This story was originally performed at ATXplained Live at Bass Concert Hall on Oct. 23, 2024.
Each year, Barton Springs Pool attracts thousands of visitors from all walks of life and all over the world. They visit the pool to swim, lie out on the lawn and even do yoga. For that moment, it's the one thing everyone has in common — a day at the pool.
But it wasn't always like this. Before 1962, Barton Springs was open only to certain people — white people.
Chris Schulman wanted to know the history of segregation at Barton Springs Pool, so he asked ATXplained. "I’m especially interested in how it ended."
Like many places in the South, the city had what were called Jim Crow laws, which banned people of color from using many public facilities. A city plan adopted in 1928 also forced Black residents to East Austin, where there weren’t a lot of public facilities like parks and swimming pools.
Sarah Marshall, who coordinates historic preservation with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, said Rosewood Park opened in 1929 as the first and only park African Americans were able to use. A second park for Black Austinites didn't open until about 1959.
"We definitely as a city recognize that the African American community at that time was extremely underserviced by the city — and not just in parks," Marshall said.
The Supreme Court desegregated schools with its Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. The next year, the high court struck down segregation at public parks. But it took years for public places in Austin to integrate. In 1960, Barton Springs was still segregated.
The summer of 1960
Every year, graduating seniors at Austin High School would celebrate with a picnic at Barton Springs Pool.
In 1960, Austin High had several Black students. Joan Means Khabele was among them.
"The principal called me in and said, ‘I consider you to be the leader of the Black kids in your class. So I want you to go and tell them none of you can go to the senior picnic because Barton Springs and Zilker Park are segregated,'" Khabele told Austin PBS in a 2013 interview.
Khabele wasn’t going to just let it go — and neither were several of her classmates.
“As soon as me and several other people found out, we were fairly outraged," said David Martinez, one of a handful of Chicanos at the school that year.
Martinez said he’d dealt with racism his whole life and had learned to fight back — even in the smallest ways.
“It started off — 'You're not allowed to wear sandals,' so I wore sandals," he said. "Then they said I couldn't wear shorts, so I wore shorts. Then they said you couldn't have facial hair, and so I grew what my uncles teased me [as] ... a football mustache — 11 on each side.”
Chicanos were allowed to swim at the pool, but Martinez said it wasn’t something Hispanic families really did because of the cost and the distance.
Still, he wanted to fight back. For him, this was about equality. So he urged Khabele and several other classmates to get a petition started.
"We believe that every senior at [Stephen F. Austin High School] should be allowed to participate in all the recreation activities at the picnic, regardless of race," the petition, written by sophomores and juniors, stated.
The petition
There's a copy of that petition at the Austin History Center. It's blank.
According to Khabele and several others, the students got people to sign the petition — and not just classmates, but also parents and other community members. It was passed around at school, dropped in teacher mailboxes, even slipped inside the school newspaper.
"The cafeteria was the social network," said Hunter Ellinger, who was a junior at Austin High then.
Ellinger's parents were union leaders. So when his father heard they were organizing around the senior picnic, he offered to make copies of the petition.
It wasn't long before parents and other people started calling the City Council.
"Now you have to realize that at this time Austin was really a pretty small town," Ellinger said. "It especially had a small town dynamic. So that was enough to make a splash."
The next day, Ellinger said, the principal announced that all seniors, including the eight Black students, could go to the picnic. No other people of color would be allowed.
"They eventually said, 'Well you can go to the picnic,' but they weren’t going to change the policy forever," Khabele told PBS. "They were just saying, 'Oh let them go. It’s just eight.'”
The Black students still weren’t allowed in the pool.
Khabele said she wasn’t going to just sit by at the picnic tables and watch her classmates swim. She was getting in the water — rules be damned.
"So we started swimming," she said. "They really don’t know at first. Then they notice — 'Oh, there’s some Black kids in there.' They want to take us out. ... So we'd get out, go around, catch our breaths, and we come back again."
This small act of defiance set off a series of protests and swim-ins over the next couple summers.
Students, including Martinez and Ellinger, would find ways to make their voices heard, particularly at the pool's booth where they wouldn’t sell tickets to Black people.
Janet Means Scott, Khabele's younger sister, said several of them would go to the pool and overwhelm the ticket booth three or four times a week during the summer.
"We made no noise," Scott said. "We just got in line and got back in line over and over for an hour and a half or two hours.”
They did this for two years. Finally, in July 1962, the city changed its policy. Now anyone could buy a ticket to Barton Springs, regardless of race.
No records
Except KUT could find no documents of the change. There is no city record of any vote by the council or a change in policy from the parks department. There aren't any photos or videos — or even newspaper articles — of these protests or swim-ins.
The petition at the Austin History Center is blank. There isn't a copy of the one students and community members signed.
Martinez said that was on purpose.
“I kept thinking they would pull the trigger and arrest us all," he said. "But no. They let us go swim. They weren’t going to allow us to make a scene.”
The only thing KUT found about the pool's integration was a single article in the Austin American-Statesman from Sept. 24, 1963 — more than a year after Black swimmers were allowed. The article doesn’t acknowledge the protests. It acknowledges only the silence.
"How did Austin take this next step toward integration so quietly?" the article states. "Just like that. No one said anything."
Fast forward to today, there still isn’t a whole out there. But the city has started to acknowledge this piece of history.
The City Council voted last year to rename the bathhouse at Barton Springs Pool after Khabele, who died in 2021. It's scheduled to reopen later this year after undergoing renovations. The city also plans to install a historical marker to document the struggle to integrate the pool.
'I wanted to know that I could'
Scott, Ellinger and Martinez all said they haven't been to Barton Springs in decades.
Scott said she was thrown in the water in 1962 — just days before the pool was integrated — and hasn’t been back.
“It's not that I wanted to swim," she said. "I wanted to know that I could."
But Khabele's children and grandchildren have loved going to Barton Springs.
Lesedi Khabele Stevens, Khabele's eldest grandchild, said she went to the pool a lot growing up with her cousins and siblings. But the power of Khabele's protest wasn’t always at the forefront of her experience growing up.
"Last summer, I ended up going with some friends who were from out of town," Stevens said. "And they were like, 'Oh, didn’t your grandma integrate or help integrate Barton Springs?' And strangely enough, it was in that moment the gravity of it really hit for me.”
She’d been so used to just freely going to the pool and moving around Austin, not thinking too much about the sacrifices — and the work — her grandmother had done.
