In the county where Michael Phelps grew up, there’s no public pool.

Baltimore County has nearly 850,000 residents and dozens of pools — but they’re all private, at country clubs or apartment buildings or gyms, and they often charge hefty fees.

The city of Baltimore has invested millions of dollars in several state-of-the-art swimming pools — all free. But Baltimore County has no plans to construct any, save for a “splash park” in Owings Mills.

As temperatures soar this summer, some county residents are asking a question that state Sen. Carl Jackson has for years: Why doesn’t Baltimore County have a public pool?

“I don’t understand why we have not looked into that as a county — especially since it seems to get hotter every summer,” said Jackson, an east-side Democrat.

Decades ago, as federal courts ordered the integration of once-segregated public facilities, county leaders chose to do without public swimming pools rather than welcome everybody. Across the country, many suburbs did the same, donating or selling pools to neighborhood associations or just filling them in.

As a result, many Black Americans lost access to pools, and to carefree summers spent wading in cool water and learning to swim. They lost economic opportunities: Jobs ranging from lifeguard to tugboat captain or even yacht chef require the ability to swim. Some lost their lives — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Black children are far more likely to drown than their white classmates.

“The culture has changed in a lot of communities where the mantra to protect your children often is ‘stay away from the water,’ because the parents can’t swim, and they can’t save their children,” said Cathleen Dean, a documentarian whose latest film, “Wade in the Water,” is a call to desegregate water access. ”Black people don’t have that connection to the water like they had in the past.”

‘No Jews, Dogs, or Coloreds Allowed’

Early in Barry Levinson’s 1999 film Liberty Heights, three gawky teens peer through a chainlink fence to watch a blonde swaying her hips poolside. A gate swings shut and the camera turns to a sign: “No Jews, Dogs, or Coloreds Allowed.”

Levinson, who is Jewish and grew up in Baltimore, said he saw such a sign “at one of the swimming pools we attended back in the ’50s.”

Jews weren’t welcome in housing developments such as Stoneleigh, a county neighborhood where restrictive deeds also banned Blacks from its homes and pool. Levinson, now 83, said he’s “amazed that more progress was not accomplished” since then.

Allen Judman, who’s around Levinson’s age and who also grew up in Baltimore, remembers those signs, as well as ones saying “restricted communities.”

“I knew that meant ‘No Jews allowed.’ I knew that even as a little kid,” Judman said.

Meadowbrook‘s pool in Mount Washington had a sign advertising “for gentiles only.” But by the time his family started going to the swim club in the 1960s, “they had dropped the Jewish business,” Judman said.

It took far longer to drop other “business.” Few things tested some white people’s tolerance like the idea of swimming with Black people.

“You’re half naked, let’s be real, and when you get wet, things kind of stick,” said Edith Thomas, 70, of Catonsville.

She recalled her parents forbade her and her brothers from visiting the Five Oaks pool on Frederick Road for fear white patrons would attack them.

“White men did not want those Black men looking at their women,” Thomas said.

Schools and pools

Efforts to desegregate beaches and pools were central to the Civil Rights Movement. During 1919’s Red Summer, one of America’s deadliest periods of racial violence, a Black Chicago teenager drifted into whites-only waters in Lake Michigan. White swimmers pelted him with stones, killing him. The ensuing violence killed 38 people and injured hundreds more.

As a whites-only swimming culture developed, Black Americans jumped into pools and beaches in organized protests called wade-ins, according to University of Virginia historian Andrew Karhl, who has written three books on the topic. Many faced beatings by white patrons and police.

Yet Black swimmers persisted in trying to integrate beaches, where they were often relegated to the most dangerous sections or areas far from public transit.

The push came in part from Black soldiers returning from World War II, said Miriam Lynch, executive director of Diversity in Aquatics, a national organization that advocates for equity in swimming. Many had learned to swim in basic training and were crestfallen to return to a still-segregated land.

Local officials’ visions of grand aquatics centers ran headlong into their aversion to integrating those spaces.

In 1953, Baltimore County’s parks and recreation department developed a plan to construct public pools at elementary schools, sharing the cost with the education department. The county abandoned the plan, and no such pools were built, a 1966 report indicated. By then, about 150 private clubs operated in the county.

The intervening 13 years saw seismic civil rights shifts. In the summer of 1964, Black and white swimmers jumped into a Florida motel pool. The owner poured acid into the pool, and an off-duty police officer jumped in to beat and pull out the swimmers as white onlookers incited more violence. News media broadcast the footage. The next day, a long-deadlocked Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Far from prompting public pools to integrate, however, desegregation spurred their closing. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than provide an integrated one. Depriving people equally did not violate the law.

“Whites,” Karhl said, “had cut off their nose to spite their face.”

