What happens when generations are kept from the water—and how do communities find their way back? This article explores the complex relationship between Black Americans and water, tracing how segregation and exclusion from public swimming facilities created lasting disparities in swimming ability and water safety. The consequences remain visible today, with Black children experiencing disproportionately high drowning rates and many families lacking access to swim instruction across generations. At the same time, the story is also one of resilience and reclamation. Through initiatives like Outdoor Afro’s Making Waves swim scholarship program, thousands of Black children and families are gaining access to swimming lessons, building confidence in the water, and creating new opportunities for outdoor recreation.
The article highlights how removing barriers to swim education can transform lives while addressing a long-standing public health challenge. Beyond swimming lessons, the piece celebrates the rich water heritage that has always existed within Black communities—from the Gullah Geechee traditions of the coastal Southeast to generations of anglers, surfers, paddlers, and swimmers who maintained deep connections to rivers, lakes, and oceans despite exclusionary policies. Ultimately, it argues that learning to swim is about more than safety; it is about reclaiming joy, strengthening community, and fostering the next generation of stewards who will care for America’s waterways.
June has a particular pull toward water. Something about the length of the days and the heat building by mid-morning makes a lake, river, or pool feel less like an option and more like a necessity. Boogie seems to feel this, too. On our morning walks, she moves toward anything that might be wet: sprinklers, puddles, the creek that runs at the edge of the trail in the early part of summer. There is an intelligence in it. When it is hot and the water is available, you go toward the water.
For Black Americans, the relationship with water is layered in ways that the biology of a warm June day does not fully account for. There is the pull. And there is also a history that, for generations, made responding to that pull more complicated than it should have been.
This June, I want to talk about both.
What Was Kept from the Water
Municipal swimming pools in the United States expanded rapidly between 1920 and 1940, as swimming became a popular summer pastime and cities built facilities to serve their residents. The keyword is some residents.
As National Geographic has documented, cities across the North and South built pools in white neighborhoods and conspicuously avoided building them in Black neighborhoods.
“Where Black swimmers attempted to use public facilities, they were routinely turned away, and in some cities faced direct violence. Pool riots broke out in the late 1940s in St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles as communities fought over who had the right to share the water.”
The consequences of that history did not disappear when pools desegregated. According to the CDC, Black children ages 10 to 14 drown in swimming pools at 7.6 times the rate of white children the same age. Approximately 64% of African American children have few to no swimming skills, compared to 40% of white children. Among Black adults, 36% report not knowing how to swim. These are not natural statistics. They are the downstream result of deliberate exclusion from swimming instruction over multiple generations: parents who never learned could not teach their children. The gap compounded with each passing decade.
The water was withheld. The knowledge of how to move through it safely was withheld along with it. What we are living with now is the inheritance of that policy.
Finding Their Way Back
The gap in swimming skills is real and measurable. So is the determination to close it. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched Making Waves, a swim scholarship program designed to address the drowning disparity directly. The program provides what the organization calls ‘swimmerships:” reimbursements of up to $200 per swimmer and $400 per family for swim lessons, with participants choosing the instructor or facility that works for their schedule, location, and budget.
Learn more at the Making Waves program page.
The program set a goal of 2,000 new swimmers in 2025. It funded more than 3,200 before the year was done. Outdoor Afro has now set its next milestone at 5,000. These are not abstract numbers. Each one is a person, often a child, who can now move through the water safely. Each one is a family with a different relationship to pools, lakes, and open water than the generation before them. The gap that was created over decades is being closed one swimmer at a time.
The swimmership model is worth understanding because it is designed around a specific reality: that the barrier to swimming lessons for many Black families is cost, and that removing cost removes the most direct obstacle. The program does not require you to travel to a specific facility or work with a specific instructor. You choose the pool, the instructor, and the time that works for your life. Outdoor Afro reimburses you. That flexibility matters in communities where transportation, scheduling, and access to quality instruction are all real variables. The program meets people where they are, which is exactly how good health and access programs are supposed to work.
“This is what Outdoor Afro does when it is working at its best: it takes a systemic problem, one whose roots are in policy and history rather than in individual choice, and it meets people where they are with something practical.”
The swimmership program does not ask anyone to understand the history of municipal pool segregation before they can get in the water. It removes the financial barrier, which is real, and lets the water do the rest. The numbers describe the reach of that. The stories describe what it feels like from the inside.
In my book, “Nature Swagger,” Bryson Sutton writes about being ten years old on his first whitewater rafting trip. He describes the whole arc: the fear before, the experience of being fully in the water’s power, the discovery that he could move through it. He then describes learning to swim: fifteen seconds underwater, then freestyle, then backstroke, then treading water. Each skill is a door opening. He writes about the feeling of competence in the water as a form of freedom he had not expected. That door is what Making Waves holds open for thousands of families each year.
The Heritage of Water Knowledge
What often gets lost in conversations about Black Americans and water is the water knowledge that was never lost. The Gullah Geechee people of the coastal Southeast have maintained a relationship with the ocean, rivers, and tidal marshes of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida for centuries.
Fishing, net-making, boat-building, the reading of tides and currents: this was and is a living tradition, passed through families who never left the water’s edge. The Gullah Geechee Corridor, which stretches from coastal North Carolina through northern Florida, holds some of the deepest water heritage of any community in the United States.
The exclusion of Black Americans from public pools in the 20th century was a specific policy applied in a specific context. It does not represent the full story of Black Americans and water. The full story includes the coastal Gullah Geechee communities, the Great Lakes fishers and swimmers, the families who learned to swim in rivers and ponds when public pools were closed to them, and the surfers, paddlers, and open-water swimmers who have been on the water, in some cases, for generations.
