Langston

Or, Lessons for Visitors
in Treading Lightly

Langston Golf Course
Washington, D.C.
Greens fee: $34 to walk 18

At some point between checking in and biting into my egg and cheese sandwich, it occurred to me that I was the only white person in the clubhouse.

Among Washington D.C.’s three municipal golf courses, Langston Golf Course perhaps trails East Potomac and Rock Creek in notoriety. But its history undoubtedly is the most noteworthy: for the first 15 years following its 1939 opening, the northeast Washington layout was the venue set aside by a segregated city for Black players. To the city’s credit, Washington desegregated its golf courses a year following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — far quicker than many others. But even seven decades later, Langston does not shy away from its place as the home for Black golfers in America’s capital. Greens fee or not, that made me a guest. So I behaved like one, taking off my hat and sitting quietly while my eggs scrambled.

A quick refresher never hurts.

The golf course was nearly as quiet. It was late February in Washington: warm enough to justify playing without a wool cap, but still too chilly for cherry blossoms. Wiser souls sitting out the cold still outnumbered the brave few foursomes scattered around Langston’s 18 holes. But Langston had been on my must-play list for a long time — no less important a monument to America’s history than anything built from stone on the Mall. When logistics finally made the visit possible, then unlike cherry blossoms, I wasn’t about to wait until spring.

The irony was not lost on me, though, that I was yet another white guy whose interest in Langston resembled passing curiosity and little more.

Signage “marking” Langston’s eighth teebox betrays its need for greater support.

Langston is a familiar American story: it has spent its existence as a place where Black people had no choice but to make something out of the little they were given. Langston lacks the architectural pedigree of Washington’s other two municipal golf courses: its original nine holes were designed by Earl Sumner Draper, a landscape architect who spent more of his career on housing than routing. (Washington’s other two municipal golf courses, East Potomac and Rock Creek, were designed by Golden Age architects Walter Travis and William Flynn, respectively.) It lacks the other municipal courses’ sense of place: where Rock Creek rolls across gently tumbling hills and East Potomac plays against views of the Washington Monument, Langston is built on an old city dump, with dormant RFK Stadium crumbling within view. Whatever Langston has become, it has done not because of leadership but in spite of it.

Its clubhouse distills that struggle: from the outside, a tired, squatty brick building about the size of a coffee shop; but inside, a humble but lively parlor with old men drinking coffee and lying about their scores, and walls plastered with posters and photos of revered Black golfers famous and obscure. Each of Langston’s holes carries their names: Tiger Woods (the 18th), Pete Brown (the 14th), and Joseph Bartholomew (the memorable third), among 15 others. The course itself carries the name of John Mercer Langston, the founding dean of nearby Howard University’s law school. If Langston lacks its counterparts’ architectural prestige, it makes up for that with a rare soul of genuine community. This place and the golfers who love it have struggled together. Even if a middle-aged white man waiting on an egg and cheese sandwich can’t share it, it’s impossible not to see.

. . .

For whatever architectural airs Langston lacks, it is not short on space: it corridors are wide, and its green sites are sized proportionately.

One thing they don’t tell you about Langston in documentaries or history books is this: there’s goose poop. A lot of it, thanks to the neighboring, goose-friendly tidal wetlands of the Anacostia River, which cuts northeast to southwest through the capital’s eastern half. Temptation might persuade toward assuming that the tidelands are a remnant of Washington’s beginnings as a swamp — but the truth is that those beginnings never existed. Contrary to popular belief, Washington was not built from a swamp; the capital city’s location was meticulously chosen by its namesake president, whose nearby home at Mount Vernon made him keenly familiar with the region. (“After all,” a Smithsonian Magazine explainer reads, “it’s Capitol Hill, … not Capitol Slough.) And even in the city’s earliest era, the Anacostia was an open, fast-flowing river. But European newcomers cleared woodlands on both sides of the river, and resulting erosion filled the Anacostia with silt and brought its flow to a crawl. Twentieth-century efforts to restore the tidelands have met with some success, but suffice it to say that white Americans’ efforts to fuck this place over did not begin with segregated golf.

Architecturally speaking, Langston cannot stand with its fellow municipal brethren: it enjoys neither East Potomac’s design pedigree nor Rock Creek’s rolling land. Its conditioning suffers from years of neglect, and its green pads have shrunk (dramatically, in some places). And yet, it is easy to see why the city’s Black golfers — relegated by absence of choice or not — feel so strongly about calling Langston home. There is something lovable about it: a communal front nine with nearly unimpeded views throughout, and a more secluded back nine in which it’s easy to forget you’re in a major city. And the course itself — neglected though it’s been — has promise. Its fairways are wide enough, and its greens frequently combine competing tilts that create movement out of ostensibly flat putts.

