Battle Against Civil Injustice | https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/
Battle Against Civil Injustice | https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/
From February 2, 2023 post.
Throwback Thursday .....
Four years before the Woolworth sit-in became a flash point – and just more than a mile up the road now named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – six Black men initiated their own act of defiance in the battle against civil injustice.
On a golf course.
On Dec. 7, 1955 – just six days after Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to leave the whites-only section – six Black men in Greensboro paid their greens fees and played nine holes of golf at Gillespie Park.
“6 Negroes Play Links; 5 Placed Under Arrest” read the headline on the front page of the next morning’s Greensboro Daily News. They were charged with trespassing on a private golf course, even though Gillespie Park was owned by the city and white “non-members” were routinely allowed to pay greens fees and tee off.
The nine-hole round prompted five trials all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a city’s stubborn withdrawal from the recreation business, a mysterious destruction by fire of the clubhouse shortly before the course was to be integrated and a five-year condemnation of the entire facility.
In the end, however, it led to the constitutional validation that all tax-paying citizens of Greensboro had the right to use all public facilities.
To learn more about the Greensboro Six and the integration of Guilford County's Gillespie Park Golf Course, Check out:
https://www.globalgolfpost.com/.../heroic-round.../....
Original source can be found here.
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