This story was updated on Aug. 15, 2024, at 3:45 p.m.
It’s a sweltering Saturday at DeKalb County’s Gresham Recreation Center. There’s an outdoor pool with a tall metal gate enclosing the space right next to a busy road.
The sun beams down as a dozen heads bobble in and out of the blue water, creating iridescent waves that crash on the tiled pool walls. A few families sit in the shade and cool off by the water.
Access to this summertime mainstay in much of the metro area is not a challenge; pools in many places are low-cost and abundant. DeKalb County has six public outdoor pools, and the city of Atlanta has more than 15 indoor and outdoor public swimming pools.
However, in East Point, the luxury of enjoying a public swimming pool has been a fad of the past since the 1980s. And the racial history of the city plays a role in its lack of public aquatic spaces.
Hannah Palmer, who lives in East Point, curated a project last year called “Ghost Pools,” which spotlights the history of swimming pools in East Point and beyond.
“East Point has no swimming pools. It’s a big city, 38,000 people, zero swimming pools,” Palmer said.
Palmer, who is also writing a book about pools, said two pools were built in East Point around the 1950s when segregation was the norm.
There was the Black pool on Randall Street and the white pool on Spring Avenue near downtown.
“The pools were pretty cheap, and it was just fun,” said Linda “Sissie” Lang, a long-time white resident of East Point who grew up going to both pools.
“I do remember being little and looking up and thinking, ‘Okay, my brother and I are two of the lightest people here,’” she said, referring to visiting the Black pool, which she’d go to with close family friends.
Black East Point resident James Dyer, who was a lifeguard at the Randall Street pool, remembered a dance party there every week.
“They would call it a canteen,” Dyer said. “They would take the big jukebox and bring it out on the pool deck, and everybody that was inside would dance, you know, and have good times.”
It was fun, but racial tensions were simmering.
In 1959, the city’s Parks and Recreation director was fired after a water safety event with white instructors at the Black Randall Street Pool.
“Well, what he didn’t know was one of the young ladies that was a participant in the water safety demonstrations, [her] dad was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan,” said Jim Grayson, the son of the former Parks and Recreation director Roy Grayson. ,
Grayson, who’s white, said his family ultimately had to leave the city after the KKK leader found out.
“They burned a cross in our front yard. They threatened to kill us,” he said.
Once segregation formally ended in 1964, the former lifeguard, Dyer, said the unease continued.
“They were having other problems outside of the pool, you know, within the city. The Klu Klux Klan was marching. We had the little riots every now and then there,” he said. “The police department was lily white.”
Heading into the 1970s, a good deal of white people were leaving East Point as part of “white flight.”
Archival documents from 1979 show the city’s pools were falling into disrepair.
By 1983, the pools officially closed after a bond referendum for repairs and construction failed to pass.
In 2010, the National Recreation and Park Association recommended that East Point should have three pools. In 2018, a proposal for a recreation center with a pool came up in community meetings held by the city.
There was no movement on those plans, and the proposed location worried residents at the time. Then, in 2020, more city plans for a pool came up.
Karen René, who served on East Point’s city council until earlier this year, said the COVID-19 pandemic slowed any progress.
“So, COVID hit, and so what happened was everybody kind of shut down, and money kind of got a little scarce,” René said.
But René said she believes the current city leadership understands the need for aquatic spaces in the area.
Long-time resident Sissie Lang said she misses the pools and the sense of community that came with them.
“When you’re standing there in a bathing suit, you don’t know what a person’s financial background is, “ she said. “You know, you’re just standing there, just hopping in a pool —you make a friend with somebody. That’s what it’s all about.”
Deana Holiday Ingraham is the mayor of East Point. She updated WABE on whether there were any plans to build pools or aquatic spaces in the city.
“We will be engaging our financial advisor and bond counsel and assembling that team to figure out the funding source,” Holiday Ingraham said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to East Point as East Lake in a 2010 recommendation from the National Recreation and Park Association.
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