Clemson wildlife ecologist Drew Lanham hangs with a crowd of “old bulls,” older Black men who tell the stories of all they’ve lived through. One of their stories is about the time Greenville, South Carolina, put sea lions into its public pool rather than share the water with Black people.
By J. Drew Lanham
*Editor’s note: For stylistic purposes the words seal and sea lion are used interchangeably. Yes, we know they are different critters.
June 18, 2020
Hate — for all of its twisted manifestations and malfeasances, re-invents itself persistently in ways that yet astound. I know the horrific metamorphic capacity all too well as a Black man in America. I know by ancestral legacy of enslavement, of Jim Crow's separate and unequal; of rape, of lynch rope strung up in deep woods, of assassin's bullet, of deeply biased judicial mandate,and suffocating police harassment and on-camera murder. I know it by measure of gerrymander, scribes of redlines, and gentrification's amoebic appropriations. I know it by presidential dog whistles and claims of "very good people on both sides."
I know it by purses clutched in elevators, by car-door locks thunking secure as I pass, identities confused and passive racist claims of "not seeing color" offered as some blinded ignorance I tire of tolerating. For all that I've experienced in the new age — being profiled, detained, questioned — called a “nigger” out of my name, the story of how hate made animal lovers of a southern city leapt beyond the standard stories of bias I'd ever heard.
One learns a great deal by ear, if willing to sit in the company of elders who've lived history. And so it was, as I sat surrounded by older male friends, men not so old as to be elderly but men with enough years behind them to have applied mistakes to life in ways that yield wisdom in the present useful for those of us not so heavily imbued with it. They are friends I love and respect who could be much older brothers, favorite uncles, or almost fathers.
As I sit among these men; Van Charles, Jimmy, Steve, Rick (now deceased), Robert, and John Henry — some scarred deeply within by Vietnam; knowing the full weight of segregation and "Whites Only" signs, some remembering the lynching of Willie Earle, a cab driver pulled from a Greenville, South Carolina, jail to be beaten, stabbed, and shot by a mob of white men who were all acquitted by a jury of their peers, I'm in the company of hundreds of years of first-hand history no newsprint or text could ever do true justice. They had lived a history I'd only heard about. They'd lived through the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's rise and infusion of hope, followed by his fall to James Earle Ray’s bullet. They recalled two Kennedys dying by gunfire, Malcolm X being killed by his own, the war in Southeast Asia that killed their friends and family members, peaceful marches, civil unrest, riots, police dogs, and fire hoses turned loose on peaceful protests, a massacre of three young Black men in Orangeburg two hours down the road, and three young men killed in Mississippi and buried in a ditch because they dared seek to do right.
These men, my friends, lived all that I read about years later. They'd lived the history my parents had but in ways my father had not: He died before telling me his stories. I sat among those friends with a beer in hand and my ears wide open as they told me this story that made them the men I called friends but could almost see as fathers. Every sitting session feels like catching up on an education session I'd missed. And so I talk little and listen much.
Back in 1963, when the order to desegregate came to Greenville, some white folks’ sudden love for the good ol’ days — and anything black but human beings — suddenly revealed itself when the pool at Cleveland Park was made into a Southern "sea world" rather than allow Black people to taint the pristine white only waters of the public facility. Rather than integrate on federal orders set in motion by King and the Civil Rights Movement, which was at a fever pitch, the city decided that sea lions deserved a new place to swim. So the pool that was destined to be miscegenated was seal-ed. The white folks still had plenty of segregation-now-segregation-forever hideaway swimming holes they could retreat to.
I have nothing against sea lions or seals. They're beautifully adapted creatures built for aquatic lives, but the decision to stock wild animals in a public facility, instead of following the law and integrating it, speaks beyond the volumes of vicissitude that define racism's insidious innovation.
The move, no doubt approved of on multiple levels of municipal hierarchy, left no question in the thriving Upstate mini-metropolis-to-be that “Negroes” were dirty and worth less than wild animals.
I didn't grow up in Greenville, but my wife, Janice Garrison, did. She's a city girl through and through. A former Miss Southside High 1984. Even when she was high school royalty at the predominantly Black institution, Greenville was on its way up from the third city behind historic Low Country Charleston and Midlands Columbia, the capital city. Today it's well on its way to becoming a model for the mid-sized All-American city that draws in wealth seeking pseudo-progressive upper-middle-class conservatives that don't fit the six-lane fastlife of Atlanta to the southwest and banker-heavy Charlotte to the northeast. With a thriving downtown bisected by the once polluted Reedy River transformed by a forward thinking city planner into a tourist draw, there's everything to love in its busy New South quaintness. Foodies, art lovers, and star seekers can all find bits to love there. The Drive, the mis-named minor league baseball team (3A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox that should've been called the "Green Monsters," but sold out to automotive industry push) that sits on gentrified ground in the West End is a sign of its comeuppance. It doesn't play second or third fiddle to an ocean-flooding Charleston or hot and armpit sweaty Columbia.
