Parting the waters of bondage: African Americans' aquatic heritage

Abstract

Since the 1960s, when the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) began compiling racial statistics on drowning death rates, it has been painfully obvious that African Americans are far more likely to drown than their white counterparts. While segregation denied black people access to most public swimming pools and racial violence transformed natural waterways into undesirable places for swimming, perceptions that swimming is an "un-black" or "white" pursuit have discouraged aquatics within African American communities, rendering black Americans far more likely to drowning than their white counterparts. This article is based on the author's historical scholarship, which uses historical records including newspaper accounts, slave narratives, white-authored travel accounts to Africa and the American South, plantation records, and ship logs to consider aquatic traditions in the African diaspora. Tracing African American's aquatic practices from Africa to America before documenting its twentieth-century decline, this article challenges notions that swimming is historically "un-black." Over the past decade, this author has collaborated with swimming advocates to use this histrory to encourage black swimming in communities throughout America. By further documenting and dissiminating African Americans' swimming heritage, this article seeks to promote aquatics and, thus, reduce drowning death rates.