A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 73

reservoir for hydroelectric operations built with New Deal Rural Electrical Administra-
tion funds. 53 While these parks provided separate facilities, they were hardly equal. Green-
wood's 12,000-acre artificial lake, for example, was for white visitors only. These segreg-
ated state parks and swimming areas became flashpoints for civil rights protesters begin-
ning in the late 1940s. 54
Legal cases emerged in Maryland and Virginia to challenge segregated access to or ex-
clusion from municipal and state park facilities before and after the U.S. Supreme Court's
landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated (so-called separate
but equal) education unconstitutional in 1954. 55 A Maryland legal case combined three
suits involving exclusion from public pools, bathing areas, and a public beach. Upon hear-
ing the Maryland case after the Brown decision, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
(Richmond, Va.) ruled state park segregation unconstitutional on March 14, 1955. 56 The
court soon ruled on subsequent Virginia cases and ordered the state's park system desegreg-
ated. But rather than consider an integrated arrangement, Virginia leaders elected to follow
the path of “massive resistance” and white supremacy. They closed all parks in response
to the Brown case, and they considered leasing or selling parts of the system. 57 Together,
the recreation-inspired legal challenges to segregation demonstrated how state parks and
access to water-based recreation served as loci for civil rights activists and massive resist-
ance. African Americans challenged segregation in schools and on buses as well as at state
park gates and on shorelines in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Corps had
planned to segregate black and white nature seekers at Clarks Hill in the Savannah River
valley. 58 Two events blocked those plans. First, one South Carolina state park official
claimed that “the establishment and development of the two state parks proposed on Clark
[ sic ] Hill” would burden the existing system of twenty-one parks that served 3 million
visitors and already could not balance maintenance with new construction. 59 The second,
primary reason for the cooled discussion about segregated parks emerged when lower
courts applied legal precedents and the Brown v. Board of Education decision to public re-
creation facilities. When Virginia officials closed state parks in 1956 to avoid court-ordered
desegregation, South Carolina state park administrator C. West Jacocks defended his state's
segregated system as it also faced a challenge from the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People's Charleston chapter over access to Edisto Beach State Park.
Jacocks justified his operations because he thought the park system provided an equitable
geographic distribution of parks and facilities for white and African American visitors.
Clearly not interested in park integration, Jacocks threatened, “Should any 'power' even-
tually bring into being the enforced non-segregated use of the state parks, there is every
indication that there will be no use.” In that event, he intoned, “the parks will be closed.” 60
Despite his best face, Jacocks knew that his facilities could never be truly separate and