South Carolina has tended to lead infamously in matters of racism. An overwhelming number of Black folks choosing to call themselves African Americans can trace an ancestry back to slave ships that disembarked relatives long ago and sold them off as chattel to build and tend rice marshes and cotton fields.
And then there was the Civil War grown almost solely out of that "curious institution." The Palmetto State seceded first. And even after losing that bloody campaign against abolition and emancipation, South Carolinians like Pitchfork Ben Tillman (founder of my alma mater Clemson University and probable relative) and Strom Thurmond — two rapscallion populist governors from my home county — kept racism's ugly grimacing head high above the waters of equal rights and justice.
Bias has been a way of life for the entirety of the state's history from the mountains to the sea. To be fair, Greenville certainly wasn't the only place to take extreme measures to avoid fair treatment. Salem, sitting on the shoulders of the Blue Ridge escarpment, had the reputation as a sundown town, requiring negroes to be out before dark. In the capital of Columbia, so-called “barbecue king” Maurice Bessinger, made pulled pork and mustard sauce a South-will-rise-again-Confederate-flag -waving-Lost-Cause-money-making machine. Bessinger was unapologetically racist. The super-sized Dixie flags waving above his restaurants demonstrated his belief that Black people were better off as livestock than as free roaming human beings. On idyllic Edisto Island, land pluff-mud deep in enslavement; a place mostly isolated and Black-occupied after bondage — then tainted with the exclusionary tag of “White’s Only” beaches when privilege tagged it as a getaway vacation spot, closed for years in the late ’60s rather than colorize. There’s an infamy to be lived up to, so perhaps the exchange of “Negroes” for finned, barking marine mammals made sense for Greenville. Some probably rationalized themselves into believing it was a sensible compromise; black skin for black fur. It just so happened that the fur was more acceptable than the skin.
Given all this prejudiced precedent, the big-brother-father-uncle-friend men I sat in counsel with, swilling “yac,” bourbon and beer, were clear in the history they'd lived in the company of seals and in a persistent societal denial of their own humanities. Van Charles, most garrulous among the crew, smiles easily and talks the most shit — joking insults that sometimes hit hard but mean he really likes you. Tall, slim, dark, and looking every bit of 45 as he moves into his 70’s, is testament to our knowing that “Black don’t crack.” He teases without animosity and speaks bluntly.
"I'm tellin' ya man, they put them goddamn seals in that fuckin' pool 'cause they didn't want us in there!"
His best friend, Jimmy Martin — no less age-cracked but lighter skinned than Charles, chimes in, "Yeah Drew, they sure did. And when they were ordered to remove the seals, they put in dirt and planted flowers in there to keep us out." Others sipped and spoke. All agreeing, laughing and cursing at the indignities they'd lived through.
I had to know so I asked, "So, did anybody ever get close to the seals?" Almost before I could finish the inquiry, Van Charles cried out, "Shiiiiiit — get close? Hell, we jumped in an swum with them fuckin' things, man!"
Steve Cobb, stately, grayed, early 70s, legs crossed nonplussed, says, "Yeah man, they're all tellin' the truth, Drew, just that nobody's ever told the whole story."
"You know those things can get pretty vicious," offering my post hoc wildlife ecologist's opinions, totally useless more than 50 years beyond lived experiences swimming with pinnipeds.
Van Charles snorted matter of factly in defiance of the mammalogy. "I swum with 'em. It was a bigass pool. We didn't fuck with them and they didn't fuck with us!"
Everyone in the council agreed, even normally quiet, corner-siting Robert nodded in agreement. The seals seemed to accept integration better than the white people did. They laughed on as others recounted the seal segregation, but I was a little incredulous the first time I heard it. John Henry, a combat veteran who would see unspeakable inhumanity in ‘Nam, a few years after the city’s insult, confirmed the sin with a knowing smile and a knowing, “Yeah man, sad but true --all true.” Still, I must've let on some doubt because they all challenged me to look it up.
So, I did. When I got home from the long weekend I took a Google hike that quickly verified the stories. Mostly. They had no firsthand accounts of seal pool swim sharing, in fact the story was sanitized in ways that made my friends’ stories seem even more important to tell.
