The water’s fine — for everyone. This Charlotte swim club is on a mission.
Nadine Ford’s nose stings from the smell of chlorine as she walks into Fairmeadows Swim Club on Tuesday night.
Despite the cool March air, it’s hot and humid inside the tented pool area. About half a dozen swimmers, heads donned with caps and eyes protected with goggles, make laps.
Some backstroke, others freestyle, and when they come up for air, red light from an analog clock illuminates their shining faces. When they’re underwater, it reflects like a moon on the pool’s surface.
As Ford strolls up and down the length of the pool, she subtly directs the swimmers with hand gestures, and they immediately correct their movements.
The swimmers are of various skill levels, genders and ages, but they have one thing in common — they’re all Black.
Nadine Ford founded nonprofit Evolutionary Aquatics in 2021 to teach people of all backgrounds how to swim and about the history of Black people in water — dispelling the myth that Black people aren’t comfortable in the water.
“The more visible Black people are with swimming, the more we will chip away at that lie,” she said. “And hopefully, if we can chip away at that lie, we can also chip away at other lies that have been cast upon us.”
‘A stereotype that’s become true’
Ford’s childhood summers in Charlotte’s Druid Hills neighborhood revolved around swimming pools.
She’d follow her friends to the Double Oaks public pool or the McCrorey YMCA pool on Beatties Ford Road and spend hours, skin wrinkling, splashing around in the water.
But decades later in 2014 when she started preparing for a triathlon, Ford realized she hadn’t been in a pool in years.
She started training, and other women who saw her were empowered and would join her. That led to the creation of Mahoghany Mermaids, a U.S. Masters Swimming and Black women-led team.
One year ago, the group became Evolutionary Aquatics, centered around a mission to “get people to understand that Black people have a connection with the water — we swim, we kayak, we fish, and we always have.” (Evolutionary Aquatics teaches swimming, kayaking, and water aerobics, as well as trains lifeguards.)
This belief fuels Ford’s work. After reading Kevin Dawson’s book “Undercurrents of Power,” which details Black aquatic culture, Ford discovered how deep that history ran.
Before slavery, Dawson’s book shows that African people were excellent swimmers, divers and canoeists when they lived near water, as early as the 17th century. And even after they were trafficked to the United States, Dawson writes, Black people’s aquatic skills often far surpassed white Americans’ — more Black Americans could swim than their white counterparts.
In 1831, Tice Davids escaped slavery by diving into the Ohio River. His enslaver assumed he drowned but claimed he left to an “underground road,” some researchers believe.
But now, centuries later, Black children are 7.6 times more likely to drown in a swimming pool than white children, according to a CDC review of data from 1999-2019 on drowning deaths among those ages 10 to 14. The USA Swimming Foundation has found 64% of Black kids don’t know how to swim, compared to 40% of their white peers.
The statistics are likely due to a historic lack of access to public swimming pools for Black Americans and a lack of representation in the sport. Public pools and beaches weren’t desegregated until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but that didn’t put an end to the inequality.
Instead, pools and beaches were made private, and Black people still faced challenges geographically and economically getting to a pool and learning how to swim. Though North Carolina’s first integrated swimming pool was established in Charlotte in 1960, historic records show the local chairman of the Park and Recreation Commission said that it “put the tolerance of white people to the test.” In Charlotte, pool managers were permitted to bar Black people from pools if their presence would result in “disorder,” according to the book “Race, Riots and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America.”
All of this has resulted, in Ford’s words, “a stereotype that has become true.”
And for 82-year-old volunteer Connie Oliphant, who coaches with Ford at Evolutionary Aquatics, this is a history she’s lived.
Charlotte history
Oliphant grew up swimming at Double Oaks Pool near Druid Hills, later becoming a swim instructor and lifeguard there. She later became the first Black physical education teacher in Charlotte schools and served as the director of aquatics, youth sports and fitness at the McCrorey YMCA.
Growing up during the era of segregated pools, Oliphant said the kids at Double Oaks had no desire to swim at white pools in other parts of Charlotte.
“What you’ve got to understand about segregation is that when I was a child, it was understood,” she said. “We didn’t want to go to their pool. We wanted to stay at ours because it was more comfortable. We didn’t want any conflict — we were just happy with what we had.”
So similarly to Ford, Oliphant has never really believed the stereotype of Black people not swimming.
“Swimming might be predominantly white, but when I think about it, I think ‘Black,’” Ford said. “That’s what I always saw.”
But since then, numbers have declined. Oliphant and Ford both suspect it has to do with access to pools, concerns about maintaining Black hair and believing the stereotypes.
That’s why Oliphant teaches swimming classes every Sunday — she’s committed to sharing her love of swimming with other Black Charlotteans, and showing them how freeing it is.
“It takes me away from all of my other worries and puts me in another environment where I have to concentrate on where I am. It’s so relaxing,” she said. “That is what I’ve been trying to teach and tell my students at the pool.”
Feeling weightless
Evolutionary Aquatics’ 60-plus students have varying goals. Some want to be comfortable enough in the water to jump off a boat during vacation. Others want to lose weight.
Ford says they get what they put into it — and she hopes as they take classes, they reclaim some of the history that’s been “stolen” from them.
Chris Moore started taking classes about four months ago, along with a group of other Black men, to improve his health, and he said it’s changed his life. He thought he knew how to swim when he started, as someone who grew up swimming on vacation and in pools around town.
Moore quickly learned he wasn’t as proficient as he thought.
“When we came, they really didn’t have any men, and about 12 of us showed up at one time,” he said. “And the women beat us down bad. We thought we were more experienced swimmers. But the whole staff — they’re teachers. They really know what they’re doing.”
Now, Moore is aiming to be certified as a lifeguard, and he’s enrolled his daughter in swimming classes at the YMCA.
“In our community, you think this isn’t a thing because we grew up in these urban communities where we’re not near bodies of water. Some people have no need to get into the water, so we assume swimming is full of white people. That’s so not true.”
Ford still remembers the first time being in a pool.
She was five years old and she went with her sister to visit her sister’s boyfriend, now husband, at a hotel he was staying in.
At the hotel pool, young Ford jumped right in. But she couldn’t swim.
“It was like, three feet of water,” she remembers. “And I’m screaming and thinking I’m drowning and about to die.
“My brother-in-law just reached out and picked me up and was like, ‘Stand up.’”
From then, it was pure joy.
“After that, I didn’t want to get out.”
“That moment when you hit the water, that feeling of weightlessness — I just love it. And now my favorite part is seeing other people, especially adults, overcome whatever it was that was holding them back.”
A few days ago, Ford was teaching a lesson to students about breathing in the pool.
“A woman really had a moment, blowing bubbles, floating and kicking. You can just see all of it clicking in her head. At the end of the night, she was tired, but she got it,” Ford said. “I gave her a thumbs up, and she was just grinning.”
This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
