Montgomery fills in its swimming pools

In 1958 Black residents of Montgomery sued the city over its segregated recreation. The lead plaintiff was Mark Gilmore, whose mother Georgia Gilmore had fed and funded the bus boycott three years earlier by selling food out of her kitchen. In 1959 federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled for them and ordered the city's recreational facilities desegregated.

Montgomery closed them. Parks, playgrounds, recreation centres, tennis courts and all the municipal swimming pools shut rather than admit Black residents, and the city filled its eight pools with dirt - a decision that cannot be reversed by a later court order, which was the point of making it. The Oak Park zoo closed on the last day of 1959 and its animals were sold or given away to other cities.

The reasoning was the same as the school closures of the previous year, and better founded in law. A city compelled to desegregate a public facility can close it, and closing it denies nothing to anyone in particular. Montgomery's white residents kept swimming at private clubs that admitted members by invitation; Black residents, who had been excluded from the public pools anyway, lost the parks and playgrounds along with them.

The parks came back slowly over the following decade and the pools largely did not. The litigation ran for years after the closures - it reached the Supreme Court in 1974, by then over whether segregated private schools could use what city recreation facilities remained - and a sign of how the tactic worked is that the argument was no longer about desegregating a public pool. There was not one left to desegregate.