70% percent of African American Children Cant Swim????

Fourteen-year-old Cornelius Thomas slipped off a raft and drowned in a high-school swimming pool earlier this month in Alexandria, La. He had never been taught how to swim. There aren't any "pools for kids to learn how to swim around here," Forest Martin, the boy's grandfather, said Tuesday as he wept.

Cornelius's drowning reflects a problem USA Swimming hopes to highlight Thursday in a report showing that 70% of African-American children and 58% of Hispanic children have little or no swimming ability, compared with 40% of Caucasian children.

Richard Carson

Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones gives a swimming lesson.

.Evidence of a continued swimming gap comes as the economic slowdown has cut back opportunities for inner-city kids to swim. With the approach of Memorial Day, the official start of swim season, "some cities are cutting back on pool hours if not closing pools altogether, and they're also cutting public-safety budgets, including lifeguards," says Christiana McFarland, director of finance and economic development for the National League of Cities.

The report, including interviews with children and parents in several cities, revealed that the biggest barrier to inner-city swimming proficiency isn't a lack of pools and instructors, but parents' fear of water.

Among low-income families, "many parents wouldn't let kids swim even if lessons were free, a theme that was tested four times in different focus groups," according to a summary of the study, conducted by Richard Irwin, professor of health and sports sciences at the University of Memphis. "Overall, fear trumped financial concerns across all respondent race groups in low-income families."

The low swimming-proficiency rate reflects both the prohibition against blacks in public pools that lasted well into the civil-rights era and a legacy of bogus science that, as recently as the 1970s, claimed blacks were biologically disadvantaged in water. In an interview, Dr. Irwin said black parents who can't swim often go to incredible lengths to keep their children away from water. At the same time, children of all races tend to overestimate their swimming abilities, particularly when a pool or beach emerges into view on a hot summer day.

According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5- to 14-year-old African-Americans drowned at 3.1 times the rate of whites in that age range, from 2000 to 2006. And in that period African-American kids were five times as likely as white kids to drown in swimming pools, in some cases inches from safety. "Many minority children do not have the basic survival swimming skills to keep them from drowning in a swimming pool," says a CDC spokesman.

Since 2007, a USA Swimming Foundation program called Make a Splash has taught basic swimming skills to 325,000 children and aims to reach a record number this summer. A leader in the effort is Cullen Jones, an African-American whose mother made him learn to swim after a near-drowning at age 5. In 2008, Mr. Jones won an Olympic gold medal as part of an American relay team. Since last summer he has held the U.S. record in the 50-meter freestyle.