Drained-pool politics are still with us today and shaping issues of far more consequence than pool access. Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, a decent social safety net.

They wouldn’t provide them in a public way anymore. And then ultimately, in order to avoid integrating them, many of these towns drained their public swimming pools rather than let Black families swim too. So of course, the white families lost a public resource as well. The Black families never knew the glory days of the well-funded public pool.

And for a long time in the Democratic Party, there was this idea that because the politics of race are so difficult, because framing things for race creates these drain the pool mentalities. So what you want to do is you want to have racially progressive policies that you sell in a colorblind way.

These pools were the pride of their communities, monuments to what public investment could do. But they were, in many places, whites-only. Then came the desegregation orders. The pools would need to be open to everyone. But these communities found a loophole. They could close them for everyone. Drain them. Fill them with concrete.