Helen Webb Harris

Helen Webb Harris founded the Wake-Robin Golf Club in 1937; it is the United States's oldest registered African-American women's golf club.[1] The first meeting of the club was held at her house with thirteen women attending.[2] The club was named after the Wake-Robin wildflower.[1]

Harris was the club's first president, and under her leadership the club joined the United Golf Association and the Eastern Golf Association.[3][4] 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 opening public courses to all.[1] In 1947 Harris was elected as the first female president of the Eastern Golf Association; she was president for two terms.[3] 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]

In 1973 Harris was inducted into the National Afro‐American Golfers Hall of Fame.[4]

Harris was also an educator in the Washington, DC school system.[5] The Helen Webb Harris Scholarship Fund was established in 2007.[5]

Some of the Wake-Robin Golf Club's records are held at Howard University.[1][4]

References
  1. "African American Golfer's Digest - News, Information & Activities in the 'Soulful' World of Golf". Africanamericangolfersdigest.com. Retrieved 2015-03-20.
  2. "The Wake Robin Golf Club founded | African American Registry". Aaregistry.org. 1936-08-06. Retrieved 2015-03-20.
  3. Marvin P. Dawkins; Graham Charles Kinloch (1 January 2000). African American Golfers During the Jim Crow Era. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 32–. ISBN 978-0-275-95940-1.
  4. "The African American Experience". Testaae.greenwood.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2015-03-20.
  5. M. Mikell Johnson Ph. D. (2010). Heroines of African American Golf. Trafford Publishing. pp. 1913–. ISBN 978-1-4269-3419-3.
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