City pools one example of Savannah’s racial split | savannahnow.com

The temperature soared into the 90s on Aug. 3, the last day to cool off in one of Savannah’s public pools before school started.

Dozens of brown-skinned young people, mostly in their teens on down, took advantage of the free pools — splashing, dunking, diving and laughing — before their summer vacation came to an end.

At Daffin Park’s pool, only one white girl, maybe 12 or 13 years old, joined in the revelry. She wasn’t interested in talking about racial relations; she was just getting in the pool with her friends.

The trend was similar at the city’s seven other pools on Aug. 3, where the dozens of pool users were black, aside from one white teen at the pool on Goebel Avenue in the Twickenham neighborhood.

The predominance of blacks at the Daffin pool was a reversal of the ‘50s into the early ‘60s when the pool was reserved for whites only. Built in 1954, the original Daffin pool was the first public concrete pool with a water filtering system in Savannah.

Blacks had to use the Tompkins pool, which had a sandy bottom, said Bernard Lewis, who started out working as a life guard for the city around 1962 and retired as the pool manager in 2000, in addition to working as a coach for the Savannah-Chatham school system.

Lewis, who is a light skinned African-American, said white families back then used to ask him to give their children swim lessons because they didn’t think he was black.

City pools, along with other facilities, were desegregated in October 1963, eight months ahead of the National Civil Rights Act, according to city archives.

Pools remained segregated to a point, due to the communities in which they were located, said Ed Jinks, a former coach for the Savannah-Chatham school system who also worked as a pool manager from 1963 to 1989. Together, he and Lewis were known as Salt and Pepper, according to Lewis.

Whites used to swim at the Jenkins, Shuman and Daffin pools, Jinks said, but as white communities began getting private pools, those pools eventually came to be used primarily by blacks, too.

Lewis said some whites were scared of the blacks from some of the rougher neighborhoods who began frequenting once-white pools, such as Daffin. At the same time, some white lifeguards got along fine and were adopted as “honorary blacks,” he said.

Jackie Dixon, who has taken over as the city’s swimming pool manager, said she would love for pools users to be more diverse. That’s one reason the city started a water aerobics program, which has had some success in drawing more whites, Dixon said.