Two young Black men walked into the Anacostia public pool on June 29, 1949. It was the third time in three days that Black swimmers had tried to use the pool, and the third time a crowd of white boys gathered to splash them, surround them, and force them out of the water. By the early afternoon there were about a hundred white people and seventy Black people at the pool itself. A few hours later there were 450 people in Anacostia Park outside the pool, many of them armed with baseball bats, clubs, and concealed knives, and four people had been hurt badly enough to be carried to Casualty Hospital. Bill Mabry, one of the Black swimmers, would later call it Washington's first race riot. The Truman administration had a choice. It could roll back the order that had triggered the violence. Or it could double down on integration. It doubled down.
Washington in 1949 was a Jim Crow city in every practical sense, even though no city ordinance required separation of the races. Black residents were systematically barred from most hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations - a structure of private discrimination that operated without need of formal law. The federal government, however, owned a great deal of city property, including six major public swimming pools sited on parkland. President Harry Truman had appointed a Committee on Civil Rights in 1946 that produced the landmark report To Secure These Rights, calling for federal action against segregation in the District. The Department of the Interior, which had jurisdiction over the federal pools, was caught between its formal nondiscrimination obligations and the District Recreation Board, the city agency whose lifeguards staffed the pools and whose leadership openly supported segregation. In June 1949 Interior Secretary Julius Krug ordered that the nonsegregation policy be enforced at the federal pools. The Anacostia pool, on the east side of the river in a working-class white neighborhood, became the test case.
On June 27, two young Black men entered the Anacostia pool. White boys at the pool surrounded them and forced them out of the water. About 50 white bystanders joined the mob and began to boo. Officers from the Metropolitan Police arrived and made no arrests. An hour later four more Black swimmers between the ages of 14 and 21 tried to enter the pool and were forced out by the same crowd, now grown to several hundred white spectators. Reporters who were present estimated 700 to 800 white people had gathered to watch by the end of the day. The next day saw similar confrontations. On June 29 the conflict reached a head. A group of white men chased a Black teenager out of the pool. The young man tried to escape over the perimeter fence and cut himself badly on the wire. Police arrived and began to escort Black and white swimmers out of the pool separately, but the fighting simply moved into Anacostia Park. A police captain at the scene estimated the crowd at 450 people. People in the crowd had brought weapons - baseball bats, clubs, and, in some cases, knives - they had presumably brought from home in anticipation.
When the violence finally subsided that evening, four people had been hurt seriously enough to be treated at Casualty Hospital. The police made five arrests - two Black men and three white men. The arrest record itself revealed the politics of the moment: two of the three white arrestees were not part of the rioting mob but were instead members of the Young Progressives Party, a leftist organization the federal government considered a Communist front. They had been distributing pamphlets in support of pool desegregation without a permit, and so the police arrested them rather than any of the white men who had actually attacked Black swimmers. The Department of the Interior closed the Anacostia pool the next day, pending a review. Pressure mounted on Krug to relax the desegregation policy and let the pool reopen as it had always operated - whites only. Krug refused. The Department issued a statement insisting that no backward step of any sort should be made in effectuating the President's Civil Rights program, specifically with respect to Washington, D.C. The Anacostia pool stayed closed for the rest of the summer of 1949.
On August 16, 1949, a biracial delegation of twenty-five mothers, organized by neighborhood civil rights activists, came to Interior Secretary Krug with a request. They asked him to reopen the Anacostia pool as a fully integrated facility under enforced federal nondiscrimination policy, staffed by trained police officers, both Black and white, to prevent any repeat of the June violence. They got what they had asked for in principle, though the pool would not actually reopen until 1950 under those conditions. The Anacostia Pool riot is sometimes forgotten in the longer history of Washington civil rights - it was overshadowed by the much larger struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. But the moment matters. Truman's administration had refused to retreat. The Department of the Interior had refused to retreat. The Black mothers who organized the August delegation had refused to retreat. The eventual integration of D.C. public facilities, sealed by the Supreme Court's 1953 ruling in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. and by Bolling v. Sharpe in 1954, was built partly on what those Black swimmers had refused to give up at the Anacostia pool. The pool itself was eventually demolished and replaced with a newer facility nearby. The water is still the same temperature for everyone.
The site of the original Anacostia pool sits at roughly 38.87 degrees N, 77.00 degrees W in Anacostia Park, on the east bank of the Anacostia River across from L'Enfant Plaza. This is inside Class B airspace and the Washington Special Flight Rules Area. Reagan National (KDCA) is 2 miles west. Andrews JBA (KADW) is 4 miles southeast. Coordinate with Potomac TRACON. P-56A over the Capitol is 2 miles northwest.