I first encountered her when my sister and I visited an show off on the Fairmount Water Works in 2022 that was once referred to as: “POOL: A Social History of Segregation.”
Within the black-and-white {photograph}, a tender Black girl named Inez Robie Patterson looked to be captured proper prior to she dived off the aspect of a pool wall. Her triceps have been flexed, fingers instantly again with fingers dealing with the ceiling. Her knees have been bent, and her ft touched a skinny, black-tiled line at the pool deck. Her hair was once well lined in a white swim cap. Her eyebrows have been fantastically thick, and her mouth shaped a slight smile. Her white go well with had a lifeguard corps insignia, signaling her experience in water protection.
As a Black girl, swim teacher, lifeguard and lifetime swimmer, I discovered myself interested in her. My doctoral analysis in African American literature, historical past and environmental concept led me to review what I name Patterson’s “aquatic life”: the written and photographic document of her courting to swimming.
I sought after to grasp: Who was once this pretty Black mermaid, and why was once swimming so necessary to her? How had she lifted her neighborhood?
A task type for Black woman swimmers
Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Patterson’s love of sports activities started at an early age.
Inez Patterson attended Temple College and was once later inducted into their Ladies’s Athletic Corridor of Popularity in 1987.
Courtesy of the Particular Collections Analysis Heart. Temple College Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.
As a woman, she excelled in hockey, basketball, and monitor and box. As a young person at West Philadelphia Top within the mid-Nineteen Twenties, she sharpened her swimming talents and entered a swim meet on the McCoach Leisure Heart – now the Marian Anderson rec heart – in South Philadelphia in September 1927. In line with The Philadelphia Tribune, she took house six first-place finishes: within the underwater swim, the aspect stroke, the status entrance dive, the operating entrance dive, the swan dive and the entrance somersault.
Camaraderie was once a concern for Patterson. Anywhere I encountered her within the archive, whether or not strolling throughout the Fairmount Water Works show off or studying outdated problems with the Tribune, she gave the look to be having a look ahead to the development being made by way of Black woman swimmers and the neighborhood they shaped and shared within the water.
A tender sports activities columnist on a venture
In different editions of Women in Sports activities, Patterson inspired the Black West Philadelphia neighborhood to wait native swim meets and fortify the ladies as they make “wonderful showings” within the water.
She additionally made a resounding case at once to Black ladies in West Philly:
“There are many reasons why you should join … first of all you have the honor of being a member of the first ‘Colored Swimming Club’ in West Philly High, second, you will learn to swim if you are a beginner, and if you are advanced you will learn life-saving; third, you will develop yourself physically and add another popular sport to your list, and fourth, you can gain athletic credit.”
Studying her column, I imagined what it should have felt love to had been a teenage Black woman talking at once to different Black ladies and carving out area for the primary “Colored Swimming Club” at West Philadelphia Top.
A Philadelphia Tribune article from 1942 studies on Inez Patterson changing into the primary Black girl to grow to be a U.S. swimming legitimate.
Photograph courtesy of the Philadelphia Tribune Media Workforce
Integrating Temple College’s swim workforce
After graduating highschool, Patterson went directly to combine Temple College’s ladies’s swim workforce. She refused to swim all the way through the hourlong “colored” apply time. Being the one Black girl at the workforce, she insisted on swimming every time her white teammates swam and being “too busy” to swim all the way through the segregated hour.
“Up to this time, no colored girls had taken part in any swim meets (at Temple),” Patterson advised the Baltimore Afro-American in 1934 about her enjoy on the college. “The purpose of (the swim meet) was to foster intercollegiate spirit among the students so, ‘Why shouldn’t I go?’ I asked myself. Out of 500 girls present I was the only colored.”
Those phrases display the righteous defiance in her persona and aquatic lifestyles. The pool was once hers, too. Why shouldn’t it’s?
Breaking new limitations
As I endured my adventure via The Philadelphia Tribune archive, I discovered of some other native Black girl swimmer: Anne Marques Garrott.
Garrott was once inducted into the Belmont-Southwest YWCA Athletic Corridor of Popularity in 1989 on the age of 75. A piece of writing about her induction detailed how Garrott, like Patterson, insisted upon being within the pool. She entered swim meets “wherever she traveled” and taught naval cadets the right way to swim on the College of Southern California, regardless of the pervasiveness of racism at USC in opposition to Black swimmers.
After crediting her folks for encouraging her to swim, Garrott thanked some other mentor: Inez Patterson. She mentioned Patterson “was one of the best-educated Black women I ever met” and in addition “a powerful swimmer (who) broke a lot of barriers.”
Inez Patterson gave up the ghost in 1944 from headaches of a ruptured pelvic abscess. Even though her lifestyles was once minimize brief, she made a significant have an effect on on Black aquatic tradition in Philadelphia. At 31 years outdated in 1942, she made historical past over again as the primary Black girl – or what the Tribune referred to as a “race girl” – to grow to be a swimming legitimate with the Nationwide Segment of Ladies’s Athletics.
Black feminist student Brittney Cooper writes in “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” that to be a “race girl” or “race woman” was once to be a Black girl “institution-builder” and “public thinker” who sought the betterment of her other people in thoughts, frame and spirit. Patterson’s aquatic lifestyles presentations us how vital the swimming pool was once to her and the communities she served, from West Philadelphia Top to Temple College, the Southwest Belmont YWCA to the YWCAs in Harlem and Jersey Town.
The creator all the way through her highschool swimming days.
Courtesy of Samantha Adams
100 years after Patterson swam at West Philadelphia Top in 1926, I make a regimen out of waking up early to swim at my out of doors group pool in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I pull the swim cap onto my mess of curly hair and fasten the goggles to my eyes. I inhale and bounce into the chilly water. I recall to mind Inez Robie Patterson, and I think gratitude for her defiant dive.
See web page 45 of the POOL: A Social Historical past of Segregation mag for the picture of Inez Patterson preparaing to dive.
