Thursday, August 11, 2005
Towels and nickels
I heard this little story from one of my father's K-State coworkers when we moved to Manhattan in 1956. Supposedly this had occurred the previous summer, so it's 50 years old now. As far as I know it's never been published anywhere; if the WPA Writers Project had still been active then, I suspect they would have appreciated and included this story. Probably true, possibly apocryphal, certainly iconic.
Integration was a hot topic in 1955.
The city of Manhattan had a separate black high school, which was merged immediately after Brown vs Board. But the city swimming pool wasn't affected by that legal change. Blacks were still relegated to Douglass Pool, down by the railroad, while whites had the nicer pool in the City Park.
K-State, though, had been integrated from the start, and had graduated important black scholars and writers as early as 1880. In the '50s K-State, being a world-class engineering and agriculture school, had a wide variety of foreign students. (Cosmopolitan Kansas? Yep.) K-State also had a long history of contrarian tendencies, dating from the Abolitionist origins of northeastern Kansas. Aggies were protesting long before protesting was cool.
So a group of college contrarians decided to do something about Douglass Pool, and decided to do it mathematically. One fine summer morning, they gathered up a dozen nice clean-cut foreign students, made sure each of them had a towel and a nickel for admission, and walked them down to the city pool.......
¶ 8:28 PM
Integration was a hot topic in 1955.
The city of Manhattan had a separate black high school, which was merged immediately after Brown vs Board. But the city swimming pool wasn't affected by that legal change. Blacks were still relegated to Douglass Pool, down by the railroad, while whites had the nicer pool in the City Park.
K-State, though, had been integrated from the start, and had graduated important black scholars and writers as early as 1880. In the '50s K-State, being a world-class engineering and agriculture school, had a wide variety of foreign students. (Cosmopolitan Kansas? Yep.) K-State also had a long history of contrarian tendencies, dating from the Abolitionist origins of northeastern Kansas. Aggies were protesting long before protesting was cool.
So a group of college contrarians decided to do something about Douglass Pool, and decided to do it mathematically. One fine summer morning, they gathered up a dozen nice clean-cut foreign students, made sure each of them had a towel and a nickel for admission, and walked them down to the city pool.......
¶ 8:28 PM
