... this mentality. It runs beyond the black/white divide and he sites (anachronistic) California bans on Mexicans in swimming pools and early white immigrants ( from Northern Europe) distinguishing themselves from later ( "darker&quot arrivals ( Jews and Italians , mostly) who were also restricted from pools.

Irony there is... southern whites ( and northern whites, for that matter) didn't seem to mind black women cooking , caring ( even *nursing*) white kids. Can't get much more intimate than that.

Doesn't make a lot of sense logically but who said people were rationale?

Good commentary on the subject in today's NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/opinion/who-gets-to-go-to-the-pool.html?_r=0

performing in a hotel, I believe in Las Vegas. When she was escorted to her room they passed the swimming pool. On a spur of the moment urge Dorothy took off a shoe and dipped her foot in the pool and then proceeded to go to her room. The hotel drained and cleaned the pool because of that.

It was like Sammy Davis Jr could perform at the Sands, but couldn't go gambling there afterwards. Insane.

Asshats.

Nine days to Juneteenth.

This is another example where economic justice does not address racism.

And so the concern among white swimmers and public officials that if blacks and whites swam together at these resort pools in which the culture was highly sexualized, that black men would assault white women with romantic advances, that they would try to make physical contact with them, and that this was unacceptable to most northern whites ...

For a different reason, the Dorothy Dandridge incident is a pretty good example of white people thinking that we contaminate the water with our blackness.

I remembered contributing to it, so I just googled it up -- the link is http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6031852

It's worth have a look at for some of the reminiscences.

... There was a court case that emerged added an attempt by the local NAACP to desegregate the municipal pools in Baltimore. And this was right after Brown v. Board of Education. And so the local attorney argued that, well, schools may be being desegregated, but we can't have swimming pools be desegregated because swimmers come in potentially intimate contact with one another.

I usually swim two or three times a week as part of my exercise regimen. I've never seen and never had this intimate contact they claim exists. Sounds like someone has a rather sex obsessed mind.

Especially people with disabilities, many of whom derive their income from benefit programs such as SSI and could not afford housing otherwise.

And you don't "go back to Section 8". It isn't a housing project. That's the whole point of Section 8. You can use it to rent any apartment where the landlord will take it, and HUD pays the difference between 30 percent of your income and what it determines is the fair market rent for your area.

...when public pools were ordered by courts to desegregate in the late '50's in Texas, many simply closed down, instead of complying with the order to admit blacks and were sold to private interests - became swimming clubs which were allowed to exclude blacks.

Moreover, the combination of access to cheap labor and materials, coupled with the desegregation order, actually sparked a boom in private, home-based pools at the time. That disparity of access to swimming pools created a wide gap in the numbers of blacks, compared to whites, who knew how to swim. It's significant that some residents in this white-majority neighborhood, which is segregated by restricted access to housing for many blacks, was so concerned about the apperance of black kids at a pool they obviously coveted as exclusive to their own race.

Interesting side note - my father traveled to Texas in the mid-seventies in his role as a civil rights officer in the EEOC to investigate discrimination in access to some public pools in that state. I recall how he took pleasure in the fact that his agency's authority was bolstered with newly approved subpoena power which he used as a persuasive lever against officials there (previously they were only able to testify in cases as 'friends of the court'). I don't know if he prevailed, or the impact of that visit, but I do remember how he spoke of the encounter with pride. He had grown up in Reading, Pa. and did his swimming in his youth in lakes and ponds. It probably wasn't a coincidence that when we moved to the mostly segregated at the time suburb of Bethesda, Md. he chose a home with a built-in pool (as well as obtaining a membership in the neighborhood YMCA).