This high school student’s award winning documentary showcases the history of segregated recreation

BALTIMORE -- The moment Sarah “Abigail” Giroux heard the announcer say the words “Baltimore, Maryland,” she knew she was taking home the top prize from last year’s National History Day.

“Right before they announced the first place winner, my mother turned to me, she gave me a hug. And she was like ‘It’s okay, Abigail. You’ll win next year.’ And then they announced the first place winner,” Giroux, 16, said. “I like completely freaked out. And I turned to my mom. And I was like, ‘That’s me!’”

Giroux, a junior at The Bryn Mawr School in Roland Park who lives in Baltimore City, won first place in the senior individual documentary category for her film “Wade in the Water: How African Americans Got Back Into the Pool” last June. The week-long national contest took place in College Park with over 2,600 students and 600 teachers, according to a National History Day news release.

Giroux also received an award from the Better Angels Society, which secured her a mentorship session in December with filmmaker Ken Burns. The conversation with the acclaimed director made Giroux realize she wants to pursue documentary filmmaking as a career.

Katherine Malone-France is president and CEO of the Better Angels Society, a national nonprofit focused on promoting American history and civic engagement through documentary filmmaking. She said Giroux’s film was shown at the Student History Film Festival in Philadelphia in November; it was also included in a docuseries from the 400 Years of African-American History Commission. Additionally, the film has been registered with the Library of Congress as an unpublished work and is considered a federal record, Malone-France said.

“It’s so important to give young people an opportunity not just to study history but to really engage with it by telling the stories that are meaningful to them in their own way and in their own voices,” Malone-France said.

Cathy Gorn, who has headed National History Day for over 40 years as its executive director, said the competition draws about half a million participants annually, with about 3,000 middle and high schoolers making it to the national level after clearing their school, regional and state competitions. Students can submit a paper, tabletop exhibit, documentary, performance or website.

In each category, the third, second and first place winners take home $250, $500 and $1,000, respectively, in addition to a medal, bragging rights and a shiny new accomplishment for their college resumes.

But that’s not the primary point of the competition, Gorn said. Students take the theme each year — for the 2022-2023 school year, it was “frontiers in history” — and examine a topic they’re passionate about while applying a critical lens to answer why their choice is important.

“It also helps young people develop a sense of empathy when they see what other people have gone through and how they struggled or made adjustments or sacrificed. … It helps kids find their everyday heroes,” Gorn said. “They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it because they want to tell these stories.”

Storytelling is what inspired Giroux to produce her 10-minute documentary on segregated recreation and the legacy left behind by the barring of Black Americans from equal access to swimming pools, including disproportionate drowning rates for Black children. The film includes an interview with Eva Scott — the first Black teacher hired at Baltimore’s Western High School — who says she was the first Black female lifeguard hired to work at the integrated No. 1 pool in Druid Hill Park, previously reserved for white swimmers, in 1956.

Giroux said she was volunteering at the Maryland Zoo in Druid Hill Park when she noticed one of its abandoned swimming pools. It piqued her curiosity, and the pool’s tie to “a very deep-rooted history of segregation” led to her eventual award-winning film.

“A lot of times people just kind of talk about the fight to desegregate schools or the fight to desegregate places where you eat. But a lot of times, people don’t talk about the fight to reclaim these recreational spaces, even though they were just as important,” Giroux said. “A large part of the reason why I even made the project in the first place was to be able to get it out there so that people can kind of hear about this story.”

At Bryn Mawr, all seventh and eighth graders are required to enter the National History Day competition. But Giroux entered for the first time as a sixth grader.

Matt Hetrick, a history teacher at the school who coordinates its National History Day participation, said Giroux is the first Bryn Mawr student he’s aware of that’s taken home the national prize. He said last year, Giroux worked almost entirely on her own on the project, which she started researching over summer 2022.

“What I think is very impressive is that each year that Abigail has worked on it, she has taken what seems to be a very familiar topic and found a new angle or a new approach that adds more insight and a new understanding,” Hetrick said, adding that she finds connections that are “often surprising and unexpected.”

Giroux is sitting out the competition this year but is going to speak with middle school students about her experience and help prepare them for the upcoming regional and state events, Hetrick said.

“[Abigail] just covers this long span of time and she does this with just this rich variety of sources and then she knits them all together into this I mean incredibly compelling ten minutes,” Malone-France with the Better Angels Society said. “She just demonstrates the potential of what happens when young people are really engaged with their history and given the tools to tell those stories from their perspectives.”