A June 2017 article in Greenville News Online was headlined "Lawsuit leads to closure of Cleveland Park swimming pool, skating rink." Judith Bainbridge wrote how the Works Progress Administration-era pool had been built in the early ’40s and gave entry for a dime per person until 1961 when Black folks came to the realization that a public pool (and adjacent skating rink) their tax dollars supported needed to admit them as full users. In 1961, after eight Black teenagers were arrested and jailed for daring to claim their right to use the public pool, the NAACP filed suit. They won the claim and the pool was ordered desegregated in 1962. The pool remained closed until the "Marineland" idea seeped into the city council's racist heads in 1963 and a trio of sea lions was deemed better than a single black toe being dipped into a pure white pool. Van Charles, Jimmy Martin, and others have told the story again and again with hands raised, they even went nocturnal — taking to swimming with the "seals" at night in defiance of the de facto segregation. After a few years of the purportedly popular city attraction, the mayor, Jimmy Traxler, suddenly sold the sea lions off to the south (as so many other Black beings had been in the past), and within a day the huge seal pond became a rose garden.
"After that, they paved it over and it became tennis courts," Van Charles said. “Plenty of niggers started playing tennis then! Couldn't keep us off the fuckin' tennis court."
It's become a ritual of the long weekend spent with folks almost old enough to be our parents but not quite. We sequester ourselves in a huge cabin in the hillbilly Hollywood of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to relax and reconnect to wisdom through good food and an occasional strong drink. Having lost my father when I was only 15 and not having had the greatest relationship with my older brother, I think I'm seeking the bull elephants missing from most of my life. Turns out, in African elephant society old bulls — huge "tuskers" with decades of experience — serve as mentors and behavioral mediators for younger males. These men are those old bulls I willingly listen to. They've taught me much.
As incredible as this story was, it hit home with me because of my own connection to wild animals, in general and specifically because of a personal history at the Greenville Zoo. When I moved from my farm-boy upbringing in the backwoods of rural Edgefield County to the Upstate frontier to attend Clemson back in the early ’80s, I never imagined that I'd end up working at the Greenville City Zoo. A career change from an engineering BS to a zoology BA, brought me closer to my passion for working with wildlife. Although almost every person I encountered believed the only job a zoology major could get was as a zookeeper, I had intentions on dashing that foolishly ignorant myth into bits by becoming a conservation ornithologist; a bird brain.
The zoo gig was not my first choice as a career, but one summer after graduating with my undergrad, newly married and a baby on the way, I needed to earn cash. When the zoo job came open I chose it over working in a cotton mill before entering grad school the next fall. In almost a year of meeting the zoo-keeping expectations, I actually came to like my job as a part-time dietician prepping ground horsemeat, frozen pinky mice and grape half-meatballs for hornbills; part-time educator explaining away the masturbatory and sparrow torturing habits of Debrazza's monkeys to shocked soccer mom's and part time do-what's-needed-keeper, mucking knee-deep piles of elephant shit that "Joy", the female African pachyderm left behind each night.
Back then it was all pre-professional bliss with no knowledge that just across the parking lot and peaceful play of children swinging in Cleveland Park was a story hidden under worn tennis courts of wildness being chosen over fairness. I think I might have approached my work in some sort of more informed and likely differently motivated way.
Thing is, the bulls I hang with bring those sealed-out life experiences forward to me now and relate current events in nature-stewardship forward in enlightening ways. As the West End of the city grows around that minor league ballpark, high rent apartments and niche shops, it does so in what was formerly known as "Black Town." It's where my wife's paternal grandmother lived. It was "the hood" to her, and Van Charles told me, "White folks didn't mess around over there". Now, they say, the place is whiter than white with gentrification — the standard for progress as it has been in many other cities.
"The [Reedy] River used to flood a bunch of that land down there," Jimmy Martin said.
"Yeah, but they'll change the bend of the river when white folks move in there," Van Charles added. "Betcha the flooding will stop."
The other bulls nodded. We all turned up assorted cups, glasses, bottles and cans in a silent toast to what had been. I shook my head in the afterglow of so much knowledge being dropped, thinking about how these bull elephants once swam with seals.
J. Drew Lanham is a native of Edgefield, SC. and works as a Distinguished Alumni and Provost's Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, where he teaches and conducts research as a conservation and cultural ornithologist. An award winning author, his book The Home Place — Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions 2016/Tantor Audio 2019) won the Philip Reed Environmental Writing Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and was most recently named a "Scholarly Book of the Decade" by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Drew is also a poet (Sparrow Envy - Poems ; Hub City Press 2016) and was named Poet Laureate of Edgefield County in 2018. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina.
