Steve Christilaw: Manuel achieves a golden moment in Olympic history
Granted, there are powerful images aplenty in Rio. That’s the nature of the Olympics. If you don’t find something to inspire and uplift you every 10 minutes, you’re asleep. Just pick a sport and watch for a few minutes.
But this image was different from the others, and it comes on the heels of one of the more moving accomplishments of the opening week.
It was a simple tweet from a Twitter follower called Laylas_Mommy_13: a photo of her daughter standing in front of a television screen showing the face of Olympic swimming gold medalist Simone Manuel, her finger raised in the air and a proud smile on her face. The caption read: My little swimmer says “I Got Next!”
The juxtaposition of Manuel, the first African American woman to win an individual Olympic medal in swimming (she won four medals, two of them gold), and the young African American girl she inspired is especially poignant when it’s viewed in context.
Sports writer Kevin Blackistone, a professor at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and a columnist for the Washington Post, provided some:
“But as we sat on the edge of our seats with friends, black and white, Thursday night in front of a large TV screen cheering Simone Manuel as she surprisingly became the first black woman from this country to win an individual Olympic swimming medal – gold, at that – we all revisited that past which haunts black people – and chillingly – still,” he wrote. “As I tweeted in the moment Thursday night: “If you know how Jim Crow metastasized in America’s pools, you know how significant #SimoneManuel’s gold medal is #Rio2016 #blackhistory”.”
Swimming pools were a major target of Jim Crow laws and, even after the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, desegregated schools, communities were allowed to segregate public swimming pools. Swimming pools, they reasoned, were more, well, sensitive.
Jackie Robinson was famously held at gunpoint for swimming in a reservoir, and there’s an iconic photo of a hotel manager pouring a liquid he claimed was acid into a swimming pool where black lodgers swam.
And there is a long-standing legend that a Las Vegas hotel drained and cleaned its pool after actress Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe in the water.
And of course there’s the long-standing myth that black people just can’t swim.
That part’s true, former Seattle Times columnist Jerry Brewer wrote in the Washington Post under the headline that read “I’m black, and I can’t swim.”
“We’re not an unusual African American family. The statistics are startling: 68.9 percent of African American children had “low or no swim ability,” according to a 2010 study commissioned by USA Swimming and conducted by the University of Memphis. For Hispanic children, the number was 57.9 percent. For Caucasians, it was 41.8 percent.
“And despite all the “black people can’t swim” jokes that comedians use to bring down the house, these are dangerous facts. Black children ages 5 to 19 die from drowning at a rate 5 1/2 times higher than white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
African American and Hispanic kids have never had the convenient access to public swimming pools that their white counterparts enjoy and thus didn’t learn to swim.
Generations of white kids grew up with swimming idols. Olympic champions Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe went from the Olympic pool to the big screen as Tarzan and Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Esther Williams had entire films devoted to her water ballet.
And Mark Spitz was Michael Phelps before Michael Phelps became Michael Phelps.
And last week, a 20-year-old woman from Houston named Simone Manuel outswam racism, outswam Jim Crow and outraced the world to win a pair of gold medals in Rio.
The good news is that Manuel is just the first in new generation of swimmers who have splashed through those old barriers and proven themselves to be worthy successors to the best swimmers this country has ever produced.
It may take three or four more Olympic Games for the full weight of those golden medallions to be fully measured.
It’s ironic that the final medal the United States swim team earned in the Rio pool was a gold medal for the 4x100 medley relay, with Manuel swimming the anchor leg – the 1,000th Summer Olympics gold medal won by the United States.