You mentioned while you were in Nebraska you
worked with the black community, and I think
there was the incident that I'm aware of in
terms of your efforts to desegregate a swimming
pool.
Can you tell me that story and how that happened?
Well, I was doing playground work for the
city.
And what city?
Is this Lincoln?
Lincoln.
And before they changed the pool, changed
the water in the pool, they let kids swim
free.
And when I went to the city hall to get the
tickets to pass around, they said, "Don't
give any tickets to the black children," or,
"the colored children," they said.
"Colored" was an accepted word at that time.
So I said, "Well, you'd better keep them all.
I'm not going to sneak around and hand out
tickets here and there and pass up others."
And the more I thought about it, the madder
I got.
And so I decided I would resign, and I sent
in a letter of resignation and sent a letter,
sent a copy to all the playground directors
in the city.
The only guy who quit was a guy who worked
with me who was black, and a veteran who had
had white troops under him and so forth, and
he was an angry person, so he was even angrier
than I was, to the point where he couldn't
rationalize.
He would have been a great Black Panther if
the Black Panther movement had been present,
but it wasn't.
As a matter of fact, blacks were fairly passive
at that time.
And anyway, nothing was happening, so I decided
I'd go to the city hall and talk to them at
a city council meeting.
And they, I said, "You're in violation of
the state statute."
Well, first of all, I got some kids together,
there was a guy in graduate, taking graduate
college who was a professor at Southern University
in Louisiana, which is the black part of LSU
at that time.
And he came with me, and we tried to get into
the swimming pool, and they wouldn't let him
in.
So I got, I just wanted to make a test.
And so I went to the city council and said,
"You're in violation of state statute," they
had a very good state statute that wasn't
enforced, but they had a very good, very specific
statute from, from way back.
And the upshot was that they said, "Not one
black has asked for, or not one colored person
has asked for what you're asking for."
And they said, "Would you be happy if they,
if we made a swimming pool in the colored
neighborhood?"
And I said, "No, that's not, that's still
in violation of your statute."
And they said, "Not one colored person has
asked for what you're asking for."
So I went to the Urban League, and I was active
with the NAACP anyway, so I went to them and
told them what was happening, and went to
some of the black preachers.
And I knew the Urban League person because
they'd asked me to come talk to career day
or something, to some of their kids.
And so I, anyway, we, their city hall will
seat maybe two hundred people, and we had
over two hundred people there, at least half
of them black.
And other people were very helpful were some
veterans coming back from the war, American
Veterans Committee, they were very, kind of
answered to the American Legion, very liberal
group.
And so they had no choice but to open the
swimming pool.
And then a cold spell set in, so nobody went
to the swimming pool.
And the guy tried to, the playground director
tried to blame it on the fact that they had
opened the swimming pool, and so I got a friend
of mine, one of the AVC guys who went down
and did some research on temperature tables
and we gave them all these temperature tables,
told them that was probably the reason.
And anyway, it stayed open after that, but
you know, it was not a big thing.
It seemed big at the time, and in a way it
was kind of a defining moment for me.
