The CDC says young people are at greater risk of drowning if they don’t have access to a pool
where they can learn to swim.
That fact explains why Seattle's ten public pools offer swimming lessons to children at reduced cost,
and makes clear how water safety and civil rights were linked in the efforts to integrate
Seattle’s Colman Pool in the 1940s.
The public pool at Lincoln Park opened on July 4, 1941.
White kids loved it, and had exclusive use of the pool because ticket sellers turned away
Japanese and black children on the order of the parks department supervisor.
Shelley Sang-Hee Lee covers the story in her book Claiming the Oriental Gateway,
and writes that Japanese and blacks demanded equal access to the pool.
They swayed the city’s mayor to condemn the discrimination, but an informal whites-only policy
remained in effect.
Yosh Nakagawa, in Natasha Varner’s article “Segregated Swimming,”
remembered the informal discrimination:
When WWII erupted, civil rights and swimming remained intertwined.
At the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho,
where the United States forcibly relocated many of Seattle’s Japanese,
an eleven-year-old boy slipped and fell into a canal in June 1943.
The camp newspaper said his five friends, “none of them knowing how to swim,”
were unable to rescue the boy and he died.
In August, a University of Washington sophomore, who the paper reported was known to “not swim well,”
also perished in a canal.
To encourage safer swimming, internees dug a hole, filled it with irrigation water, and posted lifeguards.
Building the swimming hole was an impressive achievement, but it is chilling to wonder if the drownings
that pointed to its need could have been averted if the boys involved had been allowed
an opportunity to learn to swim at Colman Pool.
While Seattle’s Japanese remained held in internment camps, black activists continued working to end the
whites-only swimming policy at Colman Pool.
According to Dr. Quintard Taylor, Jr., author of The Forging of a Black Community,
black University of Washington students succeeded in integrating the pool in 1944.
Today, Colman Pool has a strict non-discrimination policy.
Although past discrimination at swimming pools still haunts us in figures that show black children drown
at higher rates than whites—Colman Pool now lives up to its potential as an aquatic resource for ALL children
in Seattle,
thanks to civil rights leaders in the Japanese and black communities in the 1940s
who demanded equal access to public facilities.
See the Seattle Parks website for a program of lessons and swimming activities at Colman Pool
that are open to everyone.
