Why Black America Doesn’t Swim — And Why It Kills 150 Children Every Year

On a June afternoon in 2010, six teenagers waded into the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana, at a spot where the bottom dropped away without warning, and within minutes, six of them were dead. DeKendrix Warner, 14, had stepped into the deeper water first and gone under. Takeitha Warner, 13, JaMarcus Warner, 14, Litrelle Stewart, 18, LaDairus Stewart, 17, and JaTavious Warner, 17, went in after him, each trying to save the one before, each pulled down by the current and the weight of their own inability to swim. None of the six could swim. Not one. Six children dead in a river on a summer day because they had never been taught the skill that could have saved them, a skill that most of white America considers as fundamental as riding a bicycle.

This was not an anomaly. It was a data point in a pattern so consistent and so devastating that it should be considered a public health emergency, and it would be, if the children who were dying were not disproportionately Black and poor. According to the USA Swimming Foundation, 64% of Black children in America have little to no swimming ability, compared to 40% of white children. Black children between the ages of 5 and 19 drown at 5.5 times the rate of white children in the same age group. In swimming pools specifically, the disparity is even more extreme. These numbers represent hundreds of preventable deaths every year — children whose lives end in a few minutes of terror in water that, for most of their peers, is a source of recreation and joy.

The Pools They Closed Rather Than Share

The story of why Black America does not swim begins where so many stories about racial disparity in this country begin: with a deliberate act of exclusion so thoroughgoing in its execution and so enduring in its consequences that it continues to kill children sixty years after the laws that sanctioned it were struck down. In the first half of the twentieth century, America went on a public pool building spree. Thousands of municipal swimming pools were constructed across the country, funded by taxpayer dollars, operated by local governments, and understood as public amenities in the same category as parks and libraries. They were, in many cities, the center of community recreational life.

They were also, almost universally, segregated. And the pools built for Black communities were fewer, smaller, less maintained, and often nonexistent. Jeff Wiltse, a historian at the University of Montana, documented this history in his essential work Contested Waters, which traces the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from public swimming pools and the catastrophic consequences of that exclusion for swimming ability across generations.

When the civil rights movement forced the integration of public facilities, what happened at the pools was different from what happened at the lunch counters and the buses. At lunch counters, white patrons grumbled and eventually adjusted. At pools, white communities responded with a fury that revealed something primal about the terror of shared water, of Black bodies and white bodies in the same intimate, exposed, nearly naked space. In city after city, rather than allow Black children to swim alongside white children, municipalities chose to close their public pools entirely. St. Louis drained its pools. Montgomery, Alabama shut down every public pool in the city. Across the South and in many Northern cities, public swimming infrastructure that had been built with taxpayer dollars — including Black taxpayer dollars — was destroyed rather than integrated.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

What replaced the public pools, in many communities, was nothing. Or, in wealthier areas, private swim clubs that charged membership fees calibrated to exclude, that applied subjective admissions criteria that functioned as race-neutral proxies for exclusion, that took what had been a public good and privatized it in a way that ensured its benefits would flow exclusively to white families. The result was that an entire generation of Black children came of age without access to swimming facilities, without exposure to swimming culture, and without the opportunity to learn the skill that, in a country where water is everywhere — pools, lakes, rivers, beaches, bathtubs — is literally a matter of life and death.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fear

The most insidious consequence of this history is not the absence of pools. Pools can be built. Programs can be funded. Access can be restored. The most insidious consequence is the fear that was created in the generation that was excluded and that has been transmitted, with the reliability of a genetic trait, to every generation since. Parents who cannot swim do not teach their children to swim. This is not a racial characteristic. It is a universal human behavior. A parent who has never been in water, who fears water, who associates water with the danger that ignorance of swimming creates, does not take her child to the pool. She does not enroll her child in swim lessons. She may actively discourage her child from going near water, because her fear is legitimate — a child who cannot swim and enters water may die, and she knows this because she cannot swim either.

The USA Swimming Foundation’s research has documented this intergenerational pattern with devastating clarity. Among children whose parents did not know how to swim, nearly 90% reported that they themselves had little to no swimming ability. The fear cascades through families. A grandmother who was turned away from a public pool in 1958 raised a daughter who was never taught to swim, who raised a son who is terrified of water, who is raising children who will drown at 5.5 times the rate of their white classmates. The segregation ended. The pools opened, theoretically. But the damage had been done at the level of family culture, and family culture does not respond to legislation.

Hair and the Barrier Nobody Wants to Name

There is another barrier to swimming participation among Black Americans, particularly Black girls and women, and it is one that tends to provoke either dismissal or discomfort depending on who is hearing it. Hair. The maintenance of Black hair — natural or processed — is a significant cultural, economic, and time investment, and chlorinated pool water is destructive to it. A swim session that a white girl treats as a casual afternoon activity can represent, for a Black girl, hours of post-swim hair care, the potential ruination of a hairstyle that cost hundreds of dollars, and the judgment of a community in which hair is not a trivial matter but a complex signifier of identity, self-care, and belonging.

