"Not a Single Playground for Our Children"
Savannah Tribune, March 20, 1915:
Savannah Tribune, Aug. 26, 1916
Discrimination extended to development of Savannah's progressive-era playground system. City officials believed keeping teenagers occupied on playgrounds helped them avoid trouble with the law. The progressive administration of Mayor Richard Davant opened the city's first five playgrounds in June 1914, but none expressly for Black children. In 1916, the municipal playground director urged the opening of a playground on the east side and "two playgrounds for negroes." When the city failed to act, the Savannah chapter of the Urban League funded construction of a playground for Black children on the east side on Huntingdon Street between East Broad and Price streets. More than 500 children enjoyed the playground on Opening Day. In 1917, the city agreed to fund and equip the park while the Urban League continued to operate it.
In speeches and articles, recreation officials touted the benefits and modest cost of playgrounds. The city playground director Montague Gammon wrote an essay for the Atlanta Constitution in 1917 headlined "Value of Municipally Supported Playgrounds Shown in Savannah," arguing that just as government provided children an education it must assure them safe and wholesome forms of recreation. Gammon wrote that society asked too much of children and needed to restore "that birthright of the child, an opportunity to play, for play is nature's method of developing the child." Gammon's views reflected the nationwide growth of the playground movement, which he said had spread to 342 American cities. Superintendent of Playgrounds H.S. Bounds wrote an article in the Savannah Morning News in 1933, headlined "City Playgrounds Save Lives." Without the playgrounds, he wrote, "hundreds of children would be driven into the streets" and risk being struck by cars.
A Morning News editorial in 1932 called the playground system "cost-efficient and essential." It appears city officials were continually fighting resistance to the cost of playgrounds, so most of the limited funds would naturally go mostly to white playgrounds, especially during the Depression. In 1932, the Recreation Commission reported that it operated seven white playgrounds and only two for Black children, plus "one playground for colored eleven months and another playground for colored for nine months."
Crawford Square
Photo: Cosmos Mariner, April 28, 2019. https://www.hmdb.org
In 1946, Savannah’s Black youth were still playing neighborhood basketball games on dirt courts. No courts in the “Black” playgrounds were paved. That year, the City of Savannah held a tournament of men’s teams from four parks in Black neighborhoods: Crawford Square, Cann Park, Yamacraw Village, and Soldiers Field. The prize was a paved basketball court. The city would build an asphalt court for only one Black neighborhood. The team from Crawford Square won the prize, and an asphalt court was ready the next year. The basketball court on Savannah’s east side became the testing ground for Black youth from all over the city who aspired to play in college or the pros. Decades later, some of those who played on Crawford Square paid to erect a plaque marking the victory of the team known informally as the Jets. The Savannah-Chatham County Historic Site and Monument Commission approved the plaque in 2008 with revisions and additions to the text. The original headline was “Crawford Square Basketball Court.” The final version was “Recreation on Crawford Square.” The text now honors not only the basketball court, but the square’s namesake, nineteenth-century Savannah politician William Harris Crawford, and a former tradition on the square, a New Year’s Day bonfire.
Today's Playgrounds
Compare the city’s parsimony with youth recreation before integration with its modern-day schedule of playground activities all over Savannah:
Sources include:
Travis Jaudon, “Larry ‘Gator’ Rivers Aims to Revive Savannah Playground Basketball,” Savannah Morning News, October 4, 2016.