IF YOU EVER GO SWIMMING AT THE ROSE BOWL, you’ll see that the Recreational Pool deck has a plaque with a name on it. Do you know whose name that is? Well, the pool is named after Dr. Edna Griffin who, among many things, was the first Black female physician in Pasadena. But why would they name a pool after a doctor, one might ask. The answer is, because this doctor was an activist, a role that many Black women – especially of her generation – still go unnoticed for. That is why they are the focus of my present work on Los Angeles’ Great Migration era history.
In 2024 the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center renamed its recreational pool after Dr. Griffin. The city’s Recreation and Parks Commission had voted in 2023 to recommend that the City Council name the new municipal swimming pool after the doctor – despite public support for naming it after former councilmember, the late John Kennedy, instead. So “only” thirty-two years after the doctor’s death, the naming ceremony took place. Why does it always seem to take so long for Black women’s work to be acknowledged? If it gets acknowledged at all? This is a madly recurring theme such that more and more scholars and public historians are working to rectify this situation. I digress. And I’m going to do so a little bit more!
Ms. Edna was born in 1905 in Fort Smith, Arkansas. This state, along with Louisiana and Texas, are some of the primary states from whence so many African Americans came to Los Angeles during the Great Migration. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, during the Great Migration, “among the destinations for Arkansans who left the state, California received the largest number of people. Census records show that roughly 313,000 native Arkansans lived [in California] in 1960.”
Some twenty years later Dr. Griffin obtained her medical degree from the HBCU, Meharry Medical College. (She had wanted to go to USC’s medical school but in the 1920s no Black students were allowed). After interning at Tuskegee’s John Andrew Hospital, Dr. Griffin finally settled in Pasadena in 1935.
Throughout her time in the city, Dr. Griffin went to great lengths to see Pasadena’s institutions desegregated. A few years after arriving, she became the first woman president of the Pasadena branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), holding that position from 1939 to 1947. As mentioned, she was intent on desegregating her new home. So, in 1942 Dr. Griffin sued the city to allow African Americans to freely swim at the Brookside Plunge swimming pool. (This pool was eventually demolished and the area rebuilt into the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center). You see, the rules at Brookside were that African Americans could only swim there one day per week, that was Wednesdays. According to the Pasadena Library’s website the city then drained the pool afterwards each week so that the water would be nice and clean for the white swimmers those other six days of the week.
This is not a surprise, but rather a common occurrence across the country during this time. In fact, around this same time, all the way over in Newark, New Jersey, a Black family had to rent out the local YMCA pool in order to allow their daughter to practice for the Girl Scout swimming badge. And it might surprise the reader to know that this practice did not stop as early as some might think. While the 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated the desegregation of public accommodations, many cities strategized ways to avoid following this new law. As far as swimming was concerned, sometimes this meant simply shutting down the public pool altogether, rather than allow Blacks to go swimming in it. And these attempts at “work-arounds” still exist today. In fact, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, in 2009 the owner of a private swim club in Philadelphia banned Black children from a local day care center, saying they would change the “complexion” of the club.
While the municipal court eventually ruled in favor of desegregating Pasadena’s Brookside Plunge in 1942, that law was not fully implemented until five years later. Again, a common theme; laws do not necessarily equal implementation when it comes to deeply entrenched racist practices.
Anyway, during her life, Dr. Griffin ended up filing over twenty lawsuits against businesses and other institutions in Pasadena that practiced segregation. Her association with the NAACP was crucial as the organization played a major role in the courts during this time – nationwide – when it came to challenging segregation.
Dr. Griffin’s former medical office is located at 891 N. Fair Oaks Avenue. You might recognize the orange door if you drive through that intersection of Mountain and Fair Oaks ever. There’s even a self-guided audio walking tour, created by the NAACP, of Pasadena’s African-American History that includes Dr. Griffin’s former office. In the 1930s and ’40s, in particular, North Fair Oaks Avenue was home to many Black residences and businesses. In the early 2020s the N. Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative began work to rebuild this community that had been devastated by the all too common act of eminent domain in the name of urban development.
In 1947, author Helen Kitchen Branson – a nurse and health care administrator – published a biography of Dr. Griffin entitled, Let There Be Life: The Contemporary Account of Edna L. Griffin, M.D. It is available at the Huntington and other local libraries. There’s also an interesting-looking article that I am unable to access at the moment entitled, “’She Thought California Was Without Prejudice’: Race and Medicine in Jim Crow California” by Alicia Gutierrez-Romine.
On this Juneteenth, when the idea is to celebrate freedom, it seems fitting to honor a person who worked so hard for the freedom of her people. Dr. Griffin believed it was only fair that African Americans enjoy the same liberties as people of other races. And that included the freedom of going swimming at the local public pool whenever they wanted.