- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by... (vibrant music) - Summers in Philly are hot and humid.

And for many of us cooling off at a public pool might be something we take for granted.

A new exhibit at the Fairmount Water Works explores the impacts of segregated public pools on generations of African Americans in our city and beyond.

In this episode of Movers and Makers, we visit this historic exhibition and meet the community leaders who are dedicated to protecting equitable access to water.

(mellow music) - [John] I wanted to tell a new story about American history.

(gentle music) - This is a very complex story that involves violence.

It's a story that it involves trauma.

It's a story that has current day implications of drowning.

- [John] Knowing that no one had written about the social and cultural history of swimming pools, public swimming pools, in particular, I interpreted that as a significant responsibility.

- And so how do we tell this story and also provide pathways forward?

How do we tell this story and have it be uplifting?

How do we tell this story and help it shape the future instead of getting stuck in the past?

(gentle music) (mellow music) - The Fairmount Water Works it's founding, when it went into operation back in 1815, it was designed to provide fresh drinking water to the citizens of Philadelphia.

So the city's founding fathers at the time, they looked towards the Schuylkill River and they looked at the topography of the area and they decided to build a pumping station on what they called Fairmount, which is where the art museum now outstanding, was once the reservoir to the Fairmount Water Works.

And they built this incredible, what we see now today, the Fairmount Water Works, not quite the size it is today.

It was pretty much the engine house and what we call the old mill house.

And the mission was really about how to create a safe place, produce drinking water, how to create a beautiful public space so that as citizens have an opportunity to sort of marvel at this technology.

And the architecture of the site was also to sort of celebrate the innovation and the embracement of technology, but also blending that with a classical design, celebrating Philadelphia as a capital of the nation, and is a place that recognizes it's civic responsibility to provide not just drinking water, but beauty.

Eventually the waters of the Schuylkill River became too polluted for people to be able to safely drink.

So the waterworks did not have the space in order to build filtration and add a purification system.

By 1911, the Fairmount Water Works was sort of decommissioned as a drinking water facility.

- In 2015, I was asked to be a part of, an envisioning charette for the Water Works to help the city and their stakeholders plan for the future.

My company Habitheque focuses on environmental education, really connecting the public to the natural world.

And I do that through storytelling and the connection of art and science.

- [Narrator] The fish continues on its way, carrying the baby muscles to its new home.

- I had just recently been hired by the Philadelphia Water Department to help revitalize and reactivate this incredible complex.

And I started reading everything I could about water.

And I stumbled upon a book by Dr. Jeff Wiltse called "Contested Waters".

This book chronicles the social history of swimming in America.

It takes us from the 1880s to present day.

And I was someone who could swim before I could walk.

For my entire life swimming has been a joy, (gentle music) a freedom.

Everyone's graceful.

(gentle music) And so when I read Dr. Jeff Wiltse book, I just was so impacted by it.

This very watery world, there's this 100 year history of exclusion and that it has present day implications.

- When I started to work on the book, I did spend a lot of time researching and writing about the history of pools in Philadelphia.

(gentle music) And part of that because Philadelphia was the most prolific early builder of municipal pools.

And those early pools were actually public baths, and they date to the 1880s and 1890s.

One of the important things that I found is that, while, of course these pools were gender segregated, males and females used different pools or the same pool at different times, they weren't racially segregated.

During the 1920s and 1930s, cities throughout the country began building large resort like swimming pools and city officials wanted families and really the community as a whole with one exception to be able to use these pools together.

So when cities allowed males and females to swim together, that's when white public officials and white swimmers suddenly objected to the presence of African Americans.

(gentle music) - This must look like a big change from the last time you were here.

- [James] Oh, it looks amazing.

- Yeah.

And this is where the stadium seating will be, and then here is your canvas.

- [James] Cool.

- [Victoria] I mean, the crazy part is that when it was a pool, people remember these columns in it.

- [James] Yeah.

- [Victoria] And swimming around the columns in 1960s.

(calm music) - I got the invitation to work on the project after Victoria and I discovered we were both curious about working on projects that dealt with pool segregation.

