Desegregation of Swimming Pools

Siamese crocodiles
both want the taste of food.
When I’m fed
you’re fed.
Today we share the pool.
No “Whites Only” sign.
But will hate change its mind?
Leaping from the diving board
is the closest thing to flyin’!

- Ellamonique Baccus

“The Black Man in America must be accepted fully by the society; he must be granted his full constitutional rights and his just share of power and wealth in America.”

- Chester I. Lewis, Jr.

When the U.S. government built forty swimming pools in towns across Kansas during the 1930s, Black people were denied access to them. Black children had to learn to swim in rivers, and drownings were common.

In Hutchinson, KS, Chester I. Lewis, Sr., editor of the Black newspaper The Hutchinson Blade, ran a photograph of the only pool in Hutchinson available to Black people, a pool filled with algae and lily pads with no room for swimmers.

His son Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a 23-year-old lawyer new to Wichita, brought the first civil rights suit against the City of Wichita (joined by John E. Pyles). They sued over the denial of access to Wichita’s pools in 1953 and won.

Chester Lewis, Jr. obtained injunctions against the cities of Parsons and Herrington for preventing Black families from using city pools. As a result, in 1955, The Hutchinson News-Herald reported that “The Kansas Supreme Court ruled …[that] the city of Parsons has no right to refuse the privileges of its municipal swimming pool to a . . . Negro.”

The state court ruling set the precedent that municipal swimming pools across Kansas must admit Black people. Lewis’s action is why the court ruled that people could not be prevented from swimming in city pools across Kansas because of the color of their skin.

Despite this Kansas Supreme Court ruling, hostile white people found ways around the ruling. Pools in Lawrence, KS, remained closed to Black people until 1969. And, nationally, in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Jackson, MS, to close its public pools rather than integrate them [Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217].

Banning Black people from public pools may explain why a high proportion of African Americans did not learn to swim and why hurricanes and floods caused so many to drown.

In 1969, Black architect Charles McAfee, a close friend of Chester Lewis, designed the first Kansas pool accessible to African Americans that was properly sized for competitive swimming. In 2021, the award-winning pool was renamed for McAfee.

For more information, visit the Wichita Public Library's page on Chester I. Lewis.
Follow this link for more resources on segregation in swimming pools.