Kansas City, Mo. v. Williams, 14664

• Decision Date: 12 October 1953
• Docket Number: No. 14664,14666.,14664
• Citation: 205 F.2d 47
• Parties: KANSAS CITY, MO. et al. v. WILLIAMS et al. WILLIAMS et al. v. KANSAS CITY, MO. et al.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

205 F.2d 47 (1953)

KANSAS CITY, MO. et al. v. WILLIAMS et al.

WILLIAMS et al. v. KANSAS CITY, MO. et al.

Nos. 14664, 14666.

United States Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit.

June 10, 1953.

Writ of Certiorari Denied October 12, 1953.

David M. Proctor, City Counselor, and Benjamin M. Powers, Associate City Counselor, Kansas City, Mo. (John J. Cosgrove, Associate City Counselor, Kansas City Mo., on the brief), for Kansas City, Mo., et al.

Carl R. Johnson, Kansas City, Mo., and Robert L. Carter, New York City (Almer T. Adair, Kansas City, Mo., Thurgood Marshall, and David E. Pinsky, New York City, on the brief), for Esther Williams et al.

Before SANBORN, JOHNSEN and RIDDICK, Circuit Judges.

Writ of Certiorari Denied October 12, 1953. See 74 S.Ct. 45.

JOHNSEN, Circuit Judge.

Three Negro residents of Kansas City, Missouri, brought suit, individually and representatively, against the City and its Board of Park Commissioners, for declaratory and injunctive relief, to eliminate the racial discrimination alleged to exist in the denial to them and the other Negroes of Kansas City of the right to enjoy the swimming pool in Swope Park as a recreation facility.¹

The District Court entered a judgment and decree in favor of the plaintiffs personally but held that they were not entitled to relief on a class basis. See Williams v. Kansas City, Mo., D.C., W.D.Mo., 104 F.Supp. 848. The City and the Park Board have appealed from the decision rendered against them, and the plaintiffs have cross-appealed from the denial of their request for class relief.

Swope Park is a general park and recreation area of Kansas City, owned by the City, maintained with public funds, and operated through a Board of Park Commissioners. Its extensive grounds (1800 acres), the excellent facilities which it contains, and the numerous diversions which are provided in it, have made it the principal outing, entertainment and relaxation center of Kansas City.

The recreational scheme of the Park has been made to include, among its elements of enjoyment, two golf courses, a boating pond, a zoo, a band pavilion, a "starlight" theatre, picnic conveniences, shelter houses, a swimming pool, and other features. All of these facilities are subject to being enjoyed equally by general visitors to the Park, Negroes as well as whites — all except the swimming pool and its incidents. That facility of the Park is not permitted to be used by Negroes. Only such visitors to the Park as are members of the white race are allowed admittance to it.

The swimming pool constitutes one of the popular elements in the Park's recreational system. The record shows that up to 8,000 persons have made use of it in a single day and evening.² The pool consists of three separate sections — a diving pool, a swimming pool, and a wading pool — with an adjunctive sand beach for sunbathing. It has been widely cited in the recreation world as a model of swimming-pool construction, and its facilities have been designed to meet the prescriptions of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for the holding of competitive swimming and diving events.

In the general program of outing, recreation, entertainment and relaxation which the City and the Park Board have thus fostered in the Park, the calendar of members of the white race can be interspersed with diving, swimming, wading and sun-bathing activities, but the stay of Negroes in the Park on a similar general visit can not. As has been indicated, Negroes are denied admittance to the existing pool on the ground of their race, and no other provision for diving, swimming, wading, or sun-bathing enjoyment has been made for them as a facility of the Park and as part of their outing visits to it.

Negroes, who go to the Park for a day of outing, attracted, as the City and the Park Board have intended, by its many facilities and by its varied recreation and entertainment opportunities, and who desire to have diving, swimming, wading or sun-bathing constitute an element in their outing program, must disrupt their stay in the Park, journey a distance of some 4½ miles from the Park to a pool maintained by the City as a general Negro swimming facility,³ and then travel back, if they want to resume their activities at the Park. Members of the white race do not thus have to break the continuity of their stay at the Park and travel a distance of 9 miles, in order to engage in a swimming interlude, but are able to remain on for their picnic supper and to enjoy the other diversions of the Park, without any such disruption, loss of time and inconvenience.

The defense set up by the City and the Park Board to the action here was that the separate swimming pool which had been provided for Negro use, some 4½ miles distant from Swope Park,⁴ constituted a substantially equal facility with the Swope Park pool, and that therefore it could not be claimed that any racial discrimination had been involved in refusing Negroes admittance to the Park pool — with the implication also intended that accordingly there could be none either in not alternatively having provided other equivalent diving, swimming, wading and sun-bathing facilities for Negroes in the Park itself as part of its recreational system, regardless of the position which Swope Park held in the community as a general recreational area or center, and regardless of the part which such facilities played as an element of enjoyment in the recreational program at the Park of other general visitors.

We shall not engage in a detailed comparison of the Negro pool, located some 4½ miles away from Swope Park, with the Park pool, as mere physical facilities. In the relationship of the latter pool to the broad recreational system which the City and the Park Board had set up in Swope Park, and to the position which the Park had thus come to have as a general recreation center, the failure to afford to Negroes the privilege of diving, swimming, wading and sun-bathing enjoyment, as one of the constituted elements in the Park's comprehensive recreational scheme, seems to us to make the question that is involved more than simply a matter of whether the Negro pool located some 4½ to 6½ miles away from Swope Park could be said to amount to a substantially equal facility with the Park pool.

As we have suggested, the Swope Park pool swimming facilities obviously had not been placed in the Park as a matter of abstract pool locationship but in relation to and because of its incidence in the Park's general recreational scheme. It was intended and served as one of the material elements of attraction and enjoyment in the general outing purposes for which the Park was maintained. In the special recreational status which Swope Park thus had, and with all members of the general public, Negroes as well as whites, having been accorded access to it on this basis, it would hardly constitute equal treatment legally, we think, for the City and the Park Board to provide material privileges and facilities for whites, in the general recreational system set up in the Park, which were not also provided for Negroes.

The situation here is not without analogy in nature and principle to that which existed in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637, 70 S.Ct. 851, 94 L.Ed. 1149, where a Negro student was admitted to a State University for educational purposes but restrictions were imposed upon him as to some of the privileges and...