Rick Blocker, who writes in “Nature Swagger” about fifty years of surfing and his decades of work with the Black Surfing Association to document and celebrate Black surfers’ long presence in the ocean, is that full story. Elaine Lee, who writes in “Nature Swagger” about learning to swim at age five and eventually swimming with wild spinner dolphins in the waters off Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, is that full story. The Making Waves program is that full story. It is all the long, complicated, and ultimately joyful history of Black Americans and water.
There is also a quieter story that runs alongside all of it: the people who learned to swim in rivers and creeks because no pool was open to them, who passed that knowledge to their children in the way that all essential knowledge gets passed down, quietly and practically and without waiting for permission.
Those swimmers and their families are part of this history, too. The formal exclusion from public facilities did not fully interrupt the water knowledge. Some of it survived in exactly the ways that the most essential things survive: hand to hand, generation to generation, at the edge of whatever water was available.
The Swimmer as Steward
There is a relationship between knowing how to move through water and caring about what happens to it. You develop a stake in a body of water when you have been in it. You notice when the water changes. You know the difference between a healthy lake and one that has been neglected. You have a reason, beyond the abstract, to want it protected.
Conservation has always worked this way: the people most invested in a place are the people who know it most directly, who have fished in it or swum in it or launched a canoe from its banks on a summer morning. Relationship precedes stewardship.
The Gullah Geechee communities have understood this for centuries. Their deep knowledge of the tidal rivers, the coastal marshes, and the estuaries of the Southeast is inseparable from their advocacy for those ecosystems. They know those waters the way you know the people you love: by being present, paying attention, and returning season after season.
“That knowledge is why their voices carry particular weight when those waterways are threatened by development, pollution, or rising sea levels. You cannot speak for water you have never entered.”
This is part of what Making Waves is building, beyond the safety statistics. Every child who learns to swim in a local pool and then graduates to open water, every family that spends a summer weekend at a lake or river, every paddler who comes to know a specific body of water through direct experience: these are the future stewards of our nation’s waterways.
The conservation movement has always needed people who care from the inside out. When Black Americans reclaim their full relationship with water, they reclaim a joy and a skill, and they rejoin a long tradition of communities who have known, kept, and fought for the water. Those voices belong in every conversation about the future of our public lands and waterways.
What June Offers
June marks the start of the swimming season in most of the United States. Outdoor pools fill up. Lakes are warm enough to swim in. Rivers that were too cold in May are ready now. National Get Outdoors Day falls on June 14 this year, which makes the second weekend of June an especially good time to find a body of water and get in. The whole month is National Great Outdoors Month, and there is no better way to celebrate that than by adding water to your outdoor practice, whether you are already comfortable in it or just beginning to find your footing at the edge.
“If you or your family want to learn to swim, the Making Waves program is the place to start. The application process is straightforward. The swim memberships cover the cost of lessons at an instructor or facility you choose. You do not have to be a certain age or skill level. You do not need any experience with water at all. The only thing the program asks is that you want to learn.”
If you already swim, this is a good time of year to go deeper: try open-water swimming in a lake or reservoir, take a paddleboarding or kayaking lesson, or find a river trip through your local outfitter. Outdoor Afro’s Volunteers lead water-based outings in communities across the country through the summer months. Check the Outdoor Afro events calendar to find something near you.
And if you know someone who wants to learn but has not yet taken the step, tell them about Making Waves. Share the link. Offer to go with them to the first lesson. The most common reason people do not start something new is that starting alone feels harder than the thing itself. Water is easier with company, and so is courage.
And if you have children in your life who do not yet know how to swim, consider making this the summer that changes. The statistics are real. The drowning disparity is real. And so is the joy on the other side of learning: the competence, the freedom, the relationship with water that opens up when you know you can move through it safely and with confidence.
An Invitation Back
Making Waves is built on exactly this kind of invitation: come to the water on your own terms, and here are the tools to get there safely. Three thousand two hundred people took that offer last year. More will this year.
The water has always been available. What is changing, through programs like Making Waves and through the community of people committed to closing this gap, is that more people now have what they need to enter it safely. That is not a small thing. That is what it looks like when an organization takes the historical record seriously and decides to do something useful about it.
This June, go to the water at whatever level that means for you. If you have not yet learned to swim, this is the summer to start learning. If you are building confidence, keep going. If you already move through the water with ease, find a pool, a lake, a river, and get in. None of those entries is less than another. The water is there for all of it. Know your limits, go with someone when you can, and let yourself enjoy what you are ready for. The water is waiting.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Why is spending time outdoors important for families?
Outdoor activities encourage families to connect without distractions, strengthen relationships, reduce stress, and create lasting memories. Shared experiences in nature can improve communication, emotional well-being, and overall family health.
2. How can parents encourage children to spend more time outside?
Parents can make outdoor time enjoyable by planning family walks, beach trips, gardening projects, picnics, or nature-based games. When outdoor activities are fun and consistent, children are more likely to develop a lifelong appreciation for nature.
3. What are the benefits of family outdoor traditions?
Family outdoor traditions help build stronger bonds, create a sense of belonging, and pass values from one generation to the next. Whether it’s annual camping trips, gardening together, or regular visits to local parks, these traditions foster connection and shared memories.
4. How does nature support children’s development?
Time spent outdoors supports physical activity, creativity, problem-solving skills, and emotional resilience. Children who regularly engage with nature often develop greater confidence, curiosity, and an understanding of environmental stewardship.
