The Shocking Underrepresentation
of Black People in Golf Course Design
This is not a story about Brandon Johnson. And yet, how could it not be?
Johnson holds landscape architecture degrees from North Carolina State and Harvard. Since 2006, he’s worked as a golf course architect at Arnold Palmer Design Company, where he’s served as a vice president since 2013. His contributions include work at some of the country’s best-known golf courses: Bay Hill, Lakewood National, and Wexford Plantation among them. And in 2017, Johnson was elected to the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
His sterling resume’ isn’t what makes Johnson unique, though. Johnson is Black: the only Black architect among the ASGCA’s 175 members, and one of the only Black golf course designers in America.
Golf course architecture isn’t the only profession where Black people are underrepresented, of course. About one of every seven Americans is Black, but a 2015 article in The Atlantic reported that just 7.5 percent of health care workers are Black, and only 4.3 percent of engineers are Black; in 2018, less than 2 percent of law firm partners were Black.
Even by these standards, golf’s diversity is badly unimpressive: of the nearly 200 players who made at least four starts during the PGA Tour’s 2018-19 season, just three (Tiger Woods, Cameron Champ, and Harold Varner III) are Black. But at least three is better than one. Yet nearly a quarter-century after the 1997 Masters, when Tiger Woods’ triumph promised to open golf’s doors to a flood of Black and brown children, nearly every aspect of the game — including the work of designing the game’s playing fields — remains overwhelmingly white: including Woods, there are by Johnson’s count five Black golf course designers in all of America.
And even golfers who don’t lose sleep over fundamental fairness ought to care about that. Above all else, golf course architecture has always valued innovation: new ways of seeing how the game can look. But when golf course design is in the hands of people sharing largely the same backgrounds, the philosophies behind course design are inevitable to be as monolithic as the ASGCA’s membership directory.
“In a multicultural society,” Johnson said, “if only one perspective is out there either as the norm or the authority, you just don’t get a 360-degree view of what is reality — of how this wonderful game can be represented and interpreted. That’s everybody’s loss.”
. . .
Johnson’s motivation for working in golf was pretty simple: he’s crazy about it.
“I just really love the game,” Johnson said. “I’d play it all day every day, if my body and my family would let me.”
Johnson grew up playing junior high and high school golf in Charlotte, N.C., which allowed him at a young age to play a few private golf courses that he otherwise wouldn’t have seen. As a teenager, Johnson also was an obsessive PGA Tour viewer: he’d record broadcasts on his family’s VCR to watch players’ swings in slow-motion — but also found himself pausing the recordings to study views of Harbour Town Golf Links and TPC Sawgrass. He became fascinated with Pete Dye. When it became clear that Johnson wouldn’t be able to play college golf, his father suggested that he study engineering. But Johnson didn’t want to be an engineer — he wanted to build golf courses. So after high school, Johnson enrolled in the landscape architecture program at North Carolina State.
It was 1992. He was the program’s only Black student.
Johnson arrived at North Carolina State knowing almost nothing about golf course architecture, and knowing even less about how to break into the business. His big break came in 1995, though, when he landed a position in the PGA Tour’s minority internship program (the program has since been folded into the Tour’s larger, general internship program; in 2019, about half of the Tour’s 14 interns were people of color, and none worked with the Tour’s design arm). The job gave Johnson a front-row seat to golf at its highest level, access to connections that he’s still using 25 years later — and, perhaps more importantly, nearly unfettered access to TPC Sawgrass (“It was the laboratory,” Johnson said).
Visits to great architecture as a child; access to higher education; meaningful professional growth while a college student; early connections with future peers. These might not be the only elements of entrée into golf course architecture, but they were irreplaceable for Johnson.
And for Tom Doak, too.
Perhaps America’s greatest living golf course architect, Doak credits a visit to Harbour Town at age 11 with sparking his fascination with design. Doak attended Cornell, won a scholarship to travel and study courses in Scotland, and spent formative years in his early 20s working under Pete and Alice Dye (who designed Harbour Town). Today, Doak’s architecture firm includes a famously successful internship program; he doesn’t ask applicants their race, so he doesn’t know whether any Black people have applied.
Doak also wrote reams of letters to private clubs during his time at Cornell, asking to come see their courses. “While golf has this exclusive reputation,” Doak said, “I found people at private clubs to be really welcoming that I wanted to come see their golf course.”
But Doak, of course, is white — and being a white man allows a certain level of presumption that Black men cannot afford. Johnson was still a teenager in Charlotte in the early 1990s when Doak began work on Charlotte Golf Links. “It never occurred to me to be part of that construction crew as a way into golf,” Johnson said.
