photo by: Elvyn Jones/Journal-World

Ursula Minor, Lawrence NAACP branch president, speaks Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022, at a dedication of a historical marker commemorating the 1969 opening of the city's first integrated swimming pool.

The Lawrence community dedicated a marker Sunday at the Outdoor Aquatic Center that will remind future generations of the city’s past racist history and the struggle against injustice.

The marker placed at the entrance to the center at 727 Kentucky St. through the efforts of the Lawrence/Douglas County Community Remembrance Project Coalition, the Lawrence NAACP branch and the City of Lawrence tells the history behind the opening of the city’s first integrated swimming pool in 1969, the limited swimming opportunities for people of color before the pool opened and the work of those who worked to make the pool a reality.

In his remarks, the Rev. Verdell Taylor said the marker and another near City Hall commemorating the 1882 lynching of three black men from a bridge over the Kansas River were important reminders that injustice was as much a part of the history of Lawrence as its Free State roots. He additionally said racial injustice is a continuing problem in the community, and challenged the audience to research its existence in the past and to fight it in the present.

“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” he said, using a quotation attributed to various historical figures.

photo by: Elvyn Jones/Journal-World

A historical marker commemorating the opening in 1969 of the city’s integrated swimming pool was dedicated Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022, at the entry to the Lawrence Outdoor Aquatic Center, 727 Kentucky St.

Ursula Minor, president of the Lawrence NAACP branch, gave witness to the past injustices Taylor referenced. The Lawrence native said she grew up on Michigan Street, five blocks from the private pool that admitted all of the community’s white children but banned people of color. She and her siblings played in water spray while watching their white friends and classmates walk by on their way to the pool.

The new municipal pool opened when she was 10 years old, Minor said, too late for some of her older siblings to enjoy.

Minor said that before the new pool opened the options for people of color were to swim in Potter Lake, creeks or the Kansas River. Without lifeguards or supervision, that latter option could be hazardous. Minor and John Spearman Jr., a former Lawrence civil rights leader now living in Arizona, both recalled how 12-year-old Wray Jones drowned in the Kansas River in June 1955. In written remarks Spearman provided for the event, read by Annette Dabney, he invoked the contemporary “Black Lives Matter” slogan to highlight the importance of the opening of the municipal pool and other civil rights achievements of the era, as well as the continuing struggle for change.

The fight to open a integrated municipal pool was part of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Spearman wrote, and like the other advancements from the era it was achieved only through struggle and commitment. He took part in demonstrations at the private pool seven years before the municipal pool opened. Although those protests didn’t change the private pool’s policies, they did have a big influence and contributed to voters approving a bond for the municipal pool on the third attempt, he wrote.

Like Taylor, Spearman called for Lawrence residents to continue to work for justice, recalling the words of a 19th century champion of racial justice: “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” he wrote, quoting Frederick Douglass.