Thai People Don’t Get Hate Mail

This chapter explores the decline of golf in America’s inner cities in the 1980s, subsequent efforts to increase minority participation, and the rise of Tiger Woods. Complicating the notion of Woods as a traditional, popular figure in sport desegregation, the narrative instead posits him as a reluctant civil rights hero, contextualizing his popularity and exploring why the media (and many golf fans) struggled to turn back the clock and fit Woods into the mold of historic black athletes. It was a process that future historians may consider a failure, not only because the traditional “civil rights era” was over but also because the young Woods himself asked not to be identified as “black” and instead told the world that he was “Cablinasian,” a term he coined to describe his multiracial heritage. The chapter features an analysis of Woods that draws on a comparison with other athletes, including lesser-known black golfers like Calvin Peete as well as superstars like basketball great Michael Jordan.

Our Masters

This chapter discusses black professional players and the little-known history of the United Golfers Association (UGA), a black golf organization that was founded in 1925 and served as a parallel institution to the all-white Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) that formed nine years earlier in 1916. Along with many other activities, the UGA operated a national golf tour for professionals, amateurs, and intercollegiate golfers, and it continued to host events well after the desegregation of the PGA in 1961. Similar to the story of baseball’s Negro Leagues and their central place in American culture, the UGA also featured African Americans who used professional sport to carve out autonomous sites for leisure, business, and fandom. As the only national professional golf tour for black players in American history, virtually every black pro before Tiger Woods experienced playing in UGA events, a long list that includes John Shippen, Robert “Pat” Ball, John Brooks Dendy, Howard Wheeler, Charlie Sifford, Bill Spiller, Ted Rhodes, and Lee Elder. The UGA also supported a full women’s division, which over time featured gifted stars like Marie Thompson, Lucy Williams, Geneva Wilson, Ann Gregory, Thelma Cowans, Ethel (Powers) Funches, Althea Gibson, and Renee Powell.

One Hears of Negro Country Clubs

This chapter explores the development of golf clubs in black communities during and after the Great Migration surrounding World War I. By the 1920s, golf had become a frequent pastime in many black communities as well as a symbol of northern possibility and the promise of economic mobility for southern migrants. While some intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance (like W. E. B. Du Bois) struggled to detach the game from its deep ties to white colonialism and racial exclusion, others saw the growth of predominately black golf courses and country clubs as embodying the Jazz Age and a new era of black respectability. The narrative explores certain regions and cities—such as Chicago, Cleveland, or New York City—where golf’s popularity grew in black communities because the game was more “open” to black players, as well as other hot spots for black golf—Atlanta, Jacksonville (Fla.), Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New Orleans— that flourished in the heart of segregation.

Guns in their Golf Bags

This chapter discusses golf and black militant movements in the late 1960s and 1970s, exploring how American black nationalist leaders and anticolonial movements in the Caribbean and Africa appropriated the symbolism of black golfers. Popular magazines like Jet and Ebony celebrated black players, organizations sponsored black golf tours throughout the African Diaspora, and a new generation of professionals—led by Lee Elder—more directly confronted racism in the PGA and sought access to its most exclusive enclaves. Meanwhile, the ongoing internationalization of the civil rights movement placed golf squarely within global debates over race and racial discrimination. The game’s popularity in South Africa and Rhodesia made it a target of the antiapartheid movement, especially as more African-born white professionals—like star Gary Player—traveled to play in PGA events. While fans have long been interested in Muhammad Ali’s popularity in Africa or the black protests surrounding the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, they have overlooked golf as a cite of militancy. Coinciding with Ali’s famous 1974 trip to Zaire, Elder’s trips to Africa—including his confrontations with apartheid at South African golf tournaments—and his integration of the Masters Golf Tournament in 1975 are just two examples.

I Will Take Your Own Golf Stick and Wham the World

This chapter analyzes key legal battles over golf integration after World War II and the role played by the NAACP and other national civil rights organizations in waging that fight, including leading litigators Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall. It explores the ongoing battles to desegregate America’s municipal courses in the 1950s and 1960s—such as the most important legal case, Holmes v. Atlanta—and emphasizes how national black organizations debated the game’s value and whether to support legal challenges to segregated golf in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Here the narrative transitions from stories of individuals and local groups who took up the game to one of national organizations and institutions sustaining black players and challenging racial discrimination in golf, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet still there was no consensus on the game’s social significance or its value to African Americans. Just as local communities failed to rectify the tension between black golfers as symbolic of integration and economic promise—or symbolic of elitism and racial tokenism—so too did national organizations like the UGA and NAACP fail to reach a consensus on the game’s larger meanings.

Real Democracy is Found on the Links

This chapter charts the earliest examples of African American involvement with golf, ranging from the eighteenth century to World War I. It argues that black people shaped the American game from its very beginning as caddies, players, and course designers in the South (like Joseph Bartholomew in New Orleans). It also explores how middle-class black players became some of the first golf enthusiasts of any race in northern cities, like George Franklin Grant (Boston) and Walter Speedy (Chicago). It concludes by introducing some of the first black professional players, including John Shippen, and analyzing their relationship with the early United States Golf Association (USGA) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA).