Symbols of Segregation Abound in
Mississippi, Even at Municipal Golf Courses
Golf courses are nostalgic places by nature, haunted by memories, joy, pain, and hope.
Grove Park Golf Course has more ghosts than most. Fronted by dilapidated homes, covered with weeds, and saddled with a budget that bleeds cash, Grove Park — one of two municipal golf courses in Jackson, Mississippi — seems an easy candidate for the chopping block that has claimed municipal golf courses across the country.
Cart path at Grove Park GC.
But Grove Park also wrestles with a ghost that haunts every area of life in this state: racism. Golf has been bound up in racial division since the game arrived on America’s shores, but even so, few courses live with racism’s legacy the way Grove Park does: during segregation, it was the Black golf course in the capital of America’s most unreconstructed state.
Today, of course, both Grove Park and its sister course, Sonny Guy Golf Course (Jackson’s other municipal track), are desegregated — under the law, at least. In reality, though, few white golfers come from the suburbs to either course, so most of the courses’ players reflect the city’s demographics (82 percent of Jackson’s residents are African-American). Throw in the damage to Jackson’s tax base done by 50 years of white flight, and the money to maintain two golf courses just isn’t there.
On a Saturday morning in February, the grass and weeds in the landing areas off Grove Park’s tees (it’s not quite accurate to call them “fairways”) could’ve passed for rough. The course was deserted; even the pin flags weren’t out. It plods along like a zombie: not quite living and not quite dead, aimlessly tottering toward an uncertain future.
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Grove Park and Sonny Guy make for a sad analogy to the past 60 years of life in Mississippi. For years, the law treated them differently; time has proven them not so different after all, but now it’s unclear how to undo the damage.
From its opening in 1927 to its court-ordered desegregation in 1963, Sonny Guy (known in the early days as Municipal, and later as Livingston Park) was Jackson’s all-white municipal golf course. It was Mississippi’s first public golf course, and on the day it opened, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that “[v]isiting golfers who have looked over the layout pronounce it the best first-year course in the south.”
The Clarion-Ledger (Jan. 6, 1959).
Of course, just because Sonny Guy was “public” didn’t mean that it was open to everyone. More than 30 years went by before Jackson’s African-American golfers got a home — and even then, hardly out of the goodwill of the city’s heart. In the late 1950s, segregated municipal golf courses throughout the South were being put to the test. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered Atlanta to desegregate its golf courses in October 1955. Black golfers in Columbus, Ga., tried to buy tee times at that city’s segregated course in January 1956. Charleston, S.C., sold its municipal course in 1958 rather than integrate it.
Jackson hoped to avoid a court challenge by opening a Blacks-only course.
“This came about from requests by our colored citizens that we build them a golf course, and we are delighted to do so,” Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson told the Clarion-Ledger in January 1959. “We are going to show the whole United States what you can do with cooperation and separate but fine facilities.”
The Clarion-Ledger (Sept. 20, 1960).
Everyone saw through the motivations, of course. “Negro citizens of Jackson are interested in parks for people, not only for Negroes,” the local NAACP responded.
When Grove Park opened in 1960 as the segregated Black course, it didn’t even have a real name; for its first year, it was simply known as “the Negro golf course” (newspapers frequently printed the name with a lowercase “n,” a subtle insult). The mayor and other white city dignitaries posed happily for a photo at the course’s opening that year, but even getting to that day betrayed Grove Park’s place in the pecking order: in April 1960, the Clarion-Ledger reported that winter weather had brought Grove Park’s construction to a near-halt, but that a new nine-hole addition to the white course would “definitely” be open by May. Grove Park eventually opened in late September.
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Conditions at Grove Park must have been fair at worst, though. In February 1961, club pro Pete Brown (later the first Black golfer to win a PGA Tour event) tuned up for the North-South Open by shooting blistering rounds of 30-31 at Grove Park. It would be hard to imagine anyone going that low on a badly maintained course.
And in 1986, when a third municipal course (now owned by the state) closed temporarily, Grove Park and Sonny Guy were held up as examples of more attractive local tracks.
The Clarion-Ledger (June 18, 1998).
By the mid-1990s, though, conditions at Jackson’s two municipal courses might have been pretty, but the balance sheet wasn’t. In 1995, Sonny Guy and Grove Park lost $200,000 between them. The city openly considered getting out of the golf business altogether.
Golfers were still coming out in droves, though: Grove Park was getting about 20,000 rounds per year, and Sonny Guy had about 35,000. So in 1999, Jackson doubled down and pumped $1.5 million into the courses for new irrigation systems and other improvements.
Twenty years later, though, the courses’ landscapes and balance sheets were worse than ever.
In 2017 (the most recent fiscal year for which figures are available), Grove Park brought in about $11,300 in greens fees; Sonny Guy did a little better, at nearly $16,500. You don’t have to be a golf course superintendent to know that paltry revenue isn’t enough to maintain 27 holes of golf.
