July 27th: It was a hot summer and a teenager named Eugene Williams was cooling off with his buddies in Lake Michigan – right off the coast of Chicago.

I love swimming. Lake Michigan is absolutely gorgeous. I can easily imagine this scene: enjoying the reprieve from the sun, enjoying being teenagers, and overall having a good time.

But their good time didn’t last.

Anyone who has ever been in Lake Michigan (or any other body of water!) knows that sometimes the currents might take you one way or another. Boys having fun likely didn’t even notice their bodies drifting. But they drifted right over an invisible line. The line that segregated the “Black Zone” from the “White Zone.” Eugene Williams and his friends were Black. The Whites got angry and threw rocks at them. One hit Eugene Williams and caused him to drown. The police did not arrest the white man responsible for the death of this innocent teenage kid. Protests and riots immediately broke out – and that summer became known as “The Red Summer of 1919” in Chicago as White and Black people fought: over 500 Chicagoans were injured and 38 were killed.

It’s been 105 years to the day since this happened. Some things are clearly better. For starters: Chicago no longer has White and Black beaches as segregation is illegal.

But 105 years is a really long time and a lot of things are still bad. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Tyre Nichols, I could go on and on. Black people being killed unnecessarily because we live in a system built on centuries of racism and accompanying brutality. And those names are just murders I’m listing. But the Eugene Williams case is indicative of a historical context where Black individuals were forced out of public swimming areas which has cost even more Black lives than the murders. Did you know that drowning is the leading cause of injury death for children ages 1–4 years and the leading cause of unintentional injury death for children ages 5–19 years and drowning rates for Black individuals are one and a half times that of white individuals? Worse still, Black kids age 5-8 are 2.6 times more likely to experience fatal drowning and Black kids age 10-14 are 3.6 times higher to drown than their white counterparts (source: CDC). Scholars often attribute such disparities to institutional discrimination resulting in generations of families lacking access to swimming pools, swimming lessons, and water safety education (Gadberry & Gadeberry, 2020; Wiltse, 2007). Imagine being a parent in Chicago in the aftermath of Eugene Williams’ case. It was deadly for Black kids to swim because of the racial tension – I wouldn’t want my kids swimming. Of course families would take a step back from public swimming areas – but that’s resulted in generations of kids not learning to swim and subsequent loss of life every year. Black kids were forced out of opportunity for swim skill acquisition.

It’s been 105 years since Eugene Williams’ brutal racially charged murder. How have we not fixed these problems in 105 years? How are we going to fix it before another 105 years have passed? 

What are you doing to fix the problems now?