A Permanent Place: How Wake-Robin Golf Club Fought Racism through Golf
Original members of the Wake-Robin Golf Club, 1930’s
Before Mother of Golf sprouted from a woman’s frustration with being expected to do no more than decorate the walls of a golf world dominated by men, the women of Wake-Robin Golf Club embodied a different flower-based metaphor, blossoming—like the deep burgundy wake-robins native to the region—into passionate and skilled golfers in spite of the social, political, and economic restrictions placed upon them by white society and by men in 20th-century America.
Established in Washington, D.C. in 1937, Wake-Robin Golf Club is recognized as the first Black women’s golf club in the United States. Its members belonged to one of the oldest and most segregated cities in the country, one that had recently exploded into a series of uprisings in response to not only lasting but intensifying racial discrimination.
One of those members was Helen Webb-Harris, who had recently become a “golf widow,” meaning she’d lost her husband to golf. And while everyone loves to portray straight married women as passionate haters of the sport that supposedly turned their husbands’ heads, Webb-Harris proved that some of those women not only adore being left alone while their husbands hack it up, but also use that time to learn the game, watch it being played, or teach it to others. A schoolteacher, Webb-Harris was naturally inclined toward the latter, and invited neighborhood women to her home to study the rules. Once the 9-hole Langston Golf Course, named for John Mercer Langston, first Black U.S. congressman to represent Virginia, was built unsegregated in 1937, she took them to watch other Black women play, thereby generating a balmy storm that would start to peel back the lily-white paint on D.C. area golf’s facade.
But as liberating as it was for Webb-Harris and her friends to pursue the sport, being allowed to play at Langston, with its sand greens and open sewers, merely served as a reminder of all the courses they weren’t allowed to play. The “golden age of golf course design” (1910-1937), as Geoff Shackelford has called it, was happening all around them, with new courses being constructed on the regular.
But by 1939, only twenty of the 700 courses in the U.S. and only two of the six courses in Washington were open to African Americans. Langston was one of the two unsegregated D.C. courses; the other was Lincoln Memorial Golf Course, which was built in 1924 after white golfers consistently refused to honor the half-day per week that was reserved for Black players to play D.C. courses. Lincoln Memorial was immediately played into oblivion—option-starved Black golfers played 1,000 rounds on it in the first month—then shrunk, then closed in favor of the construction of a bridge, all within fifteen years.
Public golf courses were a microcosm of America—organized by and for white people—so they’d prove to be as difficult to penetrate as schools, restaurants, and other public places. But to the Black golfers of Washington, public courses would simply serve as another theater in which their tenacity would ultimately triumph over white players’ disgusting attempts to preserve Jim Crow culture.
Motivated by the situations at Lincoln and Langston, the women of Wake-Robin and their brother organization, Royal Golf Club (RGC), shifted their focus to demanding the desegregation of all six Washington courses. They petitioned the federal government to do so in 1938, but the process felt slow and futile, so the group embraced more hands-on tactics. On June 29th, 1941, RGC members entered the white-only East Potomac Golf Course. They were denied entry and left, but returned with park police officers and Edgar G. Brown, director of the National Negro Council and husband of Wake-Robin member Paris Brown, walked onto the course, and started to play. White players pelted them with rocks and glass bottles, bombarded them with racial slurs, loaded their carburetors with dirt, and slashed their tires while they were on the course, but the men of RGC finished their round. The following day, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the white man in charge of the National Park Service and a mild supporter of desegregation, ordered that all Washington public courses open their gates to African Americans, explaining:
“I can see no reason why [Black people] should not be permitted to play on the golf course. They are taxpayers, they are citizens, and they have a right to play golf on public courses on the same basis as whites."
As is the case with most policy changes, nothing immediately shifted in terms of culture. In July 1942, for example, a group of white people attacked Wake-Robin members playing the recently desegregated Anacostia Golf Course. They picked up the golfers’ balls from the fairways, throwing things and barking insults at them. The women enjoyed some retribution a few months later, however. After the all-Black United Golfers Association tried to hold the Negro National Open at a public course in D.C., but canceled due to threats from white organizations, the women of Wake-Robin and men of Royal, with the support of Secretary Ickes, held an “All Out for Victory” tournament at—yep—Anacostia.
