“I wrote a comic book,” says David Martin Davies, reporter for Texas Public Radio. His comic book “San Antonio Secret History” celebrates the San Antonio Tricentennial by shedding new light on “stories that people should know more about,” Davies says.
One of his goals with the book was to highlight things in San Antonio besides the Alamo. For instance, he grew up near Woodlawn Swimming Pool where he was a lifeguard during his teenage years.
“I didn’t know an important story that had taken place there,” he says. So he set out to find one … and succeeded.
In June of 1957, six African-American children jumped into the pool, and the city took swift action to keep it from happening again.
“This is the age of Jim Crow, and this was a whites-only pool at the time. The city freaked out. They shut down all of the city pools and the city passed an emergency ordinance segregating the pools. At the time, Jim Crow was an unofficial understanding, and now they had to codify it into law – that happened on Juneteenth, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is an important remnant of Jim Crow racism right here, and I knew nothing about it. What happened to that history, why was it erased?’” Davies says.