Throughout the Civil Rights era, many YMCAs served as recreational spaces, meeting places and safe havens for several prominent leaders and their families. After coming home from an arduous day of work in their duties as civil rights activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Andrew Young would often take their families to the Y to enjoy swimming and other activities!
YMCAs were also one of the few spaces that allowed for blacks and whites to meet and interact. Speaking on the Y’s continued tradition of advocacy for the equality and human dignity of all people, activist and former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young remarked: “The YMCA, as much as any other institution, has a record of working on desegregation. The only place you could meet in the south in the ‘50s, blacks and whites together, was YMCA camp…” Dr. King, Rev. Young and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall also spent much of their early years at the Y. The Y would honor the legacies of Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement when they officially banned all forms of discrimination at all YMCAs in 1967.