by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

Eager for her two young sons to take swimming lessons, Hannah Palmer was told the former public swimming pool in her East Point, Ga., neighborhood closed in the 1960s, because it fell into “disrepair,” a simple enough answer. A too simple answer that avoided confronting “things too sad to talk about,” Palmer observed. Feb. 16 in Convocation Hall, writer, researcher, and installation artist Palmer shared insight into the “why” beneath the burial of the East Point pool. Her newest book “The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim” tells that story, a story that is far from an isolated incident peculiar to the East Point community neighboring Atlanta. Not coincidentally, the burial of public swimming pools throughout the United States in the 1960s coincided with the 1964 Civil Rights Act ending desegregation.

During the 1940s, the Work Progress Administration (WPA) funded constructing swimming pools in small communities throughout the country. “How you make anything happen in a community is people put in the elbow grease. It’s not just tax dollars,” Palmer insisted. The original spring-fed WPA pool in East Point was replaced, but the new Spring Avenue pool, like WPA pools elsewhere, thrived because it was a community project. “A lot of the maintenance was done by volunteers,” Palmer stressed.

The same spirit of volunteerism sustained the Randall Street pool constructed for the black East Point community in 1954. Although one-fourth the size of the Spring Avenue pool in a location Palmer described as “across the tracks,” the same spirit of enthusiasm prevailed. At both pools, photographs depict vibrant, energetic crowds. Today, though, a parking lot sits on top of the Randall Street pool and a history museum on the site of the Spring Avenue pool, a museum that did not acknowledge the pool even existed until Palmer began researching the pool’s history.

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a bomb threat closed the Spring Avenue pool for the rest of the summer. The following summer regulations stipulated people could only swim in the pool in the neighborhood where they lived, in effect segregating the black and white East Point pools. Curious about if the East Point pools were ever desegregated, Palmer asked the current police chief, an African American. His answer: his mother forbid him to swim in the Spring Avenue pool. “For the black community, there was a sense you weren’t welcome or safe at the white pools,” Palmer speculated.

And soon, in East Point and small towns all across the United States the WPA pools and their successors were buried. “A generation lost their pools and never got them back,” Palmer said. The white community withdrew their support for the pools. The money went into private pools or country clubs, circumstances exacerbated by white flight.

The story of Sewanee’s swimming pools follows a similar path, noted Woody Register, Director of the Sewanee Roberson Project for Race and Reconciliation, sponsor for Palmer’s visit. The Fowler Center, constructed in 1994, sits on the site of the Juhann Gymnasium pool celebrated as being “open to the entire community” at the 1957 dedication — for the entire “white” community that is, following the directive of benefactor Jesse Bell duPont who paid for the “whites only” pool. The same year, Sewanee built a separate pool for the black population. In 1959, the first African Americans enrolled in the seminary, the Reverend Joseph Green and the Reverend Bill O’Neal. Although instructed to use the black community pool, Green and O’Neal went to swim at the pool in the gym. The other swimmers got out of the water, Register recounted, and the next day a sign appeared on the door, “closed for the summer.”

To bring attention to the story of the country’s buried swimming pools, Palmer constructed installations at the site of the two East Point pools, as well as at the site of a buried WPA pool in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “Maintaining a swimming pool is not a small project,” Palmer said in closing. “How we hold onto water is similar to how we hold onto history. Someone needs to be tending it and maintaining it constantly as a labor of love. Without that it slips away.”