For me, I was curious about why so many of people that I knew who were African American didn't know how to swim.

And I'd heard like stories about why that was and I wanted to do a deep dive into that, and Victoria was interested in the more institutional look into why there was pool segregation.

(mellow music) I'm working with an animator to create an animated piece that walks us through some major historical moments in the journey of integrating public pools throughout the country.

And it starts actually in Africa with these canoeist that were in Ghana, who were exceptional swimmers and navigators.

- [Storyteller] So much of that water was unknowable to us.

But we were one with the water.

We understood its power and our connection to that power.

- [James] And it takes us all the way to like Olympic gold medalist.

- [Reporter] In 2016, Simone Manuel becomes the first female black American swimmer, and the first woman of African descent anywhere to win individual gold at the Olympics.

- [Commentator] Looks like she's gonna win gold from lane one, and did she win!

- We see where the fight for pool integration intersects with the fight for larger civil rights in the country.

And it's just really exciting to do that in this graphic medium.

(dramatic music) - [Victoria] In one of the key events is a family where kids were swimming, and one after another, the kids jumped in to save their cousins.

- [James] But they did not know how to swim either.

One by one JaTavious Warner, JaMarcus Warner... - [Victoria] Children died that day.

The parents who also couldn't swim were on the shoreline, watching this.

A family devastated by not knowing how to swim.

- [James] Six teens drowned in Louisiana river.

- Even when you think about things like hurricane Katrina, and you hear the reports of the people who drowned in this watery world, we're going to have more water or less water depending on where you live.

Those people who drown then most likely didn't know how to swim because of this history.

There are real repercussions.

So in working with the artists, I wanted to provide them with enough inspiration so that they could do what they do, which is take us on these leaps.

- We didn't have a lot of pools around us, so there wasn't a lot of opportunity to swim.

And as I got older and we moved to new neighborhoods, they were a little bit more available, but at that point, I just was like, I'll this stick my feet in the side and that'll be great for me or I'll just like maybe wait into the water as far as I can, which I also really enjoy.

- The experience of going to a pool and knowing how to swim did not get passed down in nearly the same number among African Americans as it did among white.

And instead what ended up getting passed down in many black families and within many black communities was a fear of water.

- All of this is about what you have access to.

Do you have access to a swimming pool?

Do you have access to a space that is safe for swimming?

And for many, many years, black people in this country, didn't.

(gentle music) - There's a wonderful image in the exhibition, and it's a woman, Mamie Livingston, and she's standing outside a fenced in pool, and she isn't allowed to swim in that pool.

Mamie, would go on to write to the Baltimore newspaper and help desegregate Baltimore's pool at 17 years old, just asking, why is this happening?

Why don't we have our neighborhood pool?

When you start to think about things like civil rights movement, you think of schools, you think of buses.

Well, it's also pools.

Many things happened at pools that actually led to the Brown versus Board of Education ruling.

And even, 1964, the Civil Rights Act that was completely related to the protest to desegregate beaches in St. Augustine, Florida, - Whether we agree with the civil rights bill or not, and I of course do not, it is time to draw back from this problem and take a look down the long road at the end of which somehow we must find harmony.

- On the other side of town, you have a group of mixed races activists desegregating a motor lodge pool.

The manager poured acid into the pool to intimidate the activist to get out of the water.

A documentary photographer caught it, and it helped get the Civil Rights Act in 1964 passed.

- [Journalist] Tossed cleaning chemicals inside the pool in an effort to get the Negros to leave.

(gentle music) - So yeah, we are revealing the opposite side where we'll paint it.

And the idea behind this paintings is to create like a stained glass effect for the viewer.

It's just silhouettes of people made with water to kind of remind ourselves that we are safe around water.

We are part of the water and we are the body of water.

It's like floating, right.

And it gives a good good feeling.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - I had a vision that we wanted to activate the walls and the floors, but we wanted to do it in a way that would allow the building to speak for itself.

