The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim
Hannah S. Palmer
LSU Press
In 2018, while teaching her kids to swim and working on urban river restoration projects, Hannah S. Palmer began a journal of social encounters with water.
As she found herself dangling her feet in a seemingly all-white swimming pool, she started to worry about how her young sons would learn to swim. Would they grow up accustomed to the stubbornly segregated pools of Atlanta? Was it safe for them to wade in creeks laced with urban runoff or dive into the ever-warming, man-made swimming holes of the South? Should they just join the Y? But these weren’t just parenting questions. In the South, how we swim—and whether we have access to water at all—is tied up in race and class.