I called myself watching this movie, Pride on Friday night. The thing is, it was too late for me to watch, and I missed the best part of it. So I watched it last night with Yanni and Xay.

We loved it!

To have been black and involved in swimming at all and then watch this movie, you wonder ‘where has it been all my life?’

We were watching to see if those folks could really swim. And the underwater shots were pretty conclusive. You could see bubbles streaming out of the swimmers’ nose and mouths. It was beautiful.

And there was also the racism, and the bleak ghetto landscape. We don’t live in a world where white people refuse to swim with black people any more. But that was very real. And the movie also shows a progression from the 60s to the 70s, when the white swimmers would compete with the black swimmers, but not in the ghetto pool. Coach Jim Ellis, the focus of the movie, Pride, doesn’t encounter those kinds of problems any more.

I remember taking ballet as a girl. I heard about the Dance Theater of Harlem, where black children learned to become beautiful ballerinas–together. I used to dream of growing up and dancing with them.

I could see Pride doing the same thing for swimmers. Jim Ellis has been running his swim program for 35 years. His swimmers have gone on to place in the Pan Pacific Games, and qualify for the Olympics.

But he started out just trying to give some boys some discipline and structure. And though the racial composition of his club has changed over the years, it is still a place where black folks can swim and not be the only brown face they see. That’s important, because you shouldn’t feel like a freak because you can swim.