But then we also wanted to engage artists in a way that they could create something new here by bringing in a collective of artists, aquatic activists, scholars and influencers, Olympic athletes, championship swimmers who were pioneers, through each of these decades that have followed the 70s, the end of the public pool era.

- My competitive swimming was not magic at first sight.

When we first started to compete, we lost a lot of races and we got a lot of claps for being last to the wall.

- You know when I was in Puerto Rico, there was several families there that looked just like my family.

When we moved to Tampa, Florida, when I was about nine years old, one of the very first things I noticed was I walked onto a team of 150 kids, and majority of them were white.

So throughout my swimming career, I definitely had those moments where, I started to get really good in the water and started beating kids that didn't look like me and their parents would ask me, what are you doing at the pool?

They'd ask me, why aren't you on the track or why aren't you playing basketball?

Essentially, a mainstream predominantly black sport, why am I not doing something like that?

- Cullen Jones, Tanica Jamison, Sabir Muhammad and Maritza Correia, their stories taught me that my own success was bigger than me, that my dream should never be limited by the assumption of others.

- [Victoria] The different voices that we're representing, it's encouraging people to perhaps see things from a different perspective than what they may have thought was true or how they even remember their public pools.

- One of the ways I was able to swim every day and go to a pool every day was my mom worked as a locker room attendant at a pool.

Going with her every day was the main reason why I joined this team, and this team became one of the largest black swim clubs in the country.

- At 12 Junior National team, 13 Senior National team.

So I was already starting to compete with those Olympic athletes.

And in 1996, I watched the Olympic games in at Atlanta, and was inspired by Amy Van Dyken who won four Olympic gold medals, and I said, I wanna do that.

And I was like, how do I get there?

- We really climbed every ladder there was in the sport of swimming.

As a kid that led me to a full scholarship at Stanford.

And it was at Stanford where I really bloomed into like a really great competitive swimmer.

(gentle music) - I had a father who was extremely hard on me, told me I embarrassed him.

He was ashamed to tell his friends that I didn't make the Olympic team after he had been boasting about me for years and had the media questioning, like, why didn't I make it?

And I almost kinda forgot about me for a couple of years.

That was really hard.

- There's a philosophy of Sankofa, and Sankofa means looking back to your past, to move forward to your future, learning all of the lessons that might be bad, but it's the strength and the resilience to continue on.

- So 2004 was a completely different person where I was really focused.

And I remember going through each of my races from prelims to semi-finals to finals making the Olympic team, and just knowing that I broke a barrier, I was the first African American woman to make a US Olympic swim team.

(gentle music) I remember the first question from the reporter, right as soon as I was done swimming was like, "You broke a barrier, how do you feel?"

At that very moment I said, "I'm proud to be the first, but I don't wanna be the last."

And I immediately knew that this was gonna be part of my journey.

I wanted to continue to break barriers and continue to inspire the next generation at the same time.

- I love swimming.

- I love swimming.

- I wanted people to walk out of this exhibition, understanding this history and having a sense of why it's important.

Why are public spaces important to correcting the injustices of democracy, the failures of democracy pushing and pulling to a more just world, which is what the civil rights movement is.

It's asking democracy to stand up to its own ideals.

I wanted to provide that information, but then have the artists be able to take it somewhere else by creating a platform in a sense for you to hear what they have to say, or see the artwork that has come from the story through them.

That becomes an immersive experience that is jumping off from a history that hasn't served everyone well.

(gentle music) (vibrant music) - Next, we meet local pioneers who provide meaningful access to swimming, both as recreation and competition.

(upbeat music) - The Nile Swim Club is the oldest historically black swim club in the country.

It was founded back in 1958 when three of our members were denied admittance to other local swim clubs.

And those three members along with our community raised the money to purchase this four and a half acres of land so that our community could swim.

(children shattering) I was born and raised here, in Yeadon Pennsylvania, two blocks away.

And very funny story, believe it that the members used to say, the board said that only members could only have up to four children as members.

So my dad showed up with all 15 of us at one time, he said, I need a membership for all my kids.

So he said, he used to sneak us in four at a time.

