POOL: A Social History of Segregation

Immersive EXHIBITION (www.poolphl.com)

4,700 sq. Ft. EXHIBITION, Companion magazine and website (www.poolphl.com)

OPENED march 2022

We are incredibly grateful for the way POOL has been honored since opening.

In May 2023, the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) announced that the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center was selected as a 2023 Award of Excellence winner by the Leadership in History awards committee for POOL: A Social History of Segregation.The AASLH Leadership in History Awards is the nation’s most prestigious competition for recognition of achievement in state and local history.

2022, POOL is the recipient of the Making an Impact Award by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums @midatlanticmuseums.

2022, POOL was highlighted by PBS station WHYY TV (@whyy) and received a Mid-Atlantic Emmy nomination for the WHYY Movers & Shakers story produced by Monica Rogozinski.

At the same time, POOL and the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center were honored with the @paenvironmentalcouncil's 2022 Special Places Award.

We also received an honorable mention in the Social Justice category in @fastcompany's 2022 Innovation by Design Awards.

And in February 2022, Victoria was deeply honored with a peer-nominated award for leadership and organizational excellence at the Diversity in Aquatics’ (DIA), annual conference. Dia is a national organization dedicated to increasing water safety and aquatic activities in historically underrepresented and vulnerable communities.

According to DIA’s Director of Education and Research Angela Beale-Tawfeeq, PhD., who nominated POOL for this recognition, “As evident in the historical breadth and creativity of the POOL exhibition, Victoria’s work and collaborative partnerships with multiple organizations was cultivated with the utmost of respect and humility. She honors those who came before, while opening conversations to a broader public. Her work is very much in alignment with Diversity In Aquatics’ 2022 convention theme of  ‘Co-Creating Equitable Aquatic Spaces: From Talk to Action’, and our mission to provide educational programming and awareness, and to equip vulnerable populations with the skills needed to be safe, and opportunity to participate in aquatic physical activities and environments.”

To date, more than 14,000 people have visited POOL and hundreds of guests have responded to our postcard campaign leaving thoughtful responses to be shared on our cabana wall.

Additionally, our artist collaborators are very happy with the commissioned work they created for POOL. Already, Lowell Boston’s commissioned animation film, Water Born has been accepted in 6 film festivals. It has received a Director’s Choice Award in the Thomas Edison Film Festival, and an Honorable Mention in Philadelphia’s Short Film Slam. Further, we have already begun to expand the project through a summer live-performance activation. Guest curators artist Homer Jackson and chef Valerie Erwin presented live musical performances (SPLASH JAZZ SERIES) and food pairings (CONCESSIONS) throughout the summer of 2022 to activate the exhibition and to explore themes of the exhibition. 

During much of the 20th century, public swimming pools played a vital role in the life of American communities. Cities and towns across the country opened thousands of pools that attracted tens of millions of swimmers each year. As Dr. Jeff Wiltse explains in Contested Waters: A Social history of Swimming Pools in America, these public pools served as important social spaces, where families and neighbors could bond and connect as a community, and where young and old could learn to swim and cool themselves on hot summer days.

However, these social spaces have also been platforms to fight over who was welcome to swim. Since the 1920s, the waters of our public pools have reflected the profound racial and economic divisions running through American communities, becoming spaces where communal life and cultural values and biases have been contested and disputed—sometimes violently.

Municipal pools are unique public spaces that reveal much about the character of community life because of the intimacy inherent in swimming together. They offer environments and experiences for extended social contact, with people spending hours or entire days recreating and communing together.

Public swimming pools are important sites of racial segregation and desegregation struggles throughout the United States and reveal much about the nation’s handling of race and racial difference throughout the twentieth century. Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, federal judges had already issued rulings declaring swimming pool segregation unconstitutional and injunctions forcing cities to desegregate public pools.

Past racial discrimination at swimming pools, coupled with a general shift of funds away from public pools to private swimming and recreational opportunities, have had a significant and lasting impact on Black communities—an impact that continues today.

• According to reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black children and teenagers are almost six times as likely as white children to drown in a swimming pool.

• USA Swimming reports that 69% of Black children have little to no swimming ability, compared with 42% of white children.

For many Black individuals and families, the answer to these growing disparities has been to avoid the water altogether or to stay in the shallow end or to pretend to be able to swim when forced into the water. But these self-protections fall short when the unexpected, and sometimes tragic, happens.

To change this cycle, people such as swimming champions Maritza Correia McClendon, Cullen Jones, Simone Manuel and Sabir Muhammad, and aquatic activists, researchers and scholars such as Ed Accura, Naji Ali, Kevin Colquitt, Dr. Kevin Dawson, Coach Jim Ellis, Rhonda Harper, Anthony Patterson, Sr. and Diversity in Aquatics Inc. (our featured swimming voices throughout this exhibition) believe the answer to correcting these disparities can be found in making the lifesaving skill of swimming available to all.

POOL was made possible by generous support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and The Philadelphia Water Department. We would also like to thank leadership of the FUND for The Fairmount Water Works and Philadelphia Parks and Recreation for their ongoing support for this project.

Much of the historic content of POOL was provided by and/or written in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Wiltse, who generously made his extensive research available to the makers of POOL.

