Honoring Black History: Powell The Pioneer



In 1962, Renee Powell of East Canton, Ohio, became the first African-American to play in the United States Girls’ Junior Championship. A year later, she played in the national championship for the second time. Rhonda Glenn, Manager of USGA Communications, also played in 1963 and recalls the times.

With February designated as Black History Month, the USGA honors Powell and her career. Be sure to also check out past stories on Althea Gibson, Ann Gregory and Ted Rhodes.

By Rhonda Glenn, USGA

In July 1963, I finished a practice round at the United States Girls’ Junior Championship at Wolfert’s Roost Country Club in Albany, N.Y., as Renee Powell worked on her putting stroke on the nearby practice green.

Powell was the first African-American golfer I’d ever seen.

While I was a Southerner, my high school had been peacefully integrated in 1961 and my uncle was assistant director of the Peace Corps for West Africa, so what was then termed “the race question,” didn’t seem an issue in my insular little world. I just didn’t know any African-American golfers.

Powell was a contestant, one of us, but she looked better than we did. Many of us wore loose-fitting khaki or plaid shorts and white shirts, a little wrinkled from being in the suitcase but admittedly the best we owned, and “porkpie” bucket hats. The hats were a step up from a visor and they were our fashion statement that summer. If you didn’t have a porkpie hat when you arrived, you saw that nearly everyone else had one and so you rushed to the pro shop to buy your own. That year, they meant you belonged.

In this gaggle of casually-dressed teenaged girls, Powell looked as if she had just stepped out of a fashion magazine. Her soft pink shirt perfectly matched her Bermuda shorts. She even wore pink socks. Her hair gleamed and her smile dazzled and she literally glided across the putting green. She looked poised, as if she were somebody. Most of the rest of us just looked, well, nervous. Thrilled to be there. Grateful. But many of us, especially the first-timers, seemed wary, as if we might trip over a tee marker or spill a drink on our new shirt or play the wrong ball.

We were very earnest, we tried very hard and, somehow, we got through it. I lost in the second flight, but I had a fistful of mailing addresses for a dozen new friends. Jan Ferraris won. Jan was a big deal. She was from San Francisco and legend had it that she actually knew Ken Venturi. Ferraris never looked nervous the whole week. In the final she beat Peggy Conley, who was also composed. They both wore porkpie hats.

From Albany, some of us went to Williamstown, Mass., to play in the U.S. Women’s Amateur the following week. Renee and I both lost in the second round. I went home to Florida and Renee returned to Ohio. I was shy and hadn’t actually talked to her over those few weeks. She was just one of the other contestants, one who seemed nice and who seemed to have friends.

Looking back at race relations in our country at that time, I have since wondered what was behind her smile.

Similar Paths

We had different lives and lived in different regions, but the turbulent national scene affected every American in the early 1960s.

Just eight days after Powell and I both lost in the Women’s Amateur, Martin Luther King Jr., said, “I Have a Dream” to some 200,000 people congregated at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington.

Four months previously, Dr. King had been jailed in Birmingham, Ala. Three months before that, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, used fire hoses and police dogs to attack black people during a civil rights demonstration. And two months before we teed it up in the Girls’ Junior, Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was murdered outside his house.

For all of us, it was a particularly serious time in which to be young. We’d been through the Cold War’s “duck and cover” drills in school; the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was so close to Florida that the fathers of a few of my schoolmates dug fall-out shelters. All of it was brought into our living rooms by television news programs, which one night featured recently-released films of victims of the Nazi death camps. “I don’t want the children watching that,” my mother told my father. “I want them to see it,” he said, “so that it will never happen again.”
And so, like Renee, I knew of these incidents. I saw the March on Washington and the inspiring speech, and I saw the fire hoses and police dogs. “Oh, Daddy!” I remember crying to my father as we watched the battle on the news, and his face was troubled and sad. This terrible, irresistible force in our nation had spun out of control. The upheaval, however, seemed to have little to do with me.

