Swimming Pool Riot of 1949

Swimming Pool Riot of 1949. Anacostia Park. , Anacostia Pool was built in 1937, in the White-only section of what was then a strictly segregated park. In the early 1940s, the National Park Service desegregated park facilities, but the D.C. Recreation Board continued to admit only White visitors into the pool., In the summer of 1949, the Black community took matters into its own hands. Black children began showing up to the pool to swim, only to be met with escalating pushback. Protestors, both for and against integration, began to gather outside the pool With the situation intensifying, the Park Service closed the pool for the summer., By the following summer, acts of resistance by Black youth had tipped the balance. The D.C. Recreation Board and the Park Service came to an agreement to integrate the pool by the next summer, a decision that led to the desegregation of all public facilities in Washington, D.C.,

"Surrender by the federal government to the forces of disorder and bigotry will have [a] demoralizing effect in many cities over the nation where sincere efforts are being made to extend public recreational facilities to all citizens without regard to race or color." , , NAACP Acting Secretary Roy Wilkins to President Harry Truman

, [Caption:] , On June 29, police broke up a crowd of 500 people at the pool site, making arrests for disorderly conduct and the distribution of anti-segregation flyers.