Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf by Lane Demas (review)

Lane Demas's exhaustive book Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golfreveals that a sport considered the epitome of whiteness played a significant role in shaping the black experience in the United States. Golf courses were not just physical spaces for black leisure and racial uplift—they were strolling battlegrounds in the African American freedom struggle. The competing interests often, in golf parlance, left an uneasy lie. "Like the dread and forbidden topic of intermarriage, the golf question makes everyone uncomfortable," remarked the white wife of Walter White, the fair-skinned NAACP leader (p. 206).

National civil rights leaders ebbed and flowed in their support for integrating municipal golf courses, so local black men and women usually led the fight to access what Demas calls "the largest swath of white-only space," especially in southern cities (p. 181). African Americans who were passionate about golf—a pastime the black press eagerly promoted—built private courses, played on sometimes subpar black-only public courses, and competed on the United Golfers Association (UGA) tour, similar to the American Tennis Association for black tennis players. Demas recounts the exploits of male golfers thwarted by the Professional Golf Association's "Caucasian clause," which lasted until 1961 (p. 117).

Demas, a history professor at Central Michigan University, obligatorily ends Game of Privilegewith a thoughtful discussion about Tiger Woods, race, money, and the superstar's lasting contribution to America. To Demas, that contribution certainly is not to American golf, where the black presence has shrunk since Woods's dominance at the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead, Demas concentrates on proving that African Americans made significant contributions to golf (such as dentist George Franklin Grant, who in 1899 patented the golf tee) and that integrating the sport was more than a middle-class folly. Doing so held the threat of jail, as was the case for six black golfers in Greensboro, North Carolina. Demas argues—somewhat convincingly—that the Supreme Court victories in Simkins v. City of Greensboro(1957) and Holmes v. City of Atlanta(1955) were as or more significant to integrating public spaces than Brown v. Board of Education(1954).

Trying to upheave civil rights legacies he cannot budge, Demas also calls a seminal 1941 protest round of golf through a segregated Washington, D.C., public course more meaningful than Marian Anderson's 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More troubling is his correct but loose usage of the word "militancy" in describing both the actions of black activists who used legislative means to desegregate courses and those who murdered eight white people at a St. Croix golf club (pp. 201, 189).

Ignore Demas's insistence that the first African American to compete in the fledgling U.S. Open, John Shippen in 1896, should be as remembered as Jackie Robinson. Instead, appreciate Demas's narratives about the ways Robinson and Joe Louis elevated golf's significance in America. Shortly before Robinson reintegrated Major League Baseball, the black press touted golf as more tolerant than baseball because of one big-money, integrated event. By 1952, Louis, who backed UGA tournaments, declared "'war on Jim Crow in golf '" (p. 120). After retiring in 1957, Robinson could not join any of the prestigious country clubs in the New York area, failed in business ventures to develop an integrated course, and declared golf the "'only sport in which a Negro does not have an equal chance today'" (p. 127).

Demas's research, use of images, extensive footnotes, and historical tables make Game of Privilegeinvaluable for researching leisure, African American and southern history, and, of course, golf itself. As he hopes, Game of Privilegeindeed should start conversations—academic and, one hopes, during rounds of golf—about the ways Americans think about the sport's influence on race, and vice versa.