Catonsville goes private

In Catonsville, plans for a new public pool near the Baltimore Beltway fizzled in the late 1960s. Five Oaks, a public pool built in 1931, had been privatized in the 1950s. When member John Wright brought Black guests in 1971, management kicked them out, arguing, according to The Evening Sun, that Wright violated an “unwritten code.”

Protests ensued, and the board changed its policy to allow each member 10 guests a year regardless of race. That change, the Catonsville Times reported, lessened fears of “busloads of black people from the inner city.”

By the mid-1980s, when Edith Thomas took her daughter to Five Oaks, “it was still limited,” she said. “They wouldn’t let a lot of us in, just a few.”

Today, Five Oaks has a long waiting list. Joining requires a $750 deposit in addition to various membership fees. In an email, its board said it did not track demographic information, but they “welcome any and all potential members.”

Over the years, the county has built several new recreation centers, but none with pools.

“Hardly anyone asks for them,” said Bob Smith, the parks and recreation director, adding that most requests are for trails, ballfields and pickleball courts.

Keith Taylor, president of the Sparrows Point Historical Society, is one of several local leaders who sought county support for a public pool. Taylor wanted one at Pennwood Fields, which hosted recreational activities when Bethlehem Steel operated. Tradepoint Atlantic owns the land, and it donated a piece of property for a $28 million county park nearby. Taylor said he’s gotten nowhere in the push for a pool.

County recreation councils choose which amenities to push, said Rahim Booth, a longtime swimming instructor. These councils are often composed of volunteers who don’t think about pool access because they already have it — either at private schools or country clubs.

“You’re not in the room, so it doesn’t go on the agenda,” Booth said of pool advocates. “It’s easier to put a put in a football field, a baseball field, or even a gym.”

A matter of life and death

In 1953, 13-year old Tommy Cummings drowned while swimming with friends in the Patapsco River. Tommy’s community pool, Lake Clifton, was segregated. His death prompted mass protests, a lawsuit and, ultimately, the integration of city pools. It also helped birth a movement to teach Black children to swim.

Booth, who works with Diversity in Aquatics, has been part of that effort in Baltimore County. So has Marvin Thorpe, whose father began a swimming program in his Windsor Mill backyard in 1972 and taught the children of former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former Baltimore Raven Terrell Suggs.

It’s a challenge everywhere. Roland White, the only Black swimmer on a summer team for Loyola Blakefield High School in the late 1970s, negotiates with private pools in Florida so he can provide free instruction for Black swimmers. He still remembers his Loyola teammates’ taunts, which became so painful he begged his father to let him quit the team.

“We as a people can’t rely on other people to teach our people how to swim,” White said. “They have no vested interest.”

Asked about pools, Baltimore County Executive Kathy Klausmeier said the county had two beaches and arrangements with YMCAs in Dundalk and Randallstown that let county residents swim “at minimal cost.” The county paid for the Randallstown pool, but then leased it to the YMCA, which charges for its use. Klausmeier did not address questions about high drowning rates for Black children.

Asked where he swam as a child in Baltimore County’s Lochearn, Councilman Izzy Patoka said he and his two best friends were ”creative" in finding places to swim. They were a working-class, multiracial trio — his friends were Black and Korean — and couldn’t afford swim clubs.

Patoka said he didn’t think about the county’s paucity of public pools until The Banner asked him. Now a candidate for county executive, Patoka said he would push for them but building pools would be challenging because the county has neither the infrastructure nor funds for them.

“We should have these public amenities in Baltimore County,” Patoka said. “Recreation, including swimming, shouldn’t be exclusive to those who could afford it.”

Councilman Julian Jones, the body’s only Black member, said he’s thought about pool access for years, and thinks the two YMCAs aren’t enough. Also running for county executive, Jones said he’d push for pools.

“I asked early on, and the answer was, ‘There are a lot of pools already in the county.’ One time, believe it or not, I heard, ‘Oh, we don’t have any experience running pools,’” Jones said. “Well, if we can run the schools and the jails, we can run the pools.”

Even Michael Phelps, the eight-time Olympian, didn’t train in his home county. His mother, Debbie Phelps, paid for the family to swim at Meadowbrook. In the early 2000s, summer memberships cost a few hundred dollars; today, it’s $1,250.

Michael Phelps now runs a foundation that helps children learn to swim. Debbie Phelps serves on the advisory board at Padonia Park Club in Cockeysville, where a pool was just named for her family. Padonia’s owner, Matt Musgrove, is striving to make membership more diverse and is running a special now: $550 for a membership for 2026 that includes 10 visits in 2025. When she sees children splashing — the very activity that inspired her son to become the world’s best swimmer — she notes that most are white.

“That opportunity to play, to be with other kids in the water, it’s so important,” Debbie Phelps said. “Right now, we don’t have that in the county.”