With Toes of All Colors, a Ripple Effect

The annual Black History Invitational Swim Meet, which ended yesterday in the District, may sound to some like an event that got shoehorned into Black History Month as an afterthought. The sport has no world champion racial-barrier breakers like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson or Arthur Ashe. Besides, who would hold a swim meet in February anyway -- except maybe the Polar Bear Club?

And yet, any celebration of black history built around individual celebrity misses the point. Nobody overcomes alone. To appreciate the significance of the two-day invitational, which drew 800 competitors from predominantly black swim teams throughout the nation, one need only recall the historic struggle to provide black youths with quality swimming facilities. Then marvel at the recently built Takoma Recreation Center in Northeast Washington, which hosted the event at its indoor, temperature-controlled Olympic-size swimming pool.

"In Virginia Beach, where I grew up, blacks didn't have a place where we could learn to swim," said Rodger McCoy, 58, a swim coach and coordinator of the competitive swimming program for the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation. "Everything was segregated. We even had a problem getting to the beach."

In the District, attempts to integrate swimming pools were especially nasty. In June 1949, a race riot broke out at a whites-only pool in Anacostia after six blacks tried to go for a swim. They weren't in the water five minutes before about 50 whites booed and splashed them out. Later that day, about 200 whites and 200 blacks clashed outside the pool, using homemade clubs, some with nails sticking out, to hammer away at each other for six hours, according to newspaper accounts.

The prospect of blacks and whites "race mixing" in a swimming pool -- to say nothing of being naked together in a locker room -- could stir up more heated passions than some efforts to integrate the city's public schools, and the racial strife would poison pool waters for years.

As recently as 1994, District officials were justifying closing pools in black neighborhoods by citing an ongoing lack of interest in swimming. "We just don't have the numbers," a recreation department spokesman said at the time. "We're running up against a social situation that we must overcome."

McCoy and others were already doing something about that. He, along with the recreation department and the United Black Fund Inc., started the invitational swim meet in 1986. A year later, the program received an unexpected boost from Al Campanis, then general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. During a "Nightline" television program commemorating the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Major League Baseball debut, Campanis explained to host Ted Koppel why there were no blacks among the world-class champion swimmers. Campanis said blacks are often poor swimmers "because they don't have the buoyancy." Never mind that anybody can float. Campanis was later fired for his remarks. McCoy was fired up.

The team he coached, D.C. Wave, began racking up impressive wins against some of the region's more established private swim clubs. And some of the nation's best inner-city swim teams began showing up at the Black History Invitational -- including the Philadelphia Department of Recreation team coached by Jim Ellis, whose triumphs over racism and violence in 1973 inspired the movie "Pride," which premiered Friday in the District.

McCoy was in his late 20s when he learned to swim. He just walked into what is now the William H. Rumsey Aquatic Center, enrolled in a swim class "and a couple of months later, I was a lifeguard," he said. "I'd always wanted to learn to swim, and even if there hadn't been an instructor at the pool, I believe I would have taught myself."

McCoy's day as a swim coach at the Rumsey pool (named for a well-respected recreation department director) starts at 5 a.m. And he usually works well into the night. His students include master swimmers, triathletes and even a man who is training to swim the English Channel.

One of his star students is a 6-year-old girl who could swim a distance of only five feet when he met her last year; she now warms up by doing 500 yards freestyle. "She listens. She's very attentive and follows instructions," McCoy said. "Any child like that will succeed."

Call that history in the making.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com