(chuckles happily) But it was somewhere that I came pretty much every day growing up as a young man.

(gentle music) - Arms out facing water push and slide to me.

Go!

My name is Andre Andrews, I'm the Aquatic Director, and I sit on the board of directors here at the Nile Swim club.

I've been lifeguard since I've been 16 years old, I'm 68 years old, so it's been a minute.

Point the toes.

I've been teaching here at the Nile Swim Club for 25 years.

Point them toes.

It's one of the first black own swim clubs in the country.

That really meant something to me because I'm coming up as a young black kid in the area, they wouldn't let us swim in a lot of the swimming pools, they would not let us come in.

- From day one, the club has always been inclusive.

All are welcome to the Nile Swim Club.

And to this day it remains that way.

(gentle music) One of our biggest opportunities that we've started here at the Nile Swim Club is our No Child Will Drown in our Town campaign, where basically we provide free swimming lessons to all the children in our community for free.

Anyone that needs to learn how to swim can come to the Nile Swim Club and learn how to swim.

- The No Child Will Drown in our Towns, has been going on for about three years now, and we train about 600 kids up to this point.

For me, I believe that it's important to have free lessons because sometimes people don't have the resources or the money to pay classes.

So with the Nile they provide free lessons for kids to come to swim.

And I think it's important personally, because of the fact that there's a high percentage of black kids that can't swim.

- 'Cause a lot of kids you'd be surprised, they did not know how to swim.

And they trying to jump in the water, we was having a lot of drownings in these inner city neighborhoods.

So I think and said, we're not gonna let that happen in this town.

Come up, blow out your nose.

When you come up, blow out your nose.

See a lot of times you have to tap into the kids, you gotta make 'em comfortable in the water.

I gotta make them have confidence in me.

So I take 'em and I have to hold these kids and tell 'em about the fluter kick, one of the first things I always try to teach these kids.

'Cause I tell 'em the fluter kicks is the key to swimming, you gotta have that fluter kick.

Oh, kick it girl.

Kick it.

I love to see kids that are afraid of the water, become water worthy.

That's it girl, wait a minute.

(splashing) - Growing up, being the youngest of 19 children, we needed somewhere to go where we felt safe.

And during today's times, I look at the Nile Swim Club as a safe haven for our community and for our children.

Not only do we have swim, we have basketball, yoga, all sorts of activities to keep our children safe.

- Behind the back.

- These particular clinics and camps doesn't cost the parent or guardian anything.

And we're doing just more than just basketball skills.

Like we have what I call camp talk.

So we have guest speakers come in talk to 'em about life, career, entrepreneurship, things of that nature.

So it's more than just sports, it's life lessons as well.

- One, two three, go hard.

- Go hard!

(upbeat music) - Several of our members, along with the Yeadon Historical Commission and the Pennsylvania Historical Commission started years ago in an attempt to make the Nile Swim Club an historical location.

And this year we are awarded our historical marker and it was a great tribute to our club as well as to our community.

(vibrant music) Feels great to be president.

I feel proud to be president of this organization.

I'm very proud of my board that works with me very hard to continue to grow the club and we continue to do whatever it needs to be done to ensure that this club will be here in future generations.

(vibrant music) - [Anne] In today's profile, producer, Monica Rogozinski talks to legendary swim coach, Jim Ellis, about his role in shaping the history and future of swimming.

(mellow music) - I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

Swimming became part of my life.

We were out on a family trip.

My dad and I were in a boat, we were out in the lake, one of the state parks out near Pittsburgh.

He grabbed me, threw me out the boat.

He said, "Swim.

"Get back to the boat and swim, swam."

I didn't drown, but he pulled me back in the boat.

My mother was on the beach and she wasn't yelling, swim, swim, she was yelling something else to my dad.

So all the way home they discussed it, they enrolled me in a YMCA.

The very first lesson the guy said do this, this and this and I did it all, and I was swimming.

It was just like, it just came to me and I told my dad, I said, "Did you pay for all the swim lessons?"

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "You need to get your money back."

