Marian Spencer and the Sunlite Pool

In nineteen fifty-two, Marian Spencer heard a radio advertisement for an event at Coney Island Amusement Park in Cincinnati, a park with a pool called the Sunlite Pool that was one of the largest in the country. Her children asked if they could go. She called the park to confirm the event was open to all children. A park representative told her it was not open to Black children.

Spencer was a thirty-two-year-old woman who had graduated from the University of Cincinnati and was raising a family. She was also a member of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People branch. She decided to turn the call into a case.

She organized a team of twenty-eight witnesses, Black and white, who went to Coney Island together. They were turned away at the gate by an armed guard. Spencer had the witnesses, the dates, the testimony. She filed a desegregation lawsuit with the NAACP. She won.

That one case was the beginning of four decades of public life. Spencer chaired the Cincinnati NAACP Education Committee for more than twenty years, fighting racial isolation in the school system. She became the first female president of the Cincinnati NAACP in nineteen eighty-one, and she remains the only woman ever to have held that position. She appeared before city council meetings to testify on civil rights issues well into her nineties.

The City of Cincinnati named a street downtown for her: Marian Spencer Way. She died in twenty nineteen at age ninety-nine.

The Sunlite Pool is still at Coney Island. It is still one of the largest pools in the country. The sign on the gate no longer says what it said in nineteen fifty-two.