During a fundraiser at the Detroit Golf Club in the 1980s, a group of prominent Black Detroiters was talking to Mayor Coleman Young.
“I know you guys must really have fun out there,” Young, a non-golfer, said as they looked out on the course, according to Dennis Archer, who succeeded Young as mayor.
“We each indicated that we were not members,” Archer said recently. Young’s reaction: “Frustration and anger,” Archer recalled. “He could not believe it.”
Archer understood Young’s posture. After all, the club had rejected Archer’s application for membership several years earlier.
“I know of no other reason than my color,” Archer told the Free Press at the time.
Young began to push back at what he, and many others, saw as racism, as he had throughout his adult life. In a city where nearly seven in 10 residents were Black, a golf club bordered by the homes of prosperous African Americans remained segregated late in the 20th century.
So Young applied for membership. “Naturally,” he wrote in his memoir.
The mayor’s effort did not come without controversy. The application became a hot topic in newspapers and radio talk shows in late 1985 and early 1986 as the club’s racial makeup became widely known.
In a letter to the editor of the Free Press, Marvin W. Smith of Detroit said the golf club’s exclusion of Black people “constitutes a citywide humiliation of Detroiters.” Noting the exclusion of Young and Archer, then a prominent lawyer headed to the Michigan Supreme Court, Kenneth Davies of Detroit wrote, “I am outraged.”
Though the widespread revulsion about an all-white club in Detroit was not shared by everyone.
“In the spirit of fair play, why doesn’t the Free Press identify private Black clubs that do not include white members?” asked John W. Wayne of Grosse Pointe Farms in a letter to the editor.
Founded in 1899, DGC sits on 220 acres of wooded landscape, just west of Palmer Park on the city’s west side. Its clubhouse was designed in 1916 by celebrated architect Albert Kahn; the greens were the work of Donald Ross, the noted golf course designer. The club had 1,100 members in 1985.
Robert Roselle, executive vice president of the Campbell-Ewald Co., nominated Young for membership. His wife, June Roselle, was a Young appointee who ran Cobo Hall. Archbishop Edmund Szoka, another club member, seconded Young’s application.
“This is a golf club in the heart of Detroit, in a city 65% Black,” Szoka told…
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