McCarren Park Pool, July 1937.
“Youths” stake their claim on $50 million facility.
Most white Americans celebrate “diversity” only in the abstract. Residential and social segregation ensure little contact with non-whites, and many families change zip codes or pay private school tuition to send their children to “good”—white—schools.
Public areas like buses, subways, parks, and fair grounds are places where whites experience racial diversity. They are also where racial tension is high, and the newly renovated McCarren Park Pool in New York City is no exception. Non-whites have created such an atmosphere of violence and disorder since its reopening in June that many whites have avoided the $50 million facility.
History
At the turn of the 20th century, major cities built large public swimming pools, where Americans of all races could find relief from the summer heat. In many Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, these pools were integrated by race, but separated by sex and class.
As Jeff Wiltse explains in his book Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, it was considered inappropriate for the sexes to swim together, so they used separate pools or swam in the same pools at different times. Public swimming pools were mostly used by working-class Americans, many of whom were black or recent European immigrants. Middle- and upper-class Americans avoided the pools since they considered blacks and ethnic whites unclean, foreign, and poor, and were afraid of catching diseases from the water.
This changed in the 1920s and 1930s. Less Victorian attitudes toward sex and the improved economic status of ethnic whites turned municipal pools into melting pots for the sexes and for working- and middle-class Americans—but led to segregation of blacks.
It was one thing for blacks to swim with whites of the same sex, but whites did not want blacks around semi-clothed white women. Mr. Wiltse says this was a primary, if unstated, reason for segregating pools. >>more<<
McCarren entry archway and bathhouse wings.
thank you wiggerproblem
Short URL: http://www.newsnet14.com/?p=126799
No comments:
Post a Comment