Abstract

Country-Club Segs: The White Man's Last Stand

In this article, the author counts developments in country-club segments of Alabama concerning moves towards desegregation of blacks to these clubs. It specially considers works of Hall Thompson, a Birmingham, Alabama, golf-course expert, who refused to be pressured into admitting blacks to the country club he built. Soon after he thus gallantly declared in June 1990, his club underwent emergency desegregation to spare the Professional Golfers' Association Championship, held there in August. The 300-member Augusta National is the spiritual descendant of Georgia's old Jekyll Island Club, founded in 1886 as a winter haven for J.P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt, Joseph Pulitzer and fifty other industrial suzerains. In Birmingham, Alabama, the connection between country clubs and capitalism is equally vivid.