Help Us Save Lions Municipal Golf Course!
First Integrated Golf Course in the South
Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 24, 2000
Sometime in the early 1950s -- the exact date lost to history -- Austinites Lawrence Britton, Arthur Shaw and Marion Milroy "Doc" Curry, who died at 83, began having what Curry described as "some pretty lively discussions" with the late Beverly Sheffield, then director of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department. Even city councilwoman Emma Long had joined the discussion.
"If these people are going to pay taxes," Long said at a council meeting, "then they are entitled to play golf." Curry was an outstanding high school athlete at Corpus Christi and later an all-conference football player at Clark College in Atlanta and an All-American for the Chicago Defenders. He had been in Austin since 1951, working on his doctorate at the University of Texas after earning a master's degree at Ohio State.
Since boyhood, Curry had wanted to attend UT, but the school was segregated until 1950. In Ohio, Curry took up golf, but in Austin there were no courses -- public or private -- on which blacks were allowed to play.
Instead, blacks were permitted to caddie at Lions Municipal, after they paid a fee.
"We weren't allowed in the pro shop, but they had a little window on the side of the building where we paid a nickel to caddie," recalled Jack McClellan.
Eventually, the barriers came down. One morning, while the others waited outside, Britton breached local golf etiquette and went inside the Lions Municipal pro shop and telephoned the Parks and Rec Department.
"Which way is it going to be?" Britton asked Sheffield. "Either you're open or you're not."
"After that we could play at Muny, and go inside to pay greens fees," recalled teaching pro Carl Turner.
"They built us a shed and called it the 'black clubhouse,' " said Volma Overton Sr. "It was located right where the big scoreboard is today, in the staging area for the carts." Members of the first regular all-black foursome at Lions were Curry, Britton, Calvin Lynch and Lee Hicks.
"It was really a big deal when Lions Municipal finally permitted us on the course," Curry said in a 1994 interview. "They would allow us to tee off between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. Black players from Houston even heard about it because Memorial Park was still closed to blacks. Sometimes there'd be six or seven carloads come up from Houston. You could pay your greens fees inside, but if you wanted peanut-butter crackers, you had to go back outside to one of the old caddie windows and order it that way."
Decades later, Sheffield recalled construction of the black clubhouse. "That was a sad day," he said. "But the old heritage, the old thought at that time of the blacks going into the locker room and using the same toilet and everything, well, that carried on and still prevailed.
"We did build a little room with a restroom and that sort of thing there. And the blacks used that until we finally got to the point where we knew that had to quit."
Throughout his career in Austin, as a coach and teacher at Huston-Tillotson and Kealing Junior High, Curry's love of golf never waned. He won three Capitol City Golf Association titles and was runner-up in the 1985 Capitol City State Senior Championship.
"Golf is the main reason I'm still alive," Curry said in the interview six years ago. "I guess it's the Tom Kite in me that makes me want to get out there and beat balls.
"I have a couple of books that I refer to all the time. One is called 'Stop That Slice,' by Dante and Elliot. The other is 'Par Golf in Eight Steps,' by Joe Novak. I've read them hundreds of times each. Sometimes, when I come in at night all griping about how I played, my wife Martha will look at me and say, 'Uh-oh, must have left out a step today.' "
More discrimination
For black women golfers, even Austin driving ranges were off-limits as recently as the early 1960s. "One Saturday morning, I said to a friend, 'Let's drop the kids off at the Ice Palace so they can skate and we'll go hit some balls at the driving range.' " Bertha Means said in a 1995 story in the Austin American-Statesman.
"We went to Pop's driving range out on Burnet Road and asked for balls three times. The first time the man said, 'We ain't open.' The second time he said, 'We still ain't open.' The third time he said, 'We ain't integrated.'
"Now this was 1962 and I was accustomed to those things, so I said to my friend, 'OK, let's go see how the kids are doing ice skating.' When we got back to the rink, the kids had been turned away, too. I went home and told my husband, 'Look, I've been segregated and discriminated against, but I'm not going to let my kids go through what I've gone through. We're going back up there and picket until we get this town straight.' "
Means, whose son James was a member of the track team at UT and the first black athlete to earn a varsity letter there, didn't pick up a golf club for the next 13 years. But as a civil rights activist, she was a founder of the Mother's Action Committee and helped establish the city's Human Relations Commission . "I spent 13 years working to get the signs taken down in this town that separated the races," she said.
"When I decided to start golfing again in 1975, I called up my teacher, George Hannon, who had transferred to Morris Williams. I told him what I had been doing and said, 'George, am I too old to start back with golf?' He said, 'Oh, I've been keeping up with you. I know what you've been doing.' Then he said, 'No, you never get too old to play golf.'
"Now I belong to the ladies club at Muny and golf with friends of mine at the various clubs."
-Del Lemon, Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 24, 2000
