Though the city eventually reopened the parks, it never rebuilt the public pool. In protest against integration, the city council shut down the community center, the zoo, and every other public park in Montgomery and left the park system closed for more than ten years. However, in 1959, facing pressure to desegregate, the city chose to fill in the pool with cement rather than allow Black children to play in its waters.
Such public pools, like public education, were part of a strategy of national assimilation and community cohesion that strove to knit together an ethnically diverse populace into an American nation. In the 1950s the pool was “the grandest one for miles, the crown jewel of a Parks Department” that also featured a zoo and community center (p. In one of the most striking passages of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee, the former president of Demos and current board chair of Color of Change, visits Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama, to search for the remnants of the city’s public pool.
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