Trouble The Water
Some civil rights activists took to the streets. Others took to the water. A brief history of the wade-ins that brought down segregated beaches.
The 1964 wade in at St. Augustine's segregated beach in Florida. Photo via the State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
On a sweltering Saturday in late August, a group of more than 200 surfers paddled out for 13 blocks from Rockaway Beach outside of New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. They formed a line in the water, and splashed their hands in the waves and shouted her name, again and again: Breonna Taylor.
In the surfing community, paddle outs are a Hawaiian tradition that generally exist as a form of protest or to honor the dead. The Rockaway paddle out, organized by the Black Surfing Association East Coast was designed to raise awareness of and to protest the March 13, 2020 murder of Breonna—and the continual lack of accountability for her murder—at the hands of Louisville police officers almost six months earlier. But this protest was more than just a group of Black surfers speaking out against racist police violence by doing what they love, it was also a statement with a deep and complicated history: like so many of the activities white Americans take for granted, simply cooling off in the water is one that Black American have long had to fight—and even die—for.
In the American South, for much of the 20th century Jim Crow laws kept most beaches and public pools off limits to Black Americans. And in the North and the West, both overt and subtle racist practices kept many Blacks from accessing water. Zoning laws, redlining, and private covenants ensured that houses in most coastal areas remained available to whites only; unofficial, but socially accepted segregation prevented them from accessing beaches and pools in white neighborhoods, while most Black neighborhoods didn’t have pools. Up through the 1960s, Black residents of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles were relegated to a few small “colored” beaches—if they ventured to a “white” beach, they faced harassment or outright violence.
But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as Black Americans were staging sit-ins at lunch counters to protest segregation, so did they take to the water to protest beach segregation through a series of wade-ins that brought light to the issue. Across the country, from Connecticut to California, Black Americans took to public waterways to highlight the disparity. In Biloxi, Mississippi, one such wade-in in 1960, organized by local physician Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, Sr., resulted in a white backlash so violent it was dubbed “Bloody Wade-In,” as irate white mobs threw bricks at Black swimmers, beat them with clubs, and rioted in the city streets through the weekend. In Chicago that same summer, Black activists led by Velma Murphy Hill, then 21, took to Rainbow Beach, a traditionally “white” beach on the city’s south side for a peaceful day on the lake. After a few hours they were surrounded by an angry mob and pelted with rocks as they attempted to leave. Velma Murphy Hill sustained a head injury that left her with 17 stitches and temporary paralysis.
These are just two examples of many wade-ins that took place in the early 1960s. The protesters put their lives on the lines, but their work eventually got results: images of angry white mobs surrounding Black women, children, and eldery swimmers, and videos of fully clothed police officers dragging Black swimmers from the water, were broadcast across the country, providing a stark visual of the terror imposed on the peaceful protesters. In Chicago, Velma Murphy Hill’s protest became a rallying cry for local civil rights leaders, who organized a series of wade-ins at the same beach the following summer that eventually led to its integration. In Biloxi, the wade-ins led to the creation of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP and a major voter registration drive. And in 1968, the federal government finally ruled that all public beaches must integrate.
Even though the waters opened up, many of the barriers that initially barred Black Americans from the water continued to keep them out. During the first half of the 20th century, swimming became a broadly popular activity among whites, and swimming skills and culture were passed down from generation to generation. For Black Americans, who had been excluded from the water for so long and continued to face many of the racist practices that kept them from the water, if not the legal ones, the same never happened. By 2017, USA Swimming found that more than 60 percent of Black American children had low or no swimming ability, compared to 40 percent of white children. Meanwhile, Black athletes remain underrepresented in water sports, many of which have developed cultures that celebrate whiteness to the exclusion of other races.
Surfing, in particular, has long been unwelcoming to people of color. Though Hawaiians and indigenous people around the world have been riding waves for centuries, when surfing arrived in the states in the early 20th century—via Duke Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian Olympic swimmer often referred to as the “father of surfing”—it gained popularity in coastal white communities. After it went mainstream in the 1950s and 60s its most notable adherents fostered a culture of exclusivity through the practice of surf localism—the idea that the waves in any one area are for the use of locals exclusively, and anyone who tries to surf them is subject to harassment or violence. By the 1960s, surfing was such a white-dominated sport that it became associated with a physical stereotype—white, blonde, tanned by the sun—and produced stars like the famously racist Miki Dora, who spray painted swastikas on surf boards and eventually relocated to apartheid South Africa.
Today, a number of organizations like Brown Girl Surf and the Black Surfing Association are working to make the water more welcoming to people of color. In Los Angeles, David Malana, a teacher and multimedia producer, is in the process of establishing a nonprofit, Color the Water, that offers free surf instruction to people of color in an effort to open up the sport to previously underrepresented groups. In addition to offering technical instruction, he aims to shift the culture of surfing and create a safe space for all. “We’re going to include your identity in this surf culture and let it be shaped by you rather than you conforming to this identity,” he says. “You change surf culture to how you need it to be.”