Saturday, July 29, 2023

It's a Scorcher! Public Pools could help mitigate the heat but.. white people don't want black people in the pools

There was a time when Public Pools served communities across America.  Then starting in the post-World War 2 era of desegregation, white America decided that if they had to have equality, then no one got a public pool.  For instance here is an excerpt from Heather McGhee's book“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,”

Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow Black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so Black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every Black person in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a segregation policy using public safety as a justification, but a successful NAACP lawsuit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the following summer. On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers at­tended, joining three brave Black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation de­mands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Su­preme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affect­ing Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. 

As a result, White People were able to have their own private pools in public by just adding privacy "requirements".  For instance, HOA rules.

A video shows police arresting a teenager at a pool at Cambridge Commons in east Charlotte. A woman, who didn’t want to be identified, said a group of underaged kids got into the pool.  A family member of the HOA president said that because there is no lifeguard, the rules are that anybody under 18 must be accompanied by someone who is over 18.  The woman told Counts the kids were asked to leave and they allegedly refused and so someone called the cops.  Several adults told Channel 9 that the kid who was arrested lives in the neighborhood and would have had the right to use the pool if the chaperone policy was followed.

I don't give a fuck if your fucking "HOA rules" are a child needs to have supervision to use your fucking pool.  That's not criminal trespass.  Your fucking HOA rules are not laws.  But, when it comes to black people understand conservatives love to put them under the threat of police violence.

This is far from the first time, white people have called out-of-control white cops to come and remove the black people from the pool.  But, always remember conservatives absolutely support the use of force up to and including extrajudicial killing of black people for any offense real or imagined.
“On July 27, we received a call for a disturbance at Cambridge Commons Drive. During these types of calls, we seek collaboration from all parties involved. Our goal is always to achieve a peaceful resolution in every situation.”
As far as the police response, of course, the Public Relations contact and command staff is not going to correctly point out the dumb ass Officers who responded to the scene unduly escalated the situation and should have simply arrived noted there was no violation of law and left.  At the absolute most you treat this as a civil matter and tell all parties involved that notification of the HOA rules has been made.  But, instead this is what I've come to expect from Law Enforcement during these types of encounters who find it necessary to escalate the situation until an enforcement action, i.e. throwing a black child to the ground and handcuffing them, is required. 

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