And indeed, it isn’t. Jackson spent $313,000 on its golf courses in fiscal year 2017 (less than half of what it spent in the mid-1990s, adjusted for inflation). Between greens fees and cart rentals, the two courses returned about $45,000 to city coffers.
In other words, Jackson spent less money on golf than it did 20 year prior and, somehow, lost more.
Sonny Guy GC.
And those numbers would be problematic even if they weren’t in steep decline — but they were. Eleven years earlier, Grove Park made $14,000 in greens fees; Sonny Guy took in more than $46,000. In other words, between 2006-2017, Sonny Guy’s greens fee revenue fell more than 64 percent.
Even if your city government weren’t strapped for cash (and Jackson’s is), any operation bleeding so much money would draw unwanted attention. So when the city government discovered a $1.2 million hole in its Parks and Recreation budget in 2017, it’s no surprise that it nearly closed Grove Park for good. Perhaps the only surprise is that the city didn’t follow through.
In the end, two things saved Grove Park: its historic significance, and the promise of a new way of doing business. The city handed control of Grove Park to a nonprofit organization called the Mississippi Roadmap to Health Equity and Urban League. Under the public-private partnership, the nonprofit essentially acts as a management company: it’s responsible for maintaining Grove Park’s course and clubhouse, and in exchange, it gets to use the course to train young people and adults in golf course maintenance, landscaping, small engine repair, and basically anything else that goes into keeping a golf course open.
The early reviews were promising. When Grove Park reopened in July 2018 under a new name — Pete Brown Golf Course, named for the Mississippi native and PGA Tour stalwart — local media gushed: “The fairways are well kept, the weeds are gone from the greens and the high grass in the rough is there to challenge the golfer.”
Less than a year later, though, conditions have taken a hit again. Without a full-time maintenance staff, the nonprofit managing Grove Park relies heavily on volunteer labor. Rainy spells make it difficult to organize work parties. On average, Jackson gets five inches of rain each January; this year, it got nearly seven.
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Andy Staples has seen this before. He frequently recommends that cities get out of the golf business altogether — a strange proposal for a golf course architect who specializes in revitalizing municipal courses. But dwindling budgets and maintenance demands collide in municipal golf programs all over the country, not just in Jackson. And if cities aren’t willing to spend what it costs, then in Staples’ view, they should save themselves the money and the trouble.
“This idea that municipal golf should be this 6,800-yard, member-for-a-day experience is, to me, a losing model,” Staples said.
In a 2016 white paper, Staples explained that when public-access, daily fee courses started offering cushier, high-end experiences normally reserved for private clubs, municipal courses tried to keep up — but without all the money that those daily fee courses pulled in. It was a trap. Municipal courses “became longer and more difficult, daily maintenance expectations increased, and a ‘one size fits all’ mentality began to take hold,” Staples wrote.
Staples was writing in general terms, but he might as well have been diagnosing Jackson’s golf program: even as far back at the cash infusion of the 1990s, Jackson’s municipal golf courses were trying to compete directly with suburban semi-private courses. It was an unwinnable battle, then as it is now.
Instead of fighting the suburban semi-privates, Staples advocates for doing something completely different. It’s a concept that he calls Community Links: green spaces designed to attract and invite entire communities, not just golfers. A facility that Staples renovated in New Mexico now features miles of walking trails. Another facility in California includes batting cages, go-karts, mini golf, and campsites. Yes, there’s golf too. But Staples’ idea is to bring the entire community to the golf course, non-golfers and all; bring enough non-golfers so close to a golf course, and eventually, golf will follow.
Sonny Guy GC, after heavy February rains.
Could it work in Jackson? Maybe. The municipal golf program’s maintenance budget is a little low (Jackson spent $313,000 in 2017; something between $400,000-$600,00 per year is more typical for an 18-hole course, Staples said), but that’s not necessarily a non-starter. “I like the fact that the number is low,” Staples said. “You can provide decent conditions at that number.”
For one 18-hole course, that is — not for 27 holes on two different sites. “I had to read that twice,” Staples said of Jackson’s maintenance budget. “I thought it was a typo.”
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If there is a silver lining to all this, it is that Grove Park’s withering might save Sonny Guy.
Jackson’s municipal golf budget is still low, but it’s up to about $460,000 this year. And with the city no longer overseeing Grove Park’s day-to-day operations, it’s focusing that budget on its 18-hole course — which, even during the slowdown of recent years, has remained the more popular of the two tracks. That brings Jackson’s financial commitment to Sonny Guy within Staples’ recommended window — on the low side, to be sure, but within the window nonetheless.
“I like to look at it as an opportunity,” said Ison Harris, Jr., who leads the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. “If we’re playing cards, I have to be able to play the hand I’m dealt. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have the resources, the money, to have a full house. But I might be able to win with a pair.”
