Overview:
Jim Crow-era laws, along with segregated pools and beaches, are a key reason why so few Black people know how to swim — and why a thousand or more drown each year — and, the numbers have increased every year since the pandemic. Now, community groups and nonprofit are working to reverse the trend.
Years ago, during a spring break trip from college with a group of girlfriends, Trish Miller admitted she couldn’t swim, even though she had grown up in Chesapeake, right on the Virginia coastline. So her friends decided to give her a crash course.
After an impromptu lesson that lasted a few minutes, Miller decided she was ready and jumped into 19 feet of water. She almost drowned.
As one of the millions of Black people who couldn’t swim — and having nearly become one of the estimated thousands of Black people who die from drowning each year — Miller decided to make a change. Not long after graduating college and launching her career, she founded SwemKids, a nonprofit that teaches Black children to swim.
Now that summer is almost here, the importance of swimming lessons in Black communities comes to the fore. A range of nonprofits and philanthropies are supporting Miller and other groups like her, looking to reverse a disturbing increase in drowning fatalities during the last few years.
In the process, they are tackling stereotypes and misinformation about why more than a third of Black Americans lack an essential water skill that could save their lives.
Dr. Debra Houry, chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and an emergency room physician, says drowning is a recurring tragedy that can tear families apart.
“I’ve seen firsthand the effects of drowning: families forced to say goodbye to their loved ones too soon,” she says.
The statistics are grim: More than 4,500 people died from unintentional drowning each year in the United States from 2020 to 2022, an increase of about 500 compared to 2019. The increase reverses decades of decline in drowning rates.
The CDC found that, for Black people, rates of drowning fatalities were 28% higher in 2021 than in 2019, according to a CDC Vital Signs study released in May.
Black children ages 5 to 19 are 5.5 times more likely to drown in swimming pools than white children of the same age, and Black children ages 11 to 12 are 10 times more likely to drown.
There are more than 10 million swimming pools in the United States, according to The Association of Pool & Spa Professionals. Yet almost 40 million adults don’t know how to swim at all, and Black adults were more than twice as likely to say they do not know how to swim compared to the 15% of all adults who don’t swim. Just 37% of Black people said they’ve taken swimming lessons.
“CDC’s drowning prevention experts collected high-quality drowning data to better understand how we can protect people in communities across the United States,” Houry says. “Understanding the barriers people face to accessing basic swimming and water safety skills training can help us better understand how to address those barriers, decrease drowning rates, and save lives.”
While swimming ability and drowning disparities exist between all races and ethnicities, for Black people, the issue stretches back to the era of Jim Crow and Black Codes. Public beaches and municipal swimming pools at the time were strictly segregated — and not just in the south.
In the late 1940s, major riots broke out in St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles when Black people attempted to use public pools. There were reports of fistfights and Whites pouring nails, bleach, or acid in pools where Black people were swimming were logged from Cincinnati, to Philadelphia, and St. Augustine, Florida.
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Even as recently as 10 years ago, Black Americans were harassed when trying to enjoy swimming pools or beaches and faced violence when trying to integrate these spaces. In 2009, the owner of a private swim club in Philadelphia barred a day camp serving Black and Latino children from the club’s facilities because they would affect the “complexion” of the club.
And in 2015, police in a wealthy Dallas suburb manhandled Black teenagers on the way to a pool party.
Miller, the SwemKids founder, says cultural perceptions, fear of drowning, and anxiety about water-related accidents — often passed down through generations — can discourage Black families from learning to swim. Those emotions become generative: if parents are non-swimmers, they may be more reluctant to have their own children near the water, knowing they cannot protect them.
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Public-private partnerships are attempting to reverse this trend.
Earlier this month, the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative to Prevent Drowning announced it will provide $60 million to help prevent drowning deaths in several countries, including the United States. This investment will support swim instruction and will help research the circumstances of drowning incidents in 10 states with high numbers of drowning deaths.
To date Bloomberg Philanthropies has invested $104 million globally to prevent drowning.
The nonprofit “uses data to identify the most vulnerable groups in places with high drowning rates and funds local solutions to save lives, said Kelly Larson, Injury Prevention Lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Bloomberg Philanthropies worked with the CDC Foundation, Larson said, to select the ten states “with the goal of providing basic swim instruction and water safety skills to populations disproportionately affected by drowning — in particular Black and American Indian/Alaska Native communities.”
Fund recipients can use the grants to help maintain public pools, as underfunded public recreation department budgets continue to limit access to pools. The money also can pay for more lifeguards and other personnel, and some are focused on ensuring their staff reflects the diversity of their neighborhoods.
For Miller, that kind of representation matters: Black people are more likely to jump into the pool for lessons if the teacher or lifeguard looks like them.
“I need us to feel different,” Miller said in an interview with Atlanta Magazine.. “I need us to feel welcoming, because there’s this generational gap of Black people who don’t have the skills to pass down to their children.”