Drowning in the cesspool of racism
August 2 is an anniversary that no one wants to celebrate but one that needs to be remembered. On that day in 2010, six Black teenagers from two families drowned in the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was a day that would break your heart.
Maude Warner (left), mother of the Warner children, and Rena Blalock, mother of the Stewarts, release a lantern during the 15-year remembrance of the drowning of the Shreveport Six at Southern Hill Park, Aug. 2, 2025. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith)
The children and their families went on an outing to barbecue and cool off on a hot summer’s day. One of the children, Dekendrix Warner, stepped from a shallow sandbar into water 28 feet deep and started thrashing around.
The teenagers responded to Dekendrix’s yells for help and jumped in to try to save him. But they could not swim. All began to drown. The teenagers fought hard to save each other. No one could help, because family members and bystanders could not swim either. Screaming for help, the teenagers started going under.
“It was nothing I could do but watch them drown one by one,” said Marilyn Robinson, a friend of the family. (Fox News Aug 3, 2010)
Takeitha Warner (13), JaMarcus Warner (14), JaTavious Warner (17), Litrelle Stewart (18), LaDarius Stewart (17) and Latevin Stewart (15) all drowned that horrible day. Dekendrix Warren (15), was saved.
Black children drown at a rate almost three times higher than white children, according to Make a Splash Foundation, which provides scholarships for survival swim lessons. “Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death among children ages 1-4 and remains a major threat through age 14.” (makeasplashfoundation.co, 2026)
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 37% of Black adults don’t know how to swim, compared to 15% of the U.S. population. USA Swimming reports that 69% of Black children cannot swim compared to 41.8% of white children. Black people are three times more likely to die from drowning than white people. Some 60% of Black people never took swimming lessons.
Why is this? In the 1940s and 1950s, many public pools were built across the United States. The Works Progress Administration built hundreds of pools. Some were big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time! One included a zoo, community center and parks.
Some pools did not allow interracial swimming. To prevent Black people from swimming with white people, the Parks Department could close down. In many cities, if laws prohibiting segregation meant that the pool had to be open to Black people, white people would stop going to the pool.
In the town of Montgomery, West Virginia, a new pool was built in 1942, but it was unused for four years. Black people there were demanding equal access. White leaders formed a private “Park Association,” and the city leased the pool to this group for one dollar. Now the pool was “private” and as such could be kept segregated.
In segregated Montgomery, Alabama, the government drained the pool rather than allow it to be shared by Black and white people. The government poured concrete into the pool and covered it over with grass.
In response to desegregation laws, public pools across the country were closed down by white supremacists. The 2021 book “The Sum of Us” by Heather McGee described one example like this: “Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board and a reported capacity of 10,000 swimmers.”
When a new city administration changed the park’s policy in 1949 to allow Black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, 200 white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first 30 or so Black swimmers. The “white mob that grew to 5,000 attacked every Black person in sight.”
Due to this racism, the Black community did not have access to pools, swimming lessons and water safety instruction.
The fight for the right to swim
After a Dec. 14, 1974, march on Boston of 25,000 people to “Say No to Racism,” the NAACP called for a march in July of 1975 to Carson Beach in
South Boston. Even though Carson Beach was just yards from their apartments in the Columbia Point housing project, a center of the Black community of Dorchester, Black people could not go there, because they were vulnerable to attacks by racist gangs and the police. If they did go, it was at night.
Called together by the NAACP, the march organizers were a coalition of civil rights groups, Workers World Party and many others. A few thousand people marched from Columbia Point along the beach to the Carson Beach area. When they reached Carson Beach, police stopped them from going further.
The fight began. The white racists threw stones. Black people defended themselves. Ten people were arrested and 40 injured.
Building a workers’ world means building a world where people of all nationalities are encouraged to learn how to swim and have water safety lessons. Swimming should be part of a mandatory curriculum for elementary, middle and high school students.