For Harris, that means finding new ways to generate local interest: junior golf programs, free greens fees for ages 17 and under, and an annual tournament hosted by Jackson’s new mayor (a budding golfer, it turns out).
Harris isn’t oblivious to the headwinds that golf courses everywhere face, especially municipal courses. He’s an optimist by nature, but maybe there’s something to his confidence: the budget’s growth, the opportunity to focus on Sonny Guy, and the surge in the 18-hole course’s annual-pass sales (already $15,000 this year, up from about $3,000 in 2018) have him convinced that the tide is turning at Sonny Guy.
“If we’re doing something for kids, we can get community buy-in,” Harris said. “The opportunity for growth is still here.”
. . .
Grove Park GC.
There is still Grove Park, though. And for Grove Park, none of this is fair.
Sonny Guy and Grove Park don’t merely evoke memories of Mississippi’s segregationist past — they are steeped in it, they were born into it. Sonny Guy was off-limits to Black golfers for its first four decades; Grove Park owes its entire existence to Jackson’s last-minute attempt to stave off integration. And now, after decades of white flight, saving these symbols of Mississippi’s past is thrust upon the very people whom that past victimized.
“We are trying to keep these golf courses on life support at an amount of money that isn’t enough for maintenance to be attractive to players,” said Melvin Priester, Jr., a Jackson city councilman. “It would be one thing if we had roads that were smooth and a water-sewer system that wasn’t discharging pollution into local rivers, but we have big fish to fry.”
Somewhere during the 60 years after Grove Park’s birth into segregation, though, something strange happened: African Americans came to love it. Decades after the NAACP condemned plans to open Grove Park, Black golfers fought tooth and nail to keep it open. It is the cruelest twist of all: 60 years ago, Jackson stuck Black golfers with Grove Park instead of letting them play at Sonny Guy; now, many Black golfers want to keep playing this course they’ve known their whole lives, but Sonny Guy takes the lion’s share of city resources yet again.
“Grove Park has been the site of wonderful experiences,” Priester said. “Grove Park is where people played golf with their parents as teenagers, or made money as caddies. People feel an attachment to a place that has been a jewel of Black Jackson.”
Even Priester acknowledges that the status quo is unsustainable, though. Twenty years ago, Jackson doubled down on running its municipal golf program the way the suburban semi-private clubs run their courses. The bet didn’t pay off. It’s almost impossible to imagine the two courses existing 20 years from now as they exist today. Either municipal golf in Jackson will evolve one way or another, or the courses will become such a financial burden that they demand closure.
“Something’s gotta give,” Priester said.
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Jackson isn’t the only southern city grappling with how to bring aging municipal golf courses into the 21st Century. In 2018, Houston closed one of its municipal golf courses to convert it into a botanical garden. Lions Municipal in Austin, Texas, has spent years in the crosshairs (although it now appears to be on the verge of salvation). And just outside Atlanta, DeKalb County is reopening a county-owned course under a $1.6 million cash infusion — cash that Jackson simply doesn’t have, and the DeKalb course still isn’t expected to turn a profit.
A budget deficit alone is no reason to close a municipal golf course; Staples works with lots of cities whose golf courses don’t turn a profit, and he points out that cities often provide services (like libraries) with no eye toward making money.
The Jackson courses’ dwindling revenue, and what it says about the number of rounds being played each year, is the bigger concern. It raises a possibility that golf courses everywhere, both public and private, are grappling with: whether there are still enough golfers out there.
Grove Park GC.
In all these cities, Jackson and others, any solution will have to be some variation of Staples’ philosophy: municipal golf is inherently different, so municipal golf courses should look different too.
Staples’ portfolio of Community Links projects isn’t necessarily the only example to follow. In golf-crazed Pinehurst, N.C., with America’s densest saturation of world-class golf courses, one of the hottest tee times now is at the Cradle, a nine-hole par-3 course measuring less than 800 yards. At Bandon Dunes, the Mecca of North American golf resorts, the Preserve — a 13-hole, par-3 course — is a can’t-miss attraction. Both the Cradle and the Preserve are different, even quirky. And that’s by design.
“The Cradle and the Preserve are finally showing that there might be some value in something like that,” Staples said. “They’re both attached to bigger courses, so the jury is still out on whether they can exist on their own. But they show that golfers are open to something like that.”
However the city charts Grove Park’s future, it owes Grove Park that future. Grove Park doesn’t represent only the racism that birthed it; Grove Park also represents a promise. It was the promise of a course equal in measure to any other municipal course in Jackson — “separate but fine,” as Jackson’s mayor described it in 1959. Motives be damned, a promise is a promise. And if Jackson’s golfers were promised a facility to be separate but equal, then one way or another, Grove Park deserves to be Sonny Guy’s equal — different in substance, perhaps, but equal in stature.
“A lot of people don’t see viability,” said Harris, Jackson’s parks and rec director, “but I do.”