“For the time it was open, it was a wonderful experience.”
Sonya burnett and pamela taylor
Officially opened in the summer of 1957, the “Negro swimming pool”—or “The Swim Pool” as everyone in the St. Mark’s neighborhood called it—for a short seven to eight years was a magnetic attraction for African Americans from Sewanee and the surrounding counties.
At a time when public spaces like parks and swimming pools usually were closed to African Americans, especially in the rural South, the climate of the University community fostered a space where Black people could gather and enjoy a swim in comparative safety.
At a time when public spaces like parks and swimming pools usually were closed to African Americans, especially in the rural South, the climate of the University community fostered a space where Black people could gather and enjoy a swim in comparative safety.
University officials built the swimming pool to reinforce local racial segregation. In 1952, they began planning a “Negro” pool as a counterpart to a new reservoir on campus, which was to feature a whites-only beach for swimming. The St. Mark’s pool was to forestall demands for equal access to the new beach.
It also was an extension of the “equalization” strategy behind the earlier St. Mark’s Community Center, which improved public services in the Black neighborhood to reinforce the moral and legal underpinnings
for racial segregation in Sewanee. Over the next several years, Sewanee alumni as well as residents of the St. Mark’s neighborhood contributed money to build the pool. The varsity swim coach, Ted Bitondo, and the athletic program’s Black trainer, John Kennerly Jr., outfitted the pool with a ladder, changing rooms, and a diving board—the frame for which can still be seen today.
Regardless of the intentions behind the planning, the people of the St. Mark’s neighborhood invited their friends and kinfolk who came from far and wide to beat the summertime heat in “The Swim Pool.” As with other spaces in their part of Sewanee, the Black residents of this college town were resourceful and creative in making the pool an amenity of their community and a refuge from the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow South. The Swim Pool was expensive for the University to maintain. It fell into disuse and disrepair with the desegregation of the College and community after 1962. Residents today believe it was filled in around 1968 at the request of people living in the neighborhood. The tiled edges are still in place, visible reminders of a fondly remembered place that African American residents of Sewanee made their own.