Water was a physical constant during the humid, cicada-buzzing summers of my southern childhood. I remember the thrill of running through the chilly arcs of water from yard sprinklers. The clear-blue water in swimming pools. The Gulf waves roaring ashore on our vacation island. And, the streams that converged behind our home, where my sister and I watched scuttling crayfish and fell asleep to the murmuring sound of moving water.
My privileged, white family could swim in any public pool in Atlanta, join a private club with a pool, or just wade into the ocean from any beach. Born into the segregated South in the early 1950s, I don’t recall ever wondering why there weren’t any Black children swimming with me in those mid-century years. Not noticing was just the way things were.
Mid-Century Atlanta
A few years after my family moved to Atlanta in the mid-1950s, we joined the private Venetian Pool in Decatur, not a short drive from our home on the outskirts of Buckhead. It was a nice pool that is, today, clear about its anti-discriminatory policies. When I was a child—I recently learned—there was (appallingly) a sign at the pool entrance announcing that membership was restricted by race and religion.
We also swam at the public pool in Chastain Park, closer to our home. It was a whites-only facility, one of nine in the city at the time; there were three (smaller) Black public pools. On June 12, 1963, when I was twelve years old, Chastain was desegregated along with the other city pools. I don’t have any memories of this momentous occasion—or the hateful scene at Lake Clara Meer in Piedmont Park, when several young Black men entered the lake that had been whites-only for so long.
Swimming in motel pools was another highlight of my childhood, as my family traveled throughout the South. Since Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in public accommodations at the time, other children with pale skin were our only swimming companions. I never noticed this injustice, or so many others.
The Pool is Closed
An insightful new book, The Pool is Closed, by local author and urban designer Hannah Palmer describes the racial politics and environmental history surrounding public access to natural and man-made waters in Atlanta over the past century. A keen observer, thorough investigator, and wonderful storyteller, Palmer has written a heartfelt memoir of a young mother seeking safe, inexpensive places to take her children swimming.
The book is also an unflinching examination of the ways that race and class have long kept Black (and other non-white) families from finding the joy, skills, and health benefits that come with this rite of summer.
Palmer began her search for public pools and local creeks where her young sons could play and learn to swim in 2017. As they swam their way across the city, Palmer recorded what she saw and felt in a journal. Her perspective was as a mother, social historian, urban planner, and clean water champion. She found stories of lost (read: filled in) pools and lakes, shameful injustices at public facilities in some neighborhoods (past and present), and rivers unswimmable due to pollution, urban engineering, and blight. East Point, her hometown on the southside of Atlanta, presents a particularly enlightening case study.
Her research led to a project with Flux Projects called Ghost Pools that included large format graphics with historic photos accompanying a detailed timeline of swimming in Atlanta. The original footprints of the pools Palmer found in East Point were outlined by markers, flags, paint, and diving boards to illustrate exactly where each pool was located.
Grand Resorts, White Flight
In the early decades of the 20th century, the centerpieces of Atlanta’s grandest parks were spring-fed swimming lakes, such as Lake Clara Meer and six-acre Lake Abana in Grant Park. Built in resort-style with federal funding, these community recreation spaces gave working families an opportunity to swim together: “democratizing swimming” for middle-class, white Americans. The first and only pool in the city designated for Black residents opened in Washington Park in 1940.
With the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was outlawed at all facilities open to the public. The city of Atlanta drained Lake Abana to avoid desegregation and turned the land into a parking lot—not the last time for such an action in our city “too busy to hate.”
Throughout the sixties and beyond, white flight to the suburbs moved tax dollars for public amenities to places that remained segregated. Atlanta’s pools fell into disrepair and closed; the private pool industry boomed. Summers in the city were never the same, despite federal anti-poverty programs that funded new pools and playground sprinklers to “cool the unrest” in inner cities. Racist decision-making led to inadequate investment in public pools that were drained across the South.
New Commitment
In recent years, there has been a growing commitment to restore our rivers and lakes to meet the “swimmable” goal of the federal Clean Water Act. Advocates for clean water are demanding that these waterways be restored for public use. Polluted for decades, the Chattahoochee River downstream of Atlanta is now dramatically cleaner. Local governments and nonprofits are bringing this section of the river back to life for recreation for everyone
Today, there are a dozen outdoor community pools in Atlanta: the same number that existed when the city’s swimming pools were desegregated more than sixty years ago. As Palmer describes in her book, pools in some low-income, minority neighborhoods have not been prioritized and are in disrepair. There also remains the perception—rooted in the history of racism, hygiene concerns, and a decline in public funding—that public pools are not safe.
There is “a basic human craving for water and community,” says Palmer. As the climate crisis accelerates and temperatures rise, the need for cooling waters will only grow. Optimistically, she believes that bold and creative solutions at the local level are not only vital but achievable.
Palmer will discuss and sign The Pool Is Closed on Aug. 19 at 6 p.m. at Northside Library. Get more details and register here.