Intentional or not, Langston’s often-imprecise transition from fairway to green is a natural, playable feature echoing Streamsong Black and other architectural heavyweights.

And some of Langston’s holes — especially on the back nine — do not merely show promise: they’re really good.

The par-3 13th hole (175 yards from the blue tees, 120 yards from the red tees), for instance, is probably Langston’s best: an iron shot from the northern tip of Kingman Island (the manmade island built from Anacostia River dredging) across a strip of marsh and back to the mainland, onto a green sloping sharply down from a top tier in back to a bottom in front. Light mounding on the green’s back-right corner can keep a ball from bouncing away, but any shot toward that side must cover two small, well placed bunkers.

And the 18th (383 yards from the blue tees, 312 yards from the red tees) is as strong a finishing hole as any course could boast. The right side of the fairway offers an easy target safely away from a fairway bunker on the left, but one of Langston’s largest bunkers guards the green at front and front-right — and another, smaller bunker sits at the green’s back-left corner. The result is that any tee shot away from the fairway’s bunker-guarded left side leads to an approach shot that must cover the first greenside trap, and then find and hold the putting surface between it and the second greenside trap. Either way, the hole forces players to wrestle with trouble at one point or another.

The well placed, potential-dripping bunker guarding the left side of Langston’s fourth green is not a place you want to be.

Both holes hint at a formula for which Langston could serve as a model to other municipal courses: wide, playable par-4s and par-5s, with economical (read: lower costs) use of bunkering prioritized toward par-3s. As with the 13th, the dramatically downhill par-3 fourth (157 yards from the blue tees, 139 yards from the red tees) shows off some of the course’s best bunkering: two deep traps with scruffy edges along the green’s left side, and another on the right — and somehow plays longer than its distance.

In places, Langston probably could stand to take its own advice: a handful of the front nine’s bunkers are gratuitous and not in play. But by and large, Langston saves its bunkering for moments when it matters.

In that sense, Langston is something of a model for municipal golf courses on tight budgets: it makes its bunkers count, and it saves its best for the par-3s.

And it might yet model another best practice for municipal golf and its constituents.

. . .

One could forgive Langston’s community for looking skeptically on promises. When the National Links Trust formed in 2019 around a plan to revitalize Washington’s three municipal courses, the involvement of some of golf’s most famous designers brought unprecedented optimism to the city’s public golf scene. Golfers at Langston have heard promises before, though. In 2017, the National Parks Service came close to an agreement for renovating Langston, but the deal fell through.

Situated on a marsh, Langston’s turf fights a steep uphill battle against moisture. A new renovation plan focusing on drainage could make it a fairer fight.

A larger challenge emerges behind that failure: the image of outsiders swooping in, playing the role of savior, and then quickly leaving the stage without having asked whether their help was wanted to begin with, much less whether their actions were helpful. It doesn’t take long at Langston to spot plenty of areas where a well-resourced renovation could improve things. But to put it bluntly: what business do white community leaders, who thrust this place on Black golfers in a take-it-or-leave-it deal, now have to come back and tell those Black golfers what to do with it?

It’s a conundrum that didn’t occur to me until the sixth green. Thankfully, NLT saw it much earlier.

“We understand what Langston is. We understand who plays there,” NLT executive Damian Cosby told me. Cosby, who is Black, sees NLT’s role at Langston as listening and helping — not interfering. In contrast to NLT’s work at Rock Creek, where ongoing renovations are wholesale, Cosby describes NLT’s vision at Langston as giving the course the technical support that it’s been denied for decades: in other words, preserving Langston’s existing design by protecting what’s already there. The work (which will begin after Rock Creek’s two-year renovation ends in 2026) will include improving surface drainage and adding catch basins to move water off the playing surfaces quickly, widening the 10th fairway (which, at the moment, is jostled on its right side by Langston’s driving range), and converting grass types.

“Of the three courses, Langston has the strongest bones,” Cosby said. “We want to enhance what it is, not change it.”

Crucially, NLT also will bring on a director of community engagement to be a flesh-and-bones, seeing-and-listening presence on the ground at a place where the community has more experience being ignored than being heard.

“When we say we want to positively impact the community and change lives through golf,” Cosby said, “we mean it.”

More than most, Langston deserves that much.