Several days ago, readers bombarded me with links to a disturbing story out of Philadelphia about a suburban private club's embrace of Jim Crow a decade into the 21st century.

Like the details of a once-recurring dream nearly forgotten in the rush of years, the outline of the story is familiar to those of us who were alive in the middle of the last century. There's a momentary shock of recognition followed by the same old outrage.

Sixty-five kids from Creative Steps Inc., a Northeast Philly day camp of kindergartners to seventh-graders, paid $1,950 for the use of an enormous outdoor pool at a private suburban swim club in leafy Montgomery County. Until this summer, the children used to swim closer to home at the New Frankford Community Y, but due to budget cuts, that facility closed its doors last month.

Fortunately, the Jewish Community Center in Philadelphia offered its indoor pool to the children on Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving Mondays the only open day. Because of the heavy competition for pool time at recreational facilities in Philly, the day camp reached out to private clubs in the suburbs.

In exchange for accommodating kids from an inner city day camp one day a week for 90 minutes at a time until August, the Valley Swim Club would receive membership fees up front. The board of the private club knew a good deal when it saw one and approved the day camp's usage.

The kids showed up on the day agreed on with the swim club. Dozens of well-behaved black and Hispanic kids frolicked in the 110,000-gallon pool, boldly challenging the notion that minority kids aren't interested in swimming. They squealed with delight, hardly noticing the speed with which white club members were suddenly pulling their kids from the pool. They stayed for the entire 90 minutes allotted in the original agreement.

It didn't take long for John Duesler, the mortified president of the Valley Swim Club, to get an earful from club members about the sudden influx of kids from the city. The next day, Mr. Duesler refunded the day camp's fees and told program director Alethea Wright that her students were no longer welcome at the Valley Swim Club.

The children had already suspected as much. "I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?'" a camper named Dymire Baylor told the NBC News affiliate that broke the story earlier this week. "She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child.'"

Mr. Duesler issued a statement to the media that didn't reflect well on the members of the club who felt threatened by the presence of so many minority kids: "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion ... and the atmosphere of the club."

It was an uncomfortable echo of a period when municipal pools, like lunch counters and public transportation, were the front line of the movement to desegregate American life.

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission recognized the seriousness yesterday, with an announcement that it would investigate the incident.

"Allegedly, this group was denied the use of a pool based on their race," said Chairman Stephen A. Glassman. "If the allegations prove to be true, this is illegal discrimination in Pennsylvania."

In his 2007 book, "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America," sociologist Jeff Wiltse chronicled the evolution of pools from the early decades of the last century, when they accommodated blacks and poor whites without incident, to the segregation of the middle decades when attempts to return to integration were met with racial violence.

Public pools were places of physical and visual intimacy between the races at a time when gender segregation was ending. Fear that black boys would engage in "reckless eyeballing" of white girls and women gave the movement to separate the races a new imperative.

Beginning in 1951, the late Rev. LeRoy Patrick, a local civil rights leader and scholar who died three years ago, played a prominent role in combating the racist assumptions that made a trip to the Highland Park Pool by blacks an exercise in Gandhi-like self-control. Municipal pools were never segregated by law in Pennsylvania, but there is a long history of social exclusion that isn't entirely behind us, apparently.

As the cause of integration in public pools advanced, many whites retreated to the suburbs, where pools in back yards and membership in private clubs eliminated the need for explicit rudeness or violence.

Fortunately for the kids from Creative Steps Day Camp, Girard College has now opened its pool to them, so Monday swimming has been salvaged. The good people of the Valley Swim Club don't have to worry about draining the pool anymore.