After integration, many cities in the South decided to just shut pools down rather than let Black people in, including Tallahassee.
During the summers of 1964-1967, the city commission closed public swimming pools to avoid integrating them, according to Democrat archives.
The original Robinson-Trueblood Swimming Pool on Dade Street was dedicated May 18, 1953. Along with pools at Myers and Levy parks, Robinson-Trueblood was one of the first three pools built by the city, all in 1953.
The only pool Black residents could swim in was the Robinson-Trueblood pool.
“In the twilight of segregation, Tallahassee fathers built a city swimming pool for Black residents and hoped it would quiet their increasing demands for integration,” wrote Tallahassee Democrat writer Gerald Ensley in 2001. “It didn’t work.”
Wade-ins, where African Americans would enter whites-only beaches and pools, were met with resistance and violence from Tallahassee’s segregationists and law enforcement.
FAMU student Patricia Stephens Due , a notable civil rights activist in Tallahassee during the Jim Crow era, watched her sister Priscilla get kicked in the stomach by a police officer at a wade-in at a white’s only public pool.