06/18/2026
"Courage for me is not 'the absence of fear', but what you do in the face of fear." -- Mamie Nell Ford
The acid was in her eyes, her nose, the water all around her -- and the man pouring it into the pool was the motel manager, trying to drive her and her fellow "swim-in" protesters out. On this day in 1964, seventeen-year-old Mamie Nell Ford jumped into the segregated pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, along with six other civil rights activists, to protest its 'Whites-only' policy. A photographer captured her in that instant, mouth open, face frozen in alarm as the furious manager, James Brock, dumped acid in the pool. "I couldn't breathe," she remembered. The photo ran on front pages around the world, and within a day it had helped push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate.
Years later, Ford reflected in an interview: "I'm often asked, ‘How could you have so much courage?’ Courage for me is not ‘the absence of fear,’ but what you do in the face of fear.”
In St. Augustine, that fear was well-founded. The campaign to desegregate the small Florida coastal city in 1963 and 1964, known as the St. Augustine Movement, is considered one of the bloodiest of the Civil Rights Movement. Students staging "wade-ins" to challenge segregation on the beaches were violently beaten. After six Black children were admitted into previously all-White schools after the Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation, two of the children's homes were burnt to the ground by local segregationists and the parents of other children were fired from their jobs in retaliation.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested on the steps of the same motel only a week prior to the pool "swim-in," after being charged with trespassing when he attempted to dine at the "Whites-only" Monson Restaurant. He called St. Augustine "a rock-bound bastion of segregation," and considered it among the most lawless places the movement had taken him.
Prior to the pool "swim-in", Ford was already an experienced civil rights activist in her hometown of Albany, Georgia. When Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Albany to recruit activists to support the movement in St. Augustine, she immediately signed up. “When they asked for volunteers to participate in the swim-in demonstration, I said, yes, because, despite segregation, I knew how to swim,” she said. Many of the activists couldn't -- Black families had been shut out of pools and beaches for generations -- but Ford had taught herself to swim in a creek near her home.
They knew they would likely be arrested. They did not expect the acid. "It is as fresh in my mind as the morning dew," Ford recalled, "because when the acid was poured in the pool, the water began to bubble up." Police pulled the protesters from the water and hauled them to jail -- but by then, the photographs had already gone out across the world.
As the images made headlines, President Lyndon Johnson, watching the international reaction, reportedly told an aide, "Our whole foreign policy will go to hell over this!" Within twenty-four hours, the civil rights bill that had been stalled in the Senate for a year was approved, clearing the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After being released from serving jail time for the swim-in, Ford made a powerful statement urging the people of St. Augustine to keep fighting: “Don't lose heart now because you're the ones on whom this movement rests. People will come and go because they live somewhere else, but you live here and you make this thing happen.”
Ford returned home and went on to join five other Black girls to lead the desegregation of the formerly all-White Albany High School, where she graduated with honors in 1965. Ford, who later changed her name to Mimi Jones, then went to college in Boston where she spent her career working in the Department of Education.
The segregation she risked her life to challenge has a quieter legacy that outlived her. After legal challenges and actions like this one in St. Augustine forced the end of segregated pools, in many towns, especially in the South, 'white flight' from public pools to private clubs often led to their closure. Some communities went further, filling their pools with concrete rather than integrate them. After a 1962 protest at the public pool in Raleigh, North Carolina's Pullen Park, city officials filled it in -- as the historian David Cecelski put it, "to make sure that it would never be used by White or Black youngsters again."
The cumulative loss, over generations, helped open a gap between Black and White Americans in something as fundamental as knowing how to swim. More than a third of Black adults today say they can't swim -- more than double the rate among American adults overall -- and Black children between the ages of ten and fourteen drown in swimming pools at more than seven times the rate of their white peers.
It is a loss Mamie Nell Ford would have recognized. She had been one of the few Black children of her generation to learn to swim, taught by her own determination in a creek -- and she had turned that rare skill, at seventeen, into a weapon against the very system that kept others out of the water.
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For a poignant middle grade novel set during Freedom Summer, in which an eleven-year-old girl's beloved town pool is closed rather than integrated, we highly recommend "Glory Be" for ages 8 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/glory-be
For another powerful book about a girl who becomes active in the fight for civil rights after an encounter at a segregated swimming pool, we also recommend the National Book Award Finalist, "Revolution," for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/revolution
For a moving picture book about two best friends -- one Black, one White -- who rush to their newly desegregated town pool in 1964, only to find it filled with tar rather than integrated, we recommend "Freedom Summer" for ages 5 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780689878299 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3Sk1Mjk (Amazon)
For an upbeat, award-winning graphic novel about a modern Black girl who overcomes her fear of the water to join her school's swim team -- and learns the history behind the racial swimming gap along the way -- we recommend "Swim Team" for ages 9 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063056763 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4uJ7WqM (Amazon)
For more books for children and teens about the courageous girls and women who helped lead the fight for equality -- including fighting against segregation -- visit our blog post, "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177
For adult readers, there's also an insightful book about the history of social change and swimming pools: "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780807871270 (Bookshop) and http://amzn.to/2lDsQJY (Amazon)
To see more photos from the St. Augustine Movement, including when Black swimmers were attacked on beaches for attempting to swim in the ocean, visit https://www.crmvet.org/images/imgstaug.htm