Powell

Then, in September, four little girls were killed when a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church and in November, President John F. Kennedy was killed.

I was a kid and like all kids I lived in that particularly powerless twilight of youth, so unformed, so weak and ineffectual that we couldn’t vote, or even march and carry a sign. All I could do was to be quiet and good and try not to cry. My parents were stoic people and my mother seldom discussed serious matters, so I have a vivid memory of when she said, “What is happening to our country?” one afternoon as we sat in the backyard.

That was 45 years ago. Every generation surely has its loss of innocence but children can be resilient, so my friends and I went on with our lives, finished school and went to work. We had no outward scars. Golf – its solitary pursuit and the lovely greenness of it – refreshed me as I grew up.

Far away in Ohio, Renee Powell was becoming a ground-breaker. She went on to win numerous awards but she had lived through the same era as I and I still wondered what portion of tragic injustice lurked behind her smile that summer when the country was going mad. Had Renee finally been able to, in the words of Dr. King, “cash a check…a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir?” Had she been judged only for the content of her character? What about the “Dream?”

A Pioneer

I caught up with Renee in January and as much as she loved golf, and still loves it today, Powell said that her evolution through the game was difficult.

“I began having racial problems at the age of 8, and some are more subtle than others,” said Powell. “When I began, you saw very few people of color. I have had unpleasant situations on the golf course, in the clubhouse, driving into the clubhouse gate, going into the locker room. Golf has also been one of those sports that have quite a lot of racism attached to it, so I have forever been a pioneer breaking down barriers and trying to, by example, show that all persons should be given respect.”

Powell grew up playing at Clearview Golf Club in East Canton, a course built and operated by her father, William Powell, who returned from World War II after serving in the U.S. Army and wanted to build a golf course. “He decided to build a course where no one was discriminated against because of color, race or religion,” she said.

In 1946, the year in which Renee was born, her father was denied a G.I. Loan but gained financial support from two black doctors as partners, and his brother, who mortgaged his house. Powell began to build Clearview, walking back and forth over the land, a hand seeder around his neck to seed the first nine holes. He was Clearview’s architect, builder, superintendent, golf professional and owner and operator.

William first put a club in Renee’s hands when she was 3, and the game soon became her buffer from discrimination. “I ran into racism from the time I was 8 years old, and it had a great impact on me,” said Powell. “I remember today the names of the people. These are things that have affected you and give you an extra sense when you are around people. It had a great impact on the lives of any minority youngster who grew up in those days…I began to experience racism in school and golf became a safe harbor for me. Golf was a refuge because I could go out all by myself and in my own little world. I was probably very shy because of the all the racial issues I was confronted with.”

Renee’s father, her only instructor, filed her entry for her first tournament when she was 12. Later, she played in tournaments conducted by the United Golf Association (UGA), an association for African-American golfers, and there she met the top minority golfers of that era: Althea Gibson, Ann Gregory and Ted Rhodes. “We all played in the UGA tournaments because of the prejudice and racism at the time,” said Powell.

In 1962, Powell entered the United States Girls’ Junior Championship conducted at the Country Club of Buffalo (N.Y.) by the United States Golf Association. Gregory had been the first African-American to play in the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1956, and Powell’s appearance as the first African-American in the Girls’ Junior was just as historic. The week, however, began badly.

“I remember not seeing anyone else that looked like me,” said Powell. “It was my first time at a private country club and I wasn’t sure how I would be accepted by the members or the girls I was competing against. I had been used to people being unfriendly at other courses and my parents having to fight to get me into junior tournaments, even in Ohio. Most of the girls were just very stand-offish, I think because they knew each other and had never seen a girl of color in their tournaments.”

Renee stayed close to her father that week, but soon became friends with Mary Lou Daniel of Louisville, Ky., and Ann Baker of Maryville, Tenn. A number of USGA officials went out of their way to make her feel welcome, she said. “They were exceptionally nice…and welcoming,” said Powell.

Ann Gregory, above, played in the same era as Renee Powell. (USGA Photo Archives)