Research has confirmed what anyone who has listened to Black women already knows: hair care concerns are a documented and significant barrier to swimming participation among Black females. A study published in the International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education found that Black women cited hair maintenance as one of the primary reasons they avoided swimming. This is not vanity. It is the intersection of a practical reality — chlorine damages Black hair in ways that are more severe and more costly to repair than its effects on other hair types — with a cultural reality in which hair carries meaning and investment that outsiders frequently underestimate.

The solution is not to dismiss the concern but to address it. Swim caps designed for natural Black hair, which have historically been ill-fitting and ineffective, have improved dramatically. Pre-swim hair care products that protect against chlorine damage are increasingly available. Some swim programs specifically targeting Black girls have incorporated hair care into their programming — teaching both swimming skills and the hair management techniques that make regular swimming sustainable. These adaptations seem small, but they remove a barrier that has kept millions of Black girls out of the water.

The Cost of Access

Even where public pools exist, access is not equally distributed. The neighborhoods in American cities where Black families are concentrated — the neighborhoods shaped by decades of redlining, restrictive covenants, and discriminatory housing policy — have fewer recreational facilities per capita, including swimming pools, than wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. A child in a middle-class suburb may have access to a community pool within walking distance, a neighborhood swim team, a school with an aquatics program, and parents who grew up swimming and consider it a normal part of childhood. A child in an underserved urban neighborhood may have no pool within miles, no school swim program, no community facility, and parents who cannot swim and cannot afford private lessons that typically cost $50 to $100 per session.

The cost barrier is real and significant. Private swim lessons, the primary mechanism through which American children learn to swim outside of school programs, are priced at levels that exclude the families most in need. Group lessons, when available through parks departments or community organizations, are more affordable but often have limited enrollment, inconvenient schedules, and facilities that are themselves underfunded and undermaintained. The children who most need to learn to swim are the children least likely to have access to the instruction.

Cullen Jones and the Movement That Followed

In 1988, a five-year-old boy named Cullen Jones nearly drowned at a water park in New Jersey. His mother, who could not swim, pulled him from the water and enrolled him in swimming lessons the next day. That decision — made in the terror that follows a near-drowning, made by a mother who understood that the skill she had never learned had almost cost her son his life — changed the trajectory of Black swimming in America. Cullen Jones became an Olympic gold medalist. He won gold in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay at the 2012 London Olympics, becoming only the second Black American swimmer to win an Olympic gold medal. And then he did something more important than winning a medal: he went back to the communities that had produced him and began teaching children to swim.

Jones partnered with the USA Swimming Foundation’s Make a Splash initiative, which has provided free or reduced-cost swimming lessons to millions of children, with a specific focus on minority and underserved communities. The program has documented significant increases in swimming ability among participants and, in the communities it serves, measurable reductions in drowning incidents. Jones’s visibility as a Black Olympic swimmer has been itself an intervention — a living refutation of the unspoken assumption, transmitted through generations, that swimming is not something Black people do.

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
— James Baldwin

The YMCA, the largest community-based swim instruction provider in the United States, has developed targeted programs for urban communities with high drowning rates. Their Safety Around Water program, offered free of charge, teaches basic water safety and survival skills in a compressed format designed to reach children who might not enroll in a traditional multi-week swim course. The program has reached hundreds of thousands of children, and evaluations have shown significant improvements in water competency among participants.

What Must Change

The solutions to the drowning disparity are not mysterious. They are not expensive, relative to the cost of the lives they would save. They are not technologically complex. They require only the decision to act and the resources to sustain that decision. Universal swim education in public schools — once common in American education and now largely eliminated due to budget cuts and the decline of school pool facilities — would reach every child regardless of their parents’ swimming ability or income. Countries that have implemented universal swim education, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have seen dramatic reductions in drowning rates across all demographic groups.

Community pool construction and rehabilitation in underserved neighborhoods would address the access gap that currently ensures the children at greatest risk have the fewest opportunities to learn. The investment required is modest compared to the public expenditures routinely made on other forms of recreational infrastructure — a single municipal pool costs a fraction of a single artificial turf athletic field — and the return, measured in lives saved, is incalculable.

Culturally specific programming that addresses the intergenerational fear, the hair care concerns, the distrust born of a history of exclusion, and the cost barriers that prevent Black families from accessing existing resources would complete the intervention. Programs like Make a Splash, the Cullen Jones Diversity Camp, and the growing number of local initiatives led by Black swim instructors and coaches have demonstrated that when you build the program right — when you put it in the community, staff it with people who look like the children they are teaching, address the barriers that have kept families away, and make it free — the children come. And they learn. And they live.

I think of those six children in Shreveport, standing at the edge of the Red River on a hot afternoon, drawn to the water by the same impulse that draws all children to water — the impulse toward play, toward freedom, toward the pure physical joy of being young and alive on a summer day. They entered the water because they were children and the water was there, and they died because no one had ever taught them the skill that would have kept them alive, and no one had taught them because their parents could not swim, and their parents could not swim because their grandparents had been barred from the pools where they might have learned. The chain of causation runs from the segregated pools of the 1950s to the funeral homes of 2010, and every link in that chain represents a choice that was made — by politicians, by voters, by a society that preferred to drain its swimming pools rather than share them — and every choice that was made can be unmade by a different choice now. The children who will enter the water this summer have not yet been born into their fates. There is still time to teach them to swim.