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