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I’ve spent the last several days listening to folks talk about how influential the Marshall White Center was to their upbringing. My friend Omar remembers swimming at the MWC when his family first moved to the States. “It has always been a place that makes you feel welcomed no matter how you look,” he recalls. Many others recounted the after-school programs that they describe as literally life saving. My friend Daniel remembers going to the Martin Luther King Day breakfast at the center and feeling like he “knew a cultural secret that the other kids in Uintah didn’t have access to.”

I was one of those other kids that wasn’t in on the secret. I grew up in Uintah just a few blocks from Dan yet I’ve never set foot inside the center that he describes as an “oasis of culture in a Cracker Barrel existence.” The question is why? Why was the Marshall White Center so instrumental to some of Ogden’s citizens but virtually nonexistent to others?

Strategic disinvestment in the Marshall White Center by previous Ogden administrations left a sub-modern facility unable to compete with the likes of the (South) Ogden Athletic Club, the facility where I spent a lot of my youth that cost our family hundreds of dollars a month. This created an Ogden recreation center that, instead of bringing all citizens from every background together, divided the city by economic status and race. The continued disinvestment in this facility by our current administration led to a pool with structural damage that was closed in 2018, a weight room that closed during the early stages of the pandemic and never opened again, and a roof that, before it’s recent repair, was deemed a public safety hazard.

The Marshall White Center badly needs a major investment and Ogden is completely devoid of a quality community recreation center. This is a perfect, and quite literal, example of what author Heather McGee refers to as “Drained-Pool” politics. Heather describes in her book “The Sum of Us” how during desegregation thousands of communities decided to fill in their community pools with concrete rather than allow black folks to swim in them. She describes how this same mentality of “if ‘they’ can also have it, then no one can” persists today and keeps us from having things like affordable health care, child care and a broader social safety net.

So while our neighboring cities like Clearfield have beautiful, modern, state-of-the-art recreation facilities with robust programs, Ogden is stuck, yet again, in another political fight that leaves its citizens with nothing. At the heart of this fight is whether or not a low-income, mostly community of color is worthy of the city’s investment or if the facility should be moved to a different location. Rebuilding the Marshall White Center where it currently stands will be a uniting force for our community. The community that the Marshall White Center has served for over 50 years will get a well-deserved investment that will also benefit all Ogden citizens. No longer will two kids in the same neighborhood, separated only by economic advantage, go to separate but unequal facilities to learn to swim or play basketball. This can happen! But only if our community is willing to stand with one other rather than against each other.

REYNALDO LEAL, Standard-Examiner file photo

Kevin Lundell is an Ogden resident, community advocate, doctor of chiropractic, and owner of Lundell Chiropractic and Roy Community Fitness.

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