First the critical news: Protests at The Valley Swim Club will continue Saturday, July 11, at 12:00 noon at 22 Tomlinson Road, Huntingdon Valley. Please join us.
Yesterday about 45 people joined at various times in a hastily planned protest that lasted for a number of hours. We stood and marched around the entrance to the swim club chanting “Jim Crow Swims Here” and “No Justice, No Peace.”
I was really gratified to see that most of the people protesting came from in the neighborhood. There were about four or five of us from West Mt. Airy.
And, most impressively, a few members of the club showed up to join us. As they explained, the new justification of the Swim Club’s decision to turn away 65 mostly black children was entirely bogus. The Swim Club claims that they had underestimated how difficult it would be to deal with so many kids. But Amy Goodman and other club members pointed out that the pool is much more heavily utilized on Saturday and Sundays that it was on a Monday at 3:30, even with the addition of 65 kids.
It is clear that the issue here is racism, plain and simple.
And that it was so plain and simple is one reason we protestors were there. I don’t have any illusions about the end of racism in America. It continues in many ways, some overt, some subtle, some institutional.
But I had thought that this kind of blatant, in your face, racism was a thing of the past.
And I had thought that the day in which young children would have to deal so directly with nasty vicious remarks was over too.
And that’s the second reason we were there—because we were horrified at what these young children have had to deal with. We want the children at Creative Steps day camp to know that the directors of the Valley Swim club do not speak for all the members of the club or the neighborhood or the region. They do not speak for the majority of white people in this area, who are as appalled by what has happened in Huntingdon Valley as are black people. (I agreed to get involved in helping organize the protest precisely to make that point.)
Some of us also had personal stories that made this episode so grating. My friend Michael Moore, who urged me to get involved, went to a swimming pool with some white friends in North Carolina in the 1970s and was asked to leave.
And I saw something similar at my family’s small Catskill Mountains hotel around the same time. We had hired my friend, Ivan Richards, to be a life guard at the pool. One of the guests went to my father to complain because he didn’t want to be rescued by a black lifeguard. My father told the guest he had three options: he could find another hotel, he could agree to be rescued if necessary by a black lifeguard; or we could just instruct the lifeguard to ignore any trouble that involved him in the pool.
All of us know how appalling racism is. But when you see it first hand, it leaves an indelible impression, one that makes it hard later in life to let it go and not take a stand when you see it again.
And that might be the only good thing to come out of this sorry episode. We’ve seen, once again, that the most blatant, obnoxious racism is alive in some places in this country. We’ve learned, once again, how to stand up and say we oppose it.
You can all join in spreading this message on Saturday, July 11, at 12:00 noon at 22 Tomlinson Road in Huntingdon Valley.