Limited but open: Here’s where Jackson residents can swim this summer
With summer around the corner, young people expressed a desire for greater access to swimming facilities as most of Jackson’s public pools remain closed.
The Henry Minion Jr. pool at the VA Legion Softball Complex in west Jackson is filled with green water on May 8. The city says it will open for public use June 6. Robert Sproles for JYN
By Aubrea Caldwell and Laeyla Walters
Today is the last day of school for Jackson Public Schools, and local students are looking ahead to summer break. In Jackson, where the heat can be blistering, finding a place to cool off is essential. But many of the city’s public swimming pools have been closed for years, creating unequal access to swimming facilities.
“There should be more community pools,” said Tristyn Balu, a 10th grader at Murrah High School. “I didn’t even know we had pools. They definitely should be more accessible.”
This summer, the city plans to operate two neighborhood pools: one at Vine Street Park in north Jackson and another at the VA Legion Softball Complex in west Jackson.
City spokesperson Melissa Payne said the pools will open June 6 and close August 2. The Vine Street pool will offer swim lessons from 9 to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Both pools will be open for group swims from 10 a.m. to noon, and open swimming hours will run from 2 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays.
Thanks to Soul City Church, a third pool — at Benjamin Brown Park in Midtown — will also be open. The church entered a memorandum of understanding with the city in 2022 to operate the pool independently.
“We do all the upkeep, we do all the painting, we replace motors,” said Soul City Church pastor Scott Fortenberry. “That's all on us. We hire lifeguards, and we have to have them written in on our insurance policy.”
Fortenberry said the church raises about $25,000 each summer to operate the pool. He credited Ronnie Crudup Jr., executive director of New Horizon Ministries, with inspiring the initiative.
Since 2022 the pool at Benjamin Brown Park in Midtown has been operated by Soul City Church. JYN
In 2018, New Horizon reopened a city pool on Terry Road in south Jackson and ran it for five years. Crudup Jr. said the pool had been out of service for two years before New Horizon signed a lease with the city.
“I'm somebody who loves to swim,” Crudup Jr. said. “I want to make sure all my kids learn how to swim, but I want to make sure all the families in that area could learn how to swim.”
He said operating the pool cost the church between $40,000 and $50,000 each summer.
“We had no regrets behind it,” Crudup Jr. said. “We had a good experience for those five years.”
He says he has plans to open a pool back up in the future.
“We were wanting to do it this summer, but hopefully by next summer we will have something open,” he said.
Several other city pools, including the one at Battlefield Park, have fallen into disrepair and remain closed. Payne cited a shortage of lifeguards and vandalism as reasons more pools will not reopen this year.
Last year, the city operated the Grove Park pool, but it is closed this summer for renovations. The city posted a request for proposals on May 15 to repair and remodel the pool. Proposals are due June 10.
As of April 30, Payne said the city still had four open lifeguard positions. (The city has not responded to JYN’s public records request for swimming pool budget documents, contracts, and maintenance reports.)
Local news reports dating back to 2003 have cited lifeguard shortages as a persistent reason for the limited number of open pools — and why many Jackson youth never learn to swim. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
“Open public pools would give us Black kids an opportunity to get off the streets, and it would teach a lot of Black people how to swim,” said Christopher Hawkins, 18. “I don’t know how to swim, so it would be a good opportunity for me to learn.”
Jackson’s shameful swimming pool legacy
In the summer of 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum across the South, Black organizers in Jackson pushed to desegregate city swimming pools. At the time, Jackson had five public pools: four designated for white residents and one for Black residents — even though Black residents made up about 36% of the population.
Jackson operated segregated swimming pools until 1963 when it closed all public pools to avoid integrating them. These photos were taken in the 1950s. Mississippi Department of Archives and History
This 1974 news clipping from The Northside Sun shows architect James T. Canizaro’s rendering of one of 10 pools the city opened the following year. Newspaper.com archives
Jackson’s segregationist mayor, Allen Thompson, and the all-white city council, embracing a strategy known as “massive resistance,” chose to close four pools rather than integrate them. They sold the fifth pool to the YMCA, which continued to operate it as a whites-only facility.
Black residents sued the city over the closures, arguing they violated the 14th Amendment. The case, Palmer v. Thompson, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in the city’s favor in 1971.
By then, the Civil Rights Movement had secured the desegregation of public facilities, but Jackson’s closed pools had deteriorated. City leaders decided it would be cheaper to build new pools than renovate the old ones.
With the assistance of $400,000 in federal funding, Jackson constructed 10 new public pools, opening them on June 6, 1975 — exactly 50 years before city pools are set to open this summer.
A tour of the city’s pools
Earlier this month, JYN visited the three pools scheduled to open this summer.
The Benjamin Brown Park pool on Mill Street, next to the abandoned Rowan Middle School (which closed in 2020), had been drained and freshly painted a cool blue. The park also features a basketball court, playground and vibrant murals.
A resident who asked to be identified as Skool, 66, told JYN that Soul City Church, not the city, operates the pool. He praised the church’s efforts to serve young people.
“Jackson has closed most of the parks where kids were coming to swim at,” he said. “A lot of times it takes a private organization to come in to pick up what the city is supposed to be doing (for) free.”
The city recently updated its swimming pools web page to include information about its agreement with Soul City Church. At the time of publication, it had not updated the page to include which pools are open this summer.
When JYN visited the VA Legion Softball Complex on May 8, the Henry Minion Jr. pool had not yet been drained or cleaned. The water was deep green with algae, and dried vines covered portions of the surrounding chain-link fence.
On May 15, city workers were power washing the drained pool at Vine Street Park in preparation for reopening.
Fortenberry said the Benjamin Brown Park pool will open June 1 at 3 p.m., with Soul City Church hosting a free cookout featuring hot dogs and hamburgers. The pool will close for the season on July 28.
Zaniah McElroy, 17, said she wished more public pools were open.
“It would be a nice way to cool down, as a lot of people are not privileged enough to have pools of their own and have to resort to either pools in apartments or water parks, but those can only do so much especially because they cost a lot of money,” she said.
