As a kid in my hometown of Columbia, Miss., I remember hearing adults remark about how there used to be public pools in town when they were young, and I would wonder why the pools weren’t still there for my enjoyment, too. “In an effort to preserve harmony among all citizens of the community and to avoid possible strife being instigated by outsiders, the city last week closed both of its segregated swimming pools for the summer,” the Columbian-Progress announced on its front page on July 28, 1966.
Ah, of course. Racism is, once again, the reason we can’t have nice things. The news article, which included no byline, did not say what the source of the strife was or who the alleged “outsiders” it mentioned were. As my husband, Liam, said when I showed him the clipping, “the authors of the first draft of history didn’t want that particular bit recorded.” But it’s clear that the City decided to deprive Black and white residents alike of public swimming pools rather than integrating them as the federal courts and the Constitution demanded.
The Columbian-Progress reported on July 28, 1966, that the mayor was closing both the white and Black public pools “to avoid possible strife,” meaning integration.
That same spirit is apparently alive in Llano County, Texas, where a Confederate memorial stands across the street from the local public library. After a judge ordered the library to restore books that conservative activists had successfully urged them to remove from their shelves, The Texas Tribune reported that county officials were meeting this week to discuss shutting down the library entirely—rather than allowing it to continue operating with books on the shelves that some residents do not like.
In Missouri, lawmakers are now even considering eliminating funding for libraries statewide in response to moral panics over which books should—and should not—be on the shelves. Just as efforts to ban books have spread across the nation, pool closures spread across Mississippi and throughout the South during the 1960s and into the 1970s. One South Carolina town even put sea lions in their public
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