My Greatest Moment of the 2016 Olympics Was When Simone Manuel Won the Gold Medal in Swimming
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My greatest moment of the 2016 Olympics was when Simone Manuel won the gold medal in swimming in the 100m freestyle. It was an awesome race with an awesome finish. In the end Simone even amazed herself. As she stood in the water with her hand covering her mouth in utter surprise of her victory, at that moment I knew two things would happen. First, there would be a lot of babies named Simone, and second, thousands of Black children would be jumping into pools all over this country.
Simone’s great victory reminds me of a dark cloud in the history of the Midwest, the 1919 riot in Chicago.
The Chicago race riot of 1919 began when Eugene Williams, a black man swimming in lake Michigan, drifted over the imaginary segregation line and was bludgeoned with a large stone by white onlookers. He subsequently drowned. The riot that followed lasted 6 days, causing 38 deaths, and over 500 injuries. Furthermore, over 1000 black families lost their homes to fires. All because of swimming.
But of course, the riot really wasn’t about swimming. We tend to focus our attention on the match that lights the fire, instead of all of the combustible material that has been stacking up for decades.
The real cause of the 1919 riot was the African American migration from the southern states to the north. From 1910 to 1970 over 2 million African Americans left the oppression and legal Jim Crow racism of the south, to seek new opportunities of jobs, schools, and living environments in the north. Chicago, along with Philadelphia and New York, was one of the major stopping points.
My family came from rural South Carolina to Chicago around 1915. They settled in the south side of Chicago, the only area African Americans were allowed to live. Like the other African Americans, my family worked in the worst conditions in the stockyards, and low paying service positions- when they could find work at all. Even these jobs found competition with new immigrants from Europe, and returning veterans from WWI.
It all boiled over in the waters of Lake Michigan, July 27, 1919. In his book, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, Jeff Wiltse presents the racial history of segregated swimming in pools and public waters. According to Wiltse, once the lakes and pools were integrated in the 1940’s, whites left the public pools and built private pools and private pool clubs. This was white flight from public pools! The public pools were then no longer maintained and many of them closed.
The integration of public pools was a technical fix. However, racism is not a technical problem, but an adaptive challenge. In the book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz writes, “Adaptive challenges arise when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge." When we are faced with an adaptive challenge, we do not know the solution. An adaptive challenge can only be solved when people change their behaviors and assumptions.
As we look at the challenges in our presbytery around race, the technical solution is to create policy like the Ernie Glenn plan. This is a plan that promotes interviewing people of color for pastoral positions in the presbytery of Milwaukee. This plan is a start, but it is not enough. The problems in our cities still swirl around bringing well-paying jobs back into our communities (or public transportation to take people to where the jobs are), better public schools, and adequate housing (yes, these are the same issues that plagued our cities in 1919).
But we still must ask the adaptive question: In what ways must we change individually to solve this problem of race? I believe we must stop pointing the finger at others and start pointing at ourselves. We should ask, “How must my thinking and attitude around the sin of racism change? How am I contributing to the problem, and what must I do differently?”
When our hearts are softened, we are able to get to the real root of the problem, the sin of systemic racism, and bring change that will last for generations.