Dear Millennials: I'm sorry we didn't stop them

[willamette]

28. for any who doubt this mindset of "destroy for all, put back again just for us"

I'm 72. I learned about the swimming pools, and the lop-sided percentages of who was allowed to learn how to swim during the last couple of years, as some of the censorship screens fractured. This in spite of being denied entrance to our local pool, in the 1950's, after I was already in the locker room taking my shoes off. My sister and I were kicked out, "You're Jewish, aren't you?"
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/black-children-swimming-drownings-segregation
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In cities, officials in the south took the threat of white Americans and black Americans swimming together seriously. Rather than risk mixing people of different races in the pool, public swimming pools in the south were closed down altogether.
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Town after town in the south filled their pools with dirt, cemented them up, sometimes even bulldozed them. If desegregation meant equal access to public goods, then floor line equality – where nobody had access to anything – was seen as the preferable path.
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YMCA boom made segregation a private practice
As public pools were drained, the city sidestepped new laws by immediately enacting a secret plan it had entered into with a formerly small organization – the town’s local YMCA.
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In exchange for taking up such a role, the city offered the YMCA tax exemptions, free water for its pools, free use of parks and reduced sales of property. Membership at the YMCA exploded. Although the city was one-third black at the time, only one out of every nine of its members was black, with the remaining eight white.
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Very good Guardian article, well worth reading the whole thing.