We are currently facing a social tumult like nothing since the 1960s. The problem of racism is a subject I address in my book Shadows on the Green. The golf industry has always had problems. Think of the PGA of America’s exclusionary "Caucasian clause" from 1934-1961 (Tiger and Harold Varner III are the only exempt black players on the Tour today, there were about a dozen in the 1970s), of the USGA not having a black player in the U.S. Open from 1897-1948, and it recently alienating the black community by playing the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open at Trump National in Bedminster, New Jersey.
In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois would argue that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” one that obviously still exists.
In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal wrote a book called An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Its main thesis was that the “Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American,” a problem of “distinctly negative connotations” that suggests “something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone.” This racial problem, which Myrdal outlined exhaustively in his massive 1,500-page work, is in conflict with the “American Creed,” as he calls it. People may think, talk, and act as if under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, but at the same time they are affected by personal and local interests, and long-held prejudices, which are “defended in terms of tradition, expediency and utility.”
In 1968 the Kerner Commission warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” It went on to say, “this alternative will require a commitment to national action - compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will…Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice…Violence and destruction must be ended - in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”
We never learn from history, and hearts and minds change at a glacial pace. Each of us must look inside and educate ourselves to know the history of this country. I believe none of us is without prejudice, but we are not all racists either. To destroy history is to deny it, and we all lose. We should consider our own experiences and admit that our nation has had its failures as well as triumphs. But it has become better.
Read slave narratives. Read people like Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Walter White, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Leon Litwack, Harvard Sitkoff, John Hope Franklin, Carter G. Woodson, Ida B. Wells, Nell Irvin Painter, Elizabeth Clark Lewis, John Blassingame, Randall Kennedy, E. Franklin Frazier, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Gerda Lerner, Lawrence Levine, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Philip Dray, Ellis Cose, Angela Davis, Studs Terkel, Mary Francis Berry, Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. I have read them.
For golf specifically, read Dr. Calvin Sinnette, Pete McDaniel, John Kennedy, Lane Demas, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and M. Mikell Johnson. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on Christmas Eve 1967 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church: “I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because…you can’t give up in life.” And we are all imperfect human beings who should aspire to be better and treat all we encounter with dignity and respect. That’s my two cents.