The John B. Kelly Foundation operated the Fairmount Water Works Pool (known as the "Aquarium Pool" by those who swam there) towards the end of the nation's public pool era. The pool opened in 1962 and closed in 1972 following devastating Hurricane Agnes. Philadelphia newspaper clippings at the time reveal immense public support for water safety and aquatic recreation because of a lack of access to swimming lessons for children, and the frequency of local drownings in the region’s rivers and creeks. This deficiency, a systemic public health failure, has yet to be resolved.

Philadelphia Swim to Live

THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA WAS PROLIFIC IN EARLY POOL CONSTRUCTION, OPENING THE FIRST OUTDOOR MUNICIPAL POOL IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1883, AND OPERATING NINE POOLS BY 1898.

Philadelphia’s view of swimming as a critical public health issue got another boost in 1954, with the start of Swim to Live, a citywide summertime program to teach elementary-aged kids to swim. The program was started by a newly formed Philadelphia Aquatic Council, a consortium of groups that included the Board of Education, the American Red Cross, Boys Clubs of America, Boy Scouts, Catholic Youth Organization, Fairmount Park Recreation Department, Girl Scouts, Philadelphia Department of Recreation, Temple University, Swimming Directors' Society, University of Pennsylvania, YMCA and YWCA.

For more than 20 years, through Swim to Live, Philadelphia’s public pools opened their doors each morning to teach kids to swim for free prior to opening to the public for the remainder of the day. This essential morning swim program also fed swimmers to inner-city competitive teams such as Coach John Williams’ Polar Bears, Coach Malachi and Olivia Cunningham's Tigersharks and Coach Jim Ellis's PDR swim clubs—all founded between 1969 and 1971. In 1977, however, the city ended the Swim to Live program, and has yet to replace it. Almost 50 years later, PDR is the only inner-city Philadelphia swim club still in existence.

Learn-to-swim programs and competitive swim teams can provide young people with job opportunities as lifeguards and water safety instructors, as well as college scholarship opportunities for athletes. Yet today, many of Philadelphia’s pools remain underfunded and under-supported. 

Philadelphia has made some recent positive leaps with progressive efforts such as the UPenn student-run We Can Swim! program offering free swimming lessons to Black and Hispanic communities. Initiatives like this aim to transform Philadelphia’s swimming community with opportunities that help save lives and expand essential aquatic opportunities for all.

Drowning is the fifth leading cause of unintentional injury death for people of all ages in the United States, and the second leading cause of injury death for children ages one to fourteen years. In fact, drowning is responsible for more deaths among children ages one to four than any other cause except birth defects.

For every child who dies from drowning, another five receive emergency care for nonfatal submersion injuries.

In Pennsylvania, Black children have a 50% higher rate of accidental drowning than white children—1.2 deaths per 100,000 population for Blacks vs. 0.8 deaths per 100,000 for whites. This disparity has remained unchanged for more than 20 years.

White boys are 3.5 times more likely to drown than white girls, while Black boys are 4.5 times more likely to drown than Black girls.

Source: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC)/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) WISQARS Leading Cause of Death Statistics Database, 1999-2019 & CDC Prevention Water Safety Facts

Project Collaborators:

PROJECT FOUNDER, CREATIVE VISIONING, DIRECTION and PRODUCTION 

Victoria A. Prizzia and Habithèque Inc.

COMMISSIONED ART INSTALLATIONS 

James Ijames, POOL Co-Creator, Playwright and Director
Ed Accura
Lowell Boston
Dylan B. Caleho
Daisy Burner
Liz Corman
Modupeola Fadugba
Homer Jackson
Azikiwe Mohammed
Calo Rosa
Cathleen Dean
Aubrie Costello

FEATURED VOICES

Naji Ali
Dr. Angela Beale-Tawfeeq
Kevin Colquitt
Maritza Correia McClendon
Malachi and Olivia Cunningham
Jim Ellis
Rhonda Harper
Cullen Jones 
Dr. Miriam Lynch
Simone Manuel
Sabir Muhammad
Anthony Patterson, Sr.

EXPERTS AND ADVISORS

Dr. Jeff Wiltse
Dr. Kevin Dawson
Bruce Wigo

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Joanne Dahme
Connie Harvey
Dan Schupsky
Theresa R. Stuhlman
Cescaphe
Discovery PHL, PHL Sports and PHL Diversity
Diversity in Aquatics, Inc.
National Drowning Prevention Alliance, The Red Cross
Nile Swim Club
Parks on Tap
Philadelphia Magazine
Philadelphia Parks and Recreation
USA Swimming
We Can Swim! UPENN

ART ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Teresa Jaynes
Kamau Ware

PR and Marketing

15 Minutes Inc.

INTERACTIVE MEDIA COMPONENTS and MEDIA INTEGRATION 

Greenhouse Media 

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Gecko Group 

ARCHITECTURAL RENOVATIONS 

Mark B. Thompson & Associates 
Jason Roberts Metalworks
Erector Sets

EXHIBIT CONTENT and ARCHIVAL RESEARCH

Handymakes Studio

EXHIBIT ARCHITECTURE, FABRICATION and INSTALLATION 

Hands On! Studio
Universal Services Associates, Inc.

GRAPHIC CARDS SHOWN TOP RIGHT BY

Maria Shaplin