The public spoke. The Valley Club listened, and its members voted unanimously to change course:
The Montgomery County swim club that sparked a racial furor when it disinvited a Philadelphia day camp of mostly black and Hispanic children last month wants to invite the group back, a club official said today.
"The board decided we would reach out to Creative Steps to . . . get the kids back to the club in a safe environment," John G. Duesler Jr., president of the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, said late this evening.
A storm of controversy has surrounded the club since it barred a return by Creative Steps' 65 children after the group's first visit there June 29.
Asked why the club was reversing course, Duesler said, "Because it's the right thing to do."
Does this end things? Maybe, maybe not. What kind of time slot will be available? Will the camp be asked to send more counselors? Would you send your kids back there?
Duesler said he had "reached out" with his conciliatory message to Creative Steps director Alethea Wright "in e-mails, phone calls, and texts. I have not heard back yet."
"They should have done that before," Wright told CNN this evening. "These children are scarred. How can I take those children back there?"
A lawyer whose firm filed a discrimination lawsuit against Valley Club on Friday on behalf of an unnamed Creative Steps mother with four children said today that the club's overture would put the suit on hold.
"We find this to be a very positive development," said the lawyer, David Mildenberg. "We applaud the club's decision."
Mildenberg & Stalbaum P.C. had sued Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
"We are hopeful that a resolution will be reached that allows these children to return to the club," said Mildenberg, who said his Philadelphia firm was handling the suit on a pro bono basis.
Let's assume, for a moment, the most charitable view towards Duesler and The Valley Club -- that while there were a few racist parents at the pool, that the decision to rescind the contracts was primarily motivated by crowd control and supervision concerns. Moreover, and here's the critical part: that perhaps while the "complexion" comment was deeply unfortunate in context, it wasn't intentional or particularly truthful. Think back, if you will, to the whole discussion in Frost/Nixon about television and "unforced errors," as I explained in January by this quote from one of Frost's producers in the movie:
You know, the first and greatest sin or deception of television is that it simplifies, it diminishes, Great, complex ideas, tranches of time. Whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. ... David had succeeded on that final day in getting, for a fleeting moment, what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get: Richard Nixon's face. Swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat, filling every television screen in the country. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist.
Think about that claim in this context -- that because the "complexion" line seemed so revelatory in that interstitial moment, so unconsciously truthful because it obviously wasn't well-considered, that it overdetermined the way we'd see and hear everything else which came later.
Well, sometimes those unforced errors do reveal truth (think: Sarah Palin's winks), but sometimes they're not -- think about the novice politician who says you know a lot just because he's not trained in being on television yet. Sometimes an error is just an error, and perhaps what we had here was a peace activist Obama supporter accidentally saying the dumbest possible thing at the worst possible time.
Maybe. But even under this most charitable view, there's a lot of history to overcome:
The club, which is unaffiliated with the Huntingdon Valley Country Club, is just outside Philadelphia's city limits and was founded in 1954, when pressure was emanating from within the city to integrate pools. In 1953, State Sen. Charles R. Weiner (R., Phila.) had offered a bill to desegregate all public pools. In 1951, the Rev. Harrison DeShields of South Philadelphia sued pool operators across the city and suburbs, alleging discrimination.
The new allegations against the Valley Club prompted questions of whether it was resisting decades of racial progress.
What the article doesn't note is that the neighborhood on the Philadelphia side of that border, Philmont Heights, didn't exist in 1954. It was farm country, not developed for at least another decade. The Valley Club was built outside the City to try to escape nondiscrimination law. It can't run any more.
It's up to Alethea Wright and the Creative Steps families to determine whether Duesler and the Valley Club membership are acting in good faith, and whether to try this again. One more first step the Valley Club can take? Expel the members who made racist comments to these kids. Make clear that they are no longer welcome at your pool.
Until the families tell us it's over, sign the Color of Change petition to urge the USDOJ to investigate. Keep up the pressure.