Swimming against the tide of
desegregation Integration came late, if at all, to public pools in Little Rock.
COURTESY BUTLER CENTER FOR ARKANSAS STUDIES
F
BY JOHN A. KIRK
ifty years ago, on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The act tackled segregated education, voting rights, women’s rights and worker’s rights. Its most immediate impact, however, came in ordering the abolition of segregation in all “public accommodations.” Little Rock was already ahead of the curve in most areas of desegregation. In 1963, it had implemented a program to allow equal use of many public and some private facilities downtown. Jet magazine quoted James Forman, national executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), saying that Little Rock was “just about the most integrated [city] in the south.” But Little Rock, as many other places, faced one final hurdle: desegregating public swimming pools. Pools brought African Americans and whites into close and intimate contact more than any other publicly sponsored facility. This in turn touched on the fraught issue of African-American men and white women bathing together in states of undress. And with that came deep-seated white fears of miscegenation. Little Rock’s first public swimming pool opened in the Pulaski Heights amusement area known as White City on June 16, 1922. The pool operated for 17 seasons before finally closing in 1939 when the land was sold to developers to create a new subdivision in the city’s first, fastest growing, and exclusively all-white suburb. After the closure of the White City Pool, the Little Rock Recreation Commission proposed a city bond to fund a 45 per cent share in a new pool at a cost of $47,000. The other 55 percent came from the federal New Deal agency the Works Projects Administration (WPA). CONTINUED ON PAGE 15
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