divisive social distinction. Northern cities became fundamentally more integrated along class, gender, and generational lines, yet more segregated along racial lines. This racial division persisted throughout the rest of the twentieth century, despite court-ordered desegregation and the civil rights movement.

Savannah, Georgia Beach July 15, 1963: Two Negroes were arrested by local police and jeered and cursed by white people on the beach for swimming in the whites only water.

Northerners also contested public culture at municipal pools. During the late nineteenth century, working-class boys battled with Victorian public officials to determine the use and function of these new institutions. Public officials intended municipal pools to be used "seriously" as baths and fitness facilities. They were supposed to instill the working classes with middle-class values and habits of life. In defiance of these expectations, working-class boys transplanted their boisterous and pleasure-centered swimming culture from natural waters and defined municipal pools as public amusements. In doing so, they undermined Victorian public culture and helped popularize the pleasure-centered ethos that came to define modern American culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, swimmers refashioned attitudes about the body and cultural standards of public decency by what they wore and how they presented themselves at municipal pools. City officials attempted to dampen the sexual charge sparked by mixed-gender use and to limit exhibitionism and voyeurism by mandating conservative swimsuits. They could not, however, control popular demand. The acceptable size of swimsuits shrank during the interwar years and pools became eroticized public spaces. As a result, public objectification of the body became implicitly acceptable, and public decency came to mean exhibiting an attractive appearance rather than protecting one's modesty. The female nakedness and overt sexuality that pervade contemporary American culture originated, in part, at swimming pools. In these ways, ordinary Americans reshaped public culture by what they did and what they wore at municipal pools.

Civil Rights Series, Demonstrations at an "all-white" swimming pool in Cairo, Illinois, 1962

Municipal swimming pools were extraordinarily popular during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Cities throughout the country built thousands of pools—many of them larger than football fields—and adorned them with sand beaches, concrete decks, and grassy lawns. Tens of millions of Americans flocked to these public resorts to swim, sunbathe, and socialize. In 1933 an extensive survey of Americans' leisure-time activities conducted by the National Recreation Association found that as many people swam frequently as went to the movies frequently. In other words, swimming was as much a part of Americans' lives as was going to the movies. Furthermore, Americans attached considerable cultural significance to swimming pools during this period. Pools became emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure, and beauty. They were, in short, an integral part of the kind of life Americans wanted to live.

This story of tens of millions of Americans flocking to municipal pools, reshaping cultural standards, and redefining the meaning of the good life presents a very different view of modern American culture than offered by most historians. William Leach, Gary Cross, and Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears are unanimous in arguing that consumption and commercialism became the dominant cultural ethos in twentieth-century America, effectively wiping out all competing public cultures. In their introduction to The Culture of Consumption, Fox and Lears claim that "consumption became a cultural ideal, a hegemonic 'way of seeing' in twentieth-century America." Additionally, many cultural historians characterize Americans as passive receivers of this consumer culture supposedly created and popularized by marketers, movie producers, merchants, and entrepreneurs. As William Leach argues in Land of Desire, "the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most non-consensual public cultures ever created . . . it was not produced by 'the people' but by commercial groups in association with other elites." This was not the case at municipal swimming pools, where ordinary Americans helped create a vibrant public culture not primarily focused on spending money and consuming goods.

1964 Racial Confrontation on St. Augustine Beach. A confrontation of black demonstrators and white segregationists at a white-only beach in St. Augustine. (Photo: Florida State Archives)

Finally, the history of swimming pools reveals changes in the quality of community life and the extent of civic engagement in modern America. From the 1920s to the 1950s, municipal pools served as centers of community life and arenas for public discourse. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people gathered at these public spaces where the contact was sustained and interactive. Neighbors played, chatted, and flirted with one another, but they also fought with one another over who should and should not be allowed to swim and what sorts of activities and clothing were appropriate for this intimate public space. In short, community life was fostered, monitored, and disputed at municipal pools. The proliferation of private swimming pools after the mid-1950s, however, represented a retreat from public life. Millions of Americans abandoned public pools precisely because they preferred to pursue their recreational activities within smaller and more socially selective communities. Instead of swimming, socializing, and fighting with a diverse group of people at municipal pools, private-pool owners fenced themselves into their own backyards. The consequences have been, to a certain extent, atomized recreation and diminished public discourse.

This study focuses on the history of municipal swimming pools in the northern United States. I chose to focus on municipal pools because they enabled me to study the public lives of Americans from many different — and often overlapping—social groups: working-class whites, women, African Americans, immigrants, children, and the middle class. At one time or another, Americans from all these social groups frequented municipal pools and contested their use. This book also examines and interprets the history of private swimming pools, but mostly when that history is necessary for understanding what occurred at municipal pools. I chose to focus on the northern United States in order to make the research more manageable, and because I wanted to tell a coherent story rather than interpret regional variation. I have, however, defined the northern United States broadly, including cities such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. These cities certainly have a southern heritage, but the history of their municipal pools followed a very similar pattern to that of cities further north. Likewise, the pattern occurred not only in large cities but in smaller municipalities as well. It turns out that what happened at municipal pools, whether in St. Louis and Chicago or in Newton, Kansas, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, was all quite similar.

[From Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse. Copyright (c) 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press.]