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Needing help providing for her family as a single mom raising two kids, Naji Ali’s mother asked him to get a summer job when he was 13. What he experienced that summer affected him for many decades.

When he inquired at an inner city youth program in San Diego, the only job left was assisting a marine biologist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Although he’d grown up near the Pacific Ocean, Ali didn’t know how to swim, but he took the job because he wanted to learn more about the ocean.

Ali spent the next couple of months absorbing as much as he could. One day, one of the researchers jumped in and started swimming. “I thought it was pretty cool,” Ali says. “I’d never seen anybody jump in the water like that before.”

Ali wanted to be able to jump in the water and paddle around for fun like it was no big deal, so he asked the researcher to teach him how to swim.

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Ali wanted to be able to jump in the water and paddle around for fun like it was no big deal, so he asked the researcher to teach him how to swim. “The guy puts his arm around me, and he laughs and says, ‘Black people don’t swim,’” Ali says. Everybody on the boat laughed along with the researcher, and Ali said nothing.

The researcher’s response—perhaps intended without malice—reinforced stereotypes Ali saw around him. He was reminded, once again, that as a Black kid in America, he would always encounter the limitations others placed upon him.

“I was so embarrassed,” Ali says. “I never brought that situation up to anybody for 30 years.” And he didn’t learn to swim for a long time either.

Fast forward to the 2008 Beijing Olympics at which Michael Phelps won a historic eight gold medals. One of his most breathtaking wins came in the men’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay when Jason Lezak came from behind to best the favored French team.

That legendary last relay leg wasn’t what electrified Ali, who was watching at home. Rather, it was the third swimmer who changed his life: Cullen Jones. “I was riveted,” Ali says. “I’d never seen a Black man swim that fast and so gracefully. I was just overcome with emotion.”

Ali committed himself to learning to swim and found a company that specializes in teaching adults to swim in the open water, which was fortuitous because although Ali had been inspired by a pool swimmer, it was the open water that beckoned.

Ali committed himself to learning to swim and found a company that specializes in teaching adults to swim in the open water.

Soon, Ali became a member of the South End Rowing Club, which trains at Aquatic Park, a protected section of San Francisco Bay. But his first forays into the chilly brine were a shock. “I stepped in and literally, it felt like my feet were on fire,” he says.

But he adjusted, and over time, his short, wetsuited swims gave way to longer swims with no wetsuit. Eventually, the bay’s frigid waters became his home base, and he began teaching other people how to swim and enjoy the water.

In addition to teaching other would-be swimmers, particularly those who have faced barriers to entry, Ali works at a soup kitchen in San Francisco, a job he’s had for the past 16 years. His work there often means early mornings for prep and cleaning, but it’s a vocation he sees as an extension of his spiritual calling as a Muslim.

“I’ve been working with the homeless and the marginalized all my adult life in one iteration or another, whether it be working at a soup kitchen like I’m doing now or as a human rights worker in South Africa and Palestine,” says Ali, 57.

He arrived in South Africa in 1990 shortly after Nelson Mandela, the leader of the movement to end apartheid in the country, was released from prison after 27 years. Although the segregationist policy known as apartheid had officially ended, there was still much work to be done integrating the starkly divided society.

Ali found a job working as a human rights observer documenting the various issues still at play in the country with an organization called Lawyers for Human Rights. During his time there, he learned to speak three languages so he could better communicate with the locals he was meeting. Violence wasn’t uncommon, and his safety was often in jeopardy.

“I would travel around different parts of the country and get testimony from this person and that person about something that was going on,” he says. “I saw a lot through those five years.”

After a short time back home in San Francisco, where he’d settled in 1985, he decided to scratch his itch to keep helping and set out for Palestine, where he undertook further human rights work in the occupied territories for another three years, also in a sometimes dangerously volatile environment. He learned Arabic, which he still uses today.

"I've always worked with the dispossessed," he says.

That mandate now extends to folks who’ve struggled to get into swimming.

In response to the national trauma of George Floyd’s murder and other police-involved killings of people of color, Ali felt compelled to formalize his efforts to fight for equity and safety. Looking at the mostly white swimmers around him, he decided it was time to delve into exactly why that is and whether that could be altered.

In July 2020, he launched “Crossing the Lane Lines,” a podcast that he says gives voice to the underappreciated contributions to aquatic sports that Black individuals have made and advocates for social justice in swimming.

Since then, Ali has released more than 30 episodes and has talked to a range of individuals, including drowning prevention advocates working to reduce the alarming rates of drowning in communities of color, Olympic swimmers, historians, researchers, and many other experts and athletes.

Several of his episodes dive deep into the lengthy history of swimming among the African diaspora, shining a light on various aspects of a rich tapestry of swimming culture. In all of these episodes, Ali asks difficult questions and elevates the voices of people of color.

In preparing for these interviews, Ali does a lot of reading and analysis of the lengthy history of Black swimmers and their exclusion from aquatics. Unflinchingly, he’s delved into the painful rejection he and other Black swimmers have felt and has highlighted how some unheralded athletes have overcome despite the long odds. In the process, he’s creating a remarkable archive of the social history of swimming.

Jeff Wiltse, professor of history at the University of Montana and author of the seminal text “Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America,” has been a guest on “Crossing the Lane Lines” and says that Ali’s analysis of the complex social dynamics around race in swimming is “a deep study of the topic. He’s read widely and thought extensively, and he’s really developed a sophisticated understanding of the social dimensions of swimming.”

Kevin Dawson, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Merced, and author of the groundbreaking book “Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora” also notes that Ali’s efforts are making a difference in the quest for equity in all aspects of life, but especially in swimming. “Naji Ali is a great friend and a relentless advocate for racial inclusion in the aquatics, to both reduce the disproportionately high Black drowning death rate and to encourage people of color to enjoy their bodies in the drink,” Dawson says.

Beyond merely grasping the complex social dynamics that have led to this moment in time, Ali has also “made that understanding accessible to a broader public,” Wiltse says.

Ali is setting the example and has become the role model to other swimmers of color he might have wished for as a child. And in giving swim lessons—often for free—to other people in need is his way of trying to correct some of the inequities many have faced.

“I think it’s extremely important that no matter whether it’s a Black child or a female child or a Southeast Asian child or an Asian child that they look up on deck and they see someone that looks like them,” Ali says. “I think that’s so critical. I want to make sure that people who look like me understand that there’s someone out there who’s fighting for them as best he can.”