You talked about trauma today. If such a thing happened, it would be called a lawsuit

which gets people asking, did that really happen? You must be making it up and it's an urban

legend.

Robyn Washington is an American journalist whose work for newspapers in Boston and Duluth,

Minnesota, and also for NPR. In addition, he's made several documentaries about the civil

rights movement and the lives of black Americans, including the PBS film You Don't Have to

Ride Jim Crowe and Vermont, the whitest state in the Union. In 1995, he helped found the

alliance of black Jews and has recently become editor at large at the foreword, the nation's

leading Jewish news outlet. But Robyn is here today to talk about something much different

than his impressive resume would suggest. An NPR story he created back in 2006 that I just

had to hear more about. Today, he will tell us the story of his time in high school in the

1970s when it was required in educational institutions across the nation that boys

in Jim class swim completely in the nude. Nope, it's not an urban legend, but America

at large has certainly chosen to forget all about it. That is, until Robyn and a handful

of other men swapped their stories and reminded us all that bad dreams really do come true.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Robyn, thank you so much for joining us. You are such an impressive person with an incredible

resume, and yet I bring you here to talk about swimming naked in high school. So thank

you for being willing. That's right. You're quite welcome, Chelsea. Yes, of all the things

I've done, this is what you have to talk to me about. You are doing us a public service.

So I would love to start, and as our audience is going to find out, up until the 1970s,

in some schools across a good deal of schools, in fact across the country, it was required

...