Although they never should have been put in a position to do so, the women of Wake-Robin demonstrated impeccable feminism during their fight to desegregate municipal golf in Washington, pursuing justice for Black men in addition to themselves, a favor that Black men sometimes had difficulty returning (though they, too, never should have been put in a position by white society to do so). In 1961, Wake-Robin publicly joined the movement to force the PGA to eliminate its color barrier, but it’s unclear if any Black men pros actively supported Althea Gibson when she became the first Black woman to join the LPGA in 1964. And during the remainder of the Civil Rights movement, activist men often expected Black women to stay home and “support” men’s activism by cooking, cleaning, tending to children, and providing sex and emotional labor. But women golfers were on the frontlines of the fight for racial justice years before bus boycotts or sit-ins were being organized, showing up for themselves and for men golfers in hopes that both groups could access their chosen pastime. According to a 2017 ESPN article by Kia Gregory, one Wake-Robin member noted that "under a system of racism, in an atmosphere of sexism, Black women playing golf was not a light matter. It was a political act.”
Some Wake-Robin members have attributed their strong sense of justice to lessons learned playing golf. According to Gregory’s article, current member Kimberly Robinson suggested that golf “requires you to think, it requires you to calculate. And it draws you out of all your little comfort zones.” Difficult weather, unlucky bounces, and challenging pin placements are in no way comparable to systemic racism, but those aspects of golf can be recognized as training in strategizing and resilience, which players have applied to the ongoing fight for racial justice.
But as courageous and admirable as their work was, these women didn’t play golf to face and confront discrimination. They started playing because it was fun, and kept playing because it served as an escape from the dark energy of segregation—a therapeutic break from the kind of racialized competitiveness that characterized (and continues to characterize) the United States, “because one actually competes against the course, not other players,” giving the appearance of “a leveled playing field,” Gregory reported one member saying. The women should have been able to play for only that reason, to simply enjoy the game for its personalized and individualizing nature, but this is America.
Few people know the story of Wake-Robin Golf Club. Upon seeing an old black and white photo of early members dressed in skirts and Oxfords, younger Wake-Robin member Dionne West (26 years old in 2017), thought to herself, “Wow, they were really there,” according to Gregory. This is why documenting the history of women golfers and golfers of color is crucial. When golf started expanding in the U.S. in the 1800s, it was shaped by the racism of the men running it. But even at that time, Black Americans were inventing equipment, designing courses, playing, and caddying.
Those early stories of resistance provide evidence of the fortitude, creativity, and athleticism of Black golfers, and therefore have the power to inspire younger generations to play. Which is also exactly why these stories and photographs have been erased or ignored for so long—when those sources are lost, lost with them is the sense of pride and strength young people would gain if they had heard the stories and seen themselves reflected in photos, ultimately solidifying white people’s position of authority within the game.
Thirteen years before the LPGA was founded by thirteen white women, Wake-Robin was founded by thirteen Black women, proving that golf was loved and mastered by Black women as early as by white women in America. African American women’s golf has simply been less documented and Black women have been more discouraged—directly and indirectly—by American society from long-term playing careers. According to the Wake-Robin Papers (the club’s collection of historic documents) the women of the club originally set out to “perpetuate golf among Negro women, to make potential players into champions and to make a permanent place for Negro Women in the world of golf.”
And they succeeded—Althea Gibson, Renee Powell, LaRee Sugg, Cheyenne Woods, Sadena Parks, and Mariah Stackhouse all joined the LPGA; Ginger Howard turned pro at seventeen and plays on the Symetra Tour; other Black women have played junior, college, and recreational golf. Taneka Mackey has caddied on the LPGA and long drive champion Troy Mullins is becoming a highly visible social media influencer, undoubtedly inspiring Black women and girls to pick up a club.
The golf world has a long way to go before it is as accessible to Black women as it is to any other group, but the fight has been going on for years, whether or not anyone was paying proper attention to it, and will continue. Best we all help tend to the century-old garden the women of Wake-Robin planted until it’s in full bloom.
Photo from Getty Images