He said, "Why?"

I said, " 'Cause I know how to swim."

I said, "I don't know what them other kids were doing, "but I got it, dad."

He said, "No, you're gonna finish the classes."

But that was it, I was around seven, eight years old.

It was a weightlessness, the freedom, my imagination just took over.

That's how I got started.

Went to Cheney University, swam on the swim team there for two years and they dropped the swimming program.

So I pursued swimming wherever I could.

After the swim team dropped, I was lifeguarding at the recreation at the university, and young lady told me her mother was supervising a rec center in Philadelphia that had a swimming pool.

So I came in, took a civil service exam, passed the test I got hired.

And we were in West Philadelphia, Sayre Recreation Center.

The gangs were prevalent at the time, I wanted to get young men away from the gangs.

I said, swim team is needed.

Once they would learn to swim then they moved to the swim team, that way we would keep them in the water.

And then when they get 15, 16, they become lifeguards, take first aid and we would create a swimming community.

I wanted to do something that was positive.

I wanted to make a contribution.

(gentle music) Growing up, there were a lot of African American swimmers and the good ones always got scholarships to go to a private white team.

So when I started my program, I said, we are going to strive to achieve the highest level swimming possible in our own community.

I think that set me apart from other swim teams.

And we did experience some racism.

We experienced some negative attitudes.

- Man, what's all these people looking at us like this for.

- But that only made us stronger.

That made us come home and swim a little faster.

- Look at that water.

That's your world, you own that.

The race ain't over until you ain't got nothing left.

- We were here to dispel a lot of myths.

African Americans can't swim.

Their bones are too heavy.

They can't float.

And my own whole program was, if you give us access then we'll have success.

So with the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, building that pool in West Philadelphia, that was the best thing because I had unlimited pool time.

I had parents that got involved.

I had the community support.

We had an experience that was like no other.

It just took off and grew.

- So you could always swim like a fish.

- [Jim] To have a movie made about me was very interesting experience.

During the whole process.

I was like a deer in the headlights.

- I'd never been outside of Phil before.

- I was just going along for the ride.

I was in disbelief.

When the movie came out, my life changed again.

I got to speak at the International Hall of Fame.

They gave me the President's Award.

And then after that I started doing motivational speaking around the country.

We racing.

- [Coach] Swimmers, take your mark.

Hop.

- That gave me a platform to talk about swimming, talk about what we were doing.

The constant in my life, I was going to swim practice every day.

The constant in my life, were the young people looking up saying coach is RA.

And our main goal was to put somebody on the Olympic team.

We are racing, did everyone understand that?

- Yes.

- Okay, thank you very much.

- [Coach] Take your mark.

Hop.

- This is coach's elite group, they're my special kids, and I demand a lot from them and their parents.

I want the older kids to be role models for the younger kids.

So the younger kids come in, they can't do everything, but we give them things that they can do.

But they're here with the top group.

They come in Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning at 5:30 a.m., and they're back in the afternoon at 4:30, and Saturday mornings, we swim at 7:00 a.m. and swim until I get tired, and then I let 'em go home.

And with that, we still expect them to do well in school.

We expect them to have a social life as well.

We want to make them very well-rounded.

They keep me going every day.

In the bleaches real quick.

- [Coach] Let's climb out.

Bleachers.

- My story is just not something I did, it's something that the Philadelphia community took up and anybody that ran across our path was willing to help us.

I've been doing it for 50 years, I didn't think I'd be doing it for 50 years.

50 years went by so quick.

Seem like it was just yesterday.

I started, but the journey has been just fabulous.

- [Coach] Oh yeah.

Oh my goodness.

- [Jim] That's it of today, have a nice day.

(vibrant music) - During the course of making this program, we witnessed the dramatic power of water first hand.

Hurricane Ida made landfall and flooded the entire gallery right before the grand opening of pool, a social history of segregation.

However, with water like persistence, this exhibition has come back to life.

We hope you make time to visit.

I'm your host Anne Ishii and I'll see you on the next Movers and Makers.

(vibrant music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by...