Edwin Caldwell, Jr. - On swimming (clip)

Edwin Caldwell, Jr.: One of the things that I remember when I was about twelve years old was Frank Robinson- whose father worked for Frank Graham, my grandmother worked for Frank Graham- we used to go and watch the white kids swim in the swimming pool- the one right behind Carmichael Hall. Carmichael Auditorium has an outdoor swimming pool that the Navy built for the University and whatever. And so, all the white kids used to be able to swim and we’d have to go and look.

We had nowhere to swim, we had to swim in the swimming holes and most of the swimming holes were polluted. Sewage dumped in those swimming holes but that was- we had swimming holes. And many of our friends developed typhoid fever and they died. We didn’t know why they were dying, the only thing we knew is we wanted to swim and when we found a swimming hole deep enough that got to be our swimming hole.

We found out that these things were polluted- they didn’t have sewer pipes, everything got dumped into the streams.

Well we made a proposal-me and Frank and another fellow by the name Nelson Rigsbee-we said let’s go to Frank Graham with this proposal that since the white kids are swimming, they are allowing the white kids to swim thirty days a month, if they let us swim one day a month then we’ll empty the water. They worried about water being polluted because Black kids are in the swimming pool, we will clean it. We will sweep it out and we’ll clean it, you give us one day.

I remember Frank Graham saying, “You know, Eddie this is not my jurisdiction, you really need to go over to talk with the athletic department.” And they gave us the runaround. The athletic department said, “Well, I’m in charge of the swimming pool but I can’t make that decision, you know, you really need to go talk with the athletic director.”

We go talk with the athletic director and he said “Well, this is highly unusual. I can’t give you that kind of permission, you really need to go talk with the Chancellor of the University,” which was R.B. House, and I knew it was ended there. We did go see him, okay, he did meet with us. He didn’t want to meet with us because he did not feel- the others treated us with respect- and you could feel that he didn’t treat us with respect, so we let it go at that point. But we had developed. People at this University knew that we’re on, and the question started to circulate, “What are they going to do about this?” Are they going to stop the white kids from swimming or are they going to let us swim? That was unofficial and we heard that.

Well, they didn’t stop the white kids from swimming, they built us a swimming pool. Miss Cornelia Love anonymously gave money to build us a swimming pool at Hargraves- that’s how that money came. I mean, she didn’t just up out of the goodness of her heart said, “Oh I want to be good to Black folks,” it’s because we raised the question: “Okay if we can’t swim then I don’t think that the white kids can swim. They got no business in that swimming pool because they don’t go to this University as we do.”

And so, you know, negotiations got started- that’s how that got started, okay. There’s nothing in history books that’s going to say that got started because she just had this swell of emotion that that was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do because we raised the point.