Baton Rouge Pool Swim-In

On July 23, 1963, about fifty Black protesters led by the Rev. Arthur Jelks, then NAACP branch president, went to the City Park pool and did not enter the water. Police were waiting. Five were arrested: Pearl George, Sam Green, Betty Jean Wilson (later Claiborne), James Williams and Richard Thompson. George's eleven-year-old daughter was questioned without an adult. George drew six months in jail. After the May 1964 federal ruling the parish closed City Park and nine other pools. City Park never reopened and was filled in 1990. Governor Blanco pardoned Claiborne in 2005.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 0.5 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.6 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.8 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.6 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — 0.3 mi
• Beauregard Town — 0.3 mi
• The C.O.R.E. March — 0.4 mi
• Congregation B'Nai Israel — 0.4 mi