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Greenbeat Magazine looks at the stories in Barton Springs Interactive

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Joan Means Khabele grew up in Austin and now teaches sociology at the Univerisity of Lesotho in (South) Africa. Photo: Marshall Frech

Willie Smith was interviewed in 1991, where she was living in a modest home in East Austin. She has spent her life working with children. She has remarkably pleasant memories of visiting the Springs as a child, despite her solemn awareness of how she and other minorities were excluded from 1930 to 1960. Photo: Marshall Frech

In 1960, Ms. Khabele and other black members of her high school class were told that they would not be allowed to attend their senior class picnic at Barton Springs. They protested by staging a "swim-in."

Ms. Khabele:
"We had our neighborhood pool, but Barton Springs belongs to everybody in Austin. And so it was just pitiful that we were told we couldn't go to the picnic. After that, we had sit-ins, stand-ins, and all sorts of pray-ins and the other "-ins". Barton Springs sparked the integration of Austin."

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Ms. Smith:
"I'm 89 years old. They say my mother called me Willie because I was the tenth child and she'd run out of names. My brother and two older sisters would go fishing at the Springs, and us kids would play in the water and gather up the pecans. You could get as many as you wanted. Oh, we'd have a time. I liked to throw stones in the water and slide down the sand into the creek.

I remember the cable across the Colorado River and a huge bucket for taking loads of sand over to the Butler brickyard. My mother would send us down there with hot lunches. We'd put them in that bucket and send them across to my brothers in the brickyard.

My family lived up on Kinney Avenue near the Springs. There were only two white families around there at that time: the Morgans and the Kinneys. We bought all our milk, butter, and eggs from the Morgans.

The Springs were a good place for an outing. I remember when it became popular with the university crowd, and the city started fixing it up and spending money. It grew pretty bad to where they didn't want the colored to have a picnic out there. They even stopped letting people gather up the pecans.

I think love is the problem now; people don't read the Bible anymore, and they haven't learned how to love one another. They're only interested in the pleasurable things of the world. Now we have the TV. I hate to turn it on because there's so much rudeness and bad things happening. People don't have any business hating each other that way.

I hate to say this, but as time goes on our presidents, well. . . it's too bad that riches are so important. The Bible warns about this. If I had a million dollars now and death called out to me, what good would the money do?"

This story is made possible in part through support from
The National Environmental Education Training Foundation.

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