Some monuments to racism are holes in the ground

Bronze and granite memorials to the Confederacy dominate town squares and courthouses across the South.   Many people now call for their removal while others maintain this would be “erasing history.”  As the debate persists, other testaments to white supremacy remain mostly unacknowledged: public swimming pools that in the 1960s were shut down, filled in, paved over to keep out Black swimmers.  This is the subject of Summer Headstones, a 16-minute documentary by Hamilton Ward.  As the film reports, in summer 1961, the mayor of Nashville drained every swimming pool in town rather than integrate them.  Such swimming pool racism persists in the present as a quick Internet search in the summer of 2020 confirms .