Helen Webb Harris Explained

Helen Webb Harris founded the Wake-Robin Golf Club in 1937. It is the United States' oldest registered African-American women's golf club.[1]

Career

Harris was an educator in the Washington, DC school system.[2]

Wake-Robin Golf Club

The first meeting of the club was held at her house with thirteen women attending.[3] The club was named after the Wake-Robin wildflower.

Harris was the club's first president, and under her leadership the club joined the United Golf Association and the Eastern Golf Association.[4] [5] In 1938 the club drafted and sent a petition to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes seeking to desegregate the public courses of the District of Columbia.[1] In response Ickes approved the construction of a nine-hole golf course on the site of an abandoned trash dump, called Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939.[1]

The Wake-Robin Golf Club and the Royal Golf Club continued to pressure Secretary Ickes, and he issued an order in 1941 to open public courses to all.[1] In 1947 Harris was elected as the first female president of the Eastern Golf Association, a position which she held for two terms.[4] The Wake-Robin Golf Club was part of the movement to force the Professional Golfers Association to drop its "White-only" rule for eligibility, which it did in 1961.[1]

Some of the Wake-Robin Golf Club's records are held at Howard University.

Recognition

In 1973 Harris was inducted into the National Afro‐American Golfers Hall of Fame.[5]

The Helen Webb Harris Scholarship Fund was established in 2007.[2]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: African American Golfer's Digest - News, Information & Activities in the 'Soulful' World of Golf . Africanamericangolfersdigest.com . 2015-03-20.
  2. Book: M. Mikell Johnson Ph. D. . Heroines of African American Golf . Trafford Publishing . 2010 . 978-1-4269-3419-3 . 1913–.
  3. Web site: The Wake Robin Golf Club founded | African American Registry . Aaregistry.org . 1936-08-06 . 2015-03-20.
  4. Book: Marvin P. Dawkins. Graham Charles Kinloch. African American Golfers During the Jim Crow Era. 1 January 2000. Greenwood Publishing Group. 978-0-275-95940-1. 32–.
  5. Web site: The African American Experience . Testaae.greenwood.com . 2015-03-20 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20150402113618/http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc_print.aspx?fileID=C34904&chapterID=C34904-595&path=books%2Fgreenwood . 2015-04-02 .