Dr. Kevin Dawson was about five years old when he first experienced racism in the water.

He was playing around with a group of kids at Cabrillo Beach located in the Los Angeles neighborhood of San Pedro during the 1970s. After spending some time in the sun and sand, Dawson suggested to his friends that they go swimming together. It was then a white kid turned to Dawson and said, “Colored people don’t swim.”

Dawson didn’t know what to make of the racist comment. Even as a child, he knew he was a strong swimmer. He would later become an avid surfer. He recognized the comment as an insult, but not a racial one. He didn’t process that context until he became older, when he started to realize how people’s distorted view of the Black experience with water affected communities across the country. While visiting his grandmother in Harlem, Dawson noticed an empty, large public swimming pool sitting in a park in an under-resourced community.

“It was an instance that obviously stuck with me and kept me thinking about Black people’s relationships with water,” Dawson said. “It was helping me to understand the differences between swimming and race.”

Dawson’s curiosity turned into an academic career, he researched slave resistance during the Civil War period for a senior thesis in college. He found multiple accounts of enslaved people in Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina using waterways as passages to freedom. These accounts pushed him to look deeper into African records.

“They were stealing boats and swimming out to Union ships,” Dawson said. “All of these things were cutting against my normal grain of thought, and it really caused me to realize that if you have all these Black people swimming a half of a mile or a mile out to a Union ship, they must be pretty good swimmers.”

A history professor at the University of California, Merced, Dawson explored the aquatic prowess of Africans pre- and post-enslavement in his book “Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora.” His findings earned him the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize and added on to the legacy of Black people who are helping their community reclaim swimming as their ancestral birthright.

Here’s four ways Dawson’s book dismantles the myth claiming Black people can’t swim:

Our swimming ability reigned supreme to white people

The irony of the “Black people can’t swim” stereotype is the fact that it was actually white people who didn’t know how to swim. From the fifteenth to the late-eighteenth century, Africans’ swimming ability far surpassed those of European descent. As neighbors of lakes, rivers and oceans, the water contributed to the well being of Africans.

“Many Africans were fishing-farmers and farming-fishermen who wove terrestrial and aquatic experiences into amphibious lives, interlacing spiritual and secular beliefs, economies, social structures, and political institutions—their very way of life—around relationships with water,” Dawson wrote.

Dawson said religion skewed European’s understanding of the oceans’ depths. The Bible illustrated water as a tool of punishment. Water swept away Pharaoh’s army and engulfed the world during the Great Flood. At the beginning of time, the Bible described the world as an empty void.

“Water was something that human beings could not ‘civilize,’” Dawson said. “You could ‘civilize’ the land by clearing space, planting crops, and building towns. So for Europeans, they end up seeing water as this kind of dangerous place that threatens to take away civilization.”

This mindset made white people vulnerable to drownings. Swimming wasn’t encouraged amongst white people until the nineteenth century, when it was advertised as a skill for survival. Dawson read multiple accounts of white people drowning due to their lack of swimming ability.

“Whether they were Africans or enslaved people in the Americas, if there was a maritime accident – like a boat overturned, or sank – Black people swam and saved themselves. White people drowned unless black people saved them.”

We were some of the first surfers

The waterways of Africa were often transformed into playgrounds of joy after a hard day’s work. Children were taught how to swim at the same time they learned how to walk or after they were weaned.

“After teaching children the fundamentals, parents promoted expertise through play,” Dawson wrote. “Safeguarded by prowess, amulets, and buddy systems, parents encouraged children to explore their liquid worlds.”

Historians typically point to Hawaii as the birthplace of surfing in 1778. Dawson believes that’s incorrect. The first written record of surfing was documented 140 years prior in current-day Ghana. Dawson said Africans had the environment and the endurance to thrive in this activity.

“Atlantic Africa shares traits that inspired surfing in Oceania, including thousands of miles of warm, surf-filled waters and seagoing water people who knew ocean rhythms and surf patterns and were powerful swimmers,” he wrote.

They are only four early written accounts of surfing, nearly all of them involving children. In 1834, a Scottish traveler sighted young boys thrusting themselves into the sea  “with light boards under their stomachs. They waited for a surf; and came rolling like a cloud on top of it.”

We were expert divers – sometimes paying for our freedom because of our skills

Many Africans used breathing techniques to expand their lung capacities, giving them the ability to freedive for economic reasons. Dawson cited the writings of Scottish adventure Mungo Park, who witnessed an African fisherman dive to set traps. The fisherman was submerged for so long, Park believed the man had drowned. Freediving gave ivory merchants a clever way to secure their bounty from thieves. They hid their haul in underwater cellars. Adventurers were impressed with Africans ability to haul 100-pound tusks through the water.

Dawson said Europeans took advantage of Africans’ freediving skills during the rapid expansion of oversea shipping in the 1500s. Setting sail for longer distances increased the risk of ships capsizing. African divers were assembled to fetch sunken goods and to haul cargo beneath the ships. While some of these divers were enslaved, Africans kept a sense of autonomy over their knowledge on freediving.

“Cloistering this wisdom so that only a few knew the secrets, they seemingly created semi-fraternal orders that prevented slaveholders from appropriating and propagating their wisdom,” Dawson wrote.

Dawson said that oftentimes divers were paid a portion of whatever goods they recovered, which increased Africans’ autonomy over their own lives. Some Africans were paid as much as ship captains. In some cases, Dawson said these funds benefited their families for generations.

“They earn enough money to buy their own freedom and still have money left over to buy their sisters, their nephews, their wives, their kids and houses,” Dawson said. “In the Caribbean and the Bahamas, there are family members who still own the homes that some of these divers had purchased back in the 1700s. These homes have stayed in the family up to the present.”

Our ancestors live in these waters

While Europeans illustrated monsters in their maps of the seas, Africans acknowledge the water as a sanctuary of spirituality. Merchants and fishermen traveled to ocean shores to give sacrifices to water deities for good fortune – and sometimes misfortune. But not towards their tribes.

“Some Africans used spiritual beliefs to explain the high rates of white drowning, concluding that deities drowned Europeans for their transgressions,” Dawson wrote. “In 1887, Alfred Ellis learned that peoples along the Gold Coast believed in ‘Akum-brohfo’, ‘slayer of white men, whom he destroys by upsetting their boats.’”

Dawson stresses that African spirituality didn’t see death as the end of one’s life, but the extension of it. So water became part of the realm of the afterlife where their ancestors dwelled. This understanding became the foundation of Africans’ connection to water and why their joy thrived in it. It also hints at how Black people today can deepen their own relationship with the lakes, rivers and oceans that surround us now.

“With all these positive beliefs, swimming wasn’t just a secular thing that they were just taking pleasure in. It was a way of connecting with one’s ancestral spirits,” he said.