Council approves renaming bathhouse in honor of Joan Means Khabele

City Council on Thursday approved the renaming of the bathhouse at Barton Springs Pool in honor of the woman who, as a teenager, led the first “swim-in” at the segregated pool in an act of civil disobedience.

With the unanimous vote, the facility officially becomes the Joan Means Khabele Bathhouse at Barton Springs Pool. The structure is currently undergoing an extensive rehabilitation project.

Scott Cobb, a lifeguard at the pool, submitted the nomination for renaming the bathhouse after Khabele, with more than 20 other community members adding their names in support.

“I think that’s a fitting honor for her and for all those teenagers back then, and the teenagers today who stand up for what they believe is wrong and want to make it right,” Cobb told Council.

Means, who died in October 2021 at the age of 78, was the oldest of five children born to Bertha Sadler Means and James Means, both prominent educators and pioneers in the civil rights movement.

Growing up in a segregated Austin, Khabele attended Blackshear Elementary and Kealing Junior High, where she was valedictorian of her graduating class. She entered Austin High School in 1957 as part of the third small group of students to integrate the school, three years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

Documents submitted with the renaming nomination include a transcript of a video interview conducted with Khabele, which aired on Austin PBS in 2014. In the interview, Khabele recalled the principal summoning her to his office in the spring of 1960. She said he wanted her to deliver the news to her Black classmates that they wouldn’t be allowed to attend the senior picnic because of Jim Crow laws in effect at public facilities.

For years, Austin High had traditionally held its senior class picnic at Zilker Park, followed by a swim in Barton Springs. Khabele was understandably upset when she was told she and her Black classmates wouldn’t be able to participate in the tradition – and that she had been designated to be the bearer of bad news.

The principal’s refusal to defy segregation laws motivated Khabele to begin organizing students, including 11th graders, “which means, once I went off to the University of Chicago, there are still people who can carry on if we failed to open up Barton Springs and Zilker Park,” the interview transcript reads.

Khabele said she had a vague memory of the school ultimately allowing Black students to attend the picnic at the park, but they would still be banned from swimming. “We were not to get into that water and, you know, there’s all sorts of ignorance about getting in too close or in an intimate environment with Black people on the part of whites,” the transcript states.

Thus began what would become a series of summer swim-ins at Barton Springs Pool, with Khabele the first to make the jump. It wasn’t long before Khabele’s white classmates joined the swim-ins, along with older students from Huston-Tillotson University, the University of Texas and St. Edward’s University.

“A swim-in is, you just jump in and then they (the lifeguards) come and pull you out,” Khabele says in the transcript. “You go around the building. You go back in, and you just do this all day.”

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Posted In: Parks, District 5