Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: “Troubled Waters: Segregated Swimming in American Cities, 1914-1954”

The Institute for the Humanities presents the Faculty Fellow Lecture series with Lynn Hudson, history, “Troubled Waters: Segregated Swimming in American Cities, 1914-1954,” on Thursday, Nov. 7, at 4 p.m. at the Institute for the Humanities.

In this lecture, Hudson examines the challenges faced by Black Americans as they crossed color lines in pursuit of recreation in pools and on beaches in the critical years between World War I and the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. The focus will be on the Midwest and West, where the Great Migration brought thousands of African Americans seeking to live free of the Jim Crow restrictions of the South. Migrants sought the freedom to own a house, vote, use a library, go to school, or swim in a pool, and cities in these regions were the testing grounds. To gain access to segregated swimming facilities, African Americans crossed color lines, took legal action and reclaimed white-only spaces. Focusing on the conflicts over recreational spaces and water highlights the ways in which Black bodies were seen as contaminating agents in the battles over urban space and the ways black Americans shaped new definitions of citizenship in the years before Brown.

Hudson is a professor of history and an affiliated faculty member of the Black Studies department. She is the author of “The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco” (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) and “West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California’s Color Line” (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

Email huminst@uic.edu to request accessibility accommodations.