Likewise, Johnson said he could never imagine himself writing to private clubs in the hopes of securing an invitation. “No one in their right mind is intentionally going to go into a situation where they think they’re going to be uncomfortable, where you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” Johnson said. “And if they did do that over and over, and repeatedly put themselves in that situation, you’d call them insane. It’s just human nature. Think about McDonald’s: McDonald’s is successful because it’s convenient.”
There is also the informality of the career path into golf course architecture: for every formally trained landscape architect, there’s someone who joined a crew picking up rocks (of the four associates in Doak’s firm, one holds a landscape architecture degree). And even unintentionally, informal hiring processes tend to favor people whose backgrounds look like their hirers. In golf course architecture, where nearly everyone making a hiring decision is white, implicit bias necessarily cuts against Black candidates.
“I can use my own experience as aid: if you’re trying to break into the industry, it’s not easy,” Johnson said. “It’s a small industry that relies on relationships. It’s hard to break into.”
. . .
This is not a story about Joseph Bartholomew. And yet, how could it not be?
Bartholomew is one of history’s most important golf course architects. He’s also one of its most unknown. Born in New Orleans in the late 1800s (various sources date his birth between 1881 and 1890, but a 1949 article in Fortune magazine described him as 59 years old), Bartholomew grew up working as a caddie at Audubon Park Golf Club. Eventually he worked his way up to assistant pro, when he was recruited by members to build a new golf course: Metairie Golf Club. Bartholomew traveled to New York to study with Metairie’s designer, Seth Raynor, and returned to build out Raynor’s design; Metairie opened in 1922. For more than 30 years that followed, Bartholomew established himself as Louisiana’s leading designer and builder of golf courses; his final design at Pontchartrain Park Golf Course in New Orleans, which opened in 1956, was renamed for him after his death.
Joseph Bartholomew, America’s first Black golf course architect, circa 1966.
“Over the years Joe has quietly built monuments in New Orleans to golf and, unintentionally, to himself,” New Orleans mayor Victor Hugo Schiro said in 1966.
Bartholomew’s formal education ended in grade school, but he was an engineering genius with a natural talent for simply making things work. Outside golf course design, Bartholomew also was a successful businessman and owned a construction firm that did work throughout New Orleans; by the end of the 1940s, Bartholomew had amassed a fortune that, when adjusted for inflation, totaled nearly $5 million.
That Bartholomew rose from such humble beginnings to heights so seldom reached by anyone is astonishing by itself. That Bartholomew was Black makes his career even rarer.
It would be tempting to label Bartholomew a pioneer — the Jackie Robinson of golf course architecture, perhaps. But that wouldn’t be true. A pioneer, by his nature, conquers a wilderness so that others may follow. Bartholomew’s path has been rarely followed, though. Nearly 60 years after the death of Jim Crow, America’s golf course design industry has precious few more Black architects than it did when Bartholomew broke into the business a century ago.
Much has changed since Bartholomew’s heyday. Laws have changed. Social views have changed. University admissions practices have changed. Hiring policies have changed. Even golf has changed.
Yet for all these changes, golf course architecture remains nearly all-white. Nearly 100 years after Bartholomew established himself as the only Black face in an otherwise monolithically white crowd, golf course design remains almost devoid of any Black architects. Bartholomew was no pioneer: the wilderness remains unconquered.
. . .
This is not a story about Whitney Barr and Devin Butler. And yet, how could it not be?
Barr and Butler aren’t golf course designers — they’re landscape architecture students at the University of Georgia: Barr is in the final year of a master’s degree, and Butler is a bachelor’s degree graduate now working on a master’s of urban planning. They’re successful, but the hurdles they’ve experienced in landscape architecture smack of those described by Johnson in the subset field of golf course architecture: few Black peers in the landscape architecture program, and fewer mentors who understand their perspectives. Out of roughly 150 bachelor’s and master’s students in UGA’s landscape architecture program, Butler counts four Black people.
“When I started, there were three women, but they left — they did not feel supported, they did not feel seen,” Barr said. “I felt the same thing. But I felt like I couldn’t leave.”
If the professional path to golf course architecture is often unconventional, then Barr proves the same can be true of landscape architecture. After earning an English degree at Spelman College in Atlanta, Barr developed an interest in healthy eating after a serious illness. “I was buying a lot of stuff at Whole Foods — but eating food as medicine, it’s not equitable,” Barr said. So she took to gardening, and soon found her way to a nonprofit that worked on food insecurity; with so much experience growing healthy food for herself, she gravitated toward urban gardening. Eventually, she decided to make a career out of it. “I just wanted to figure out how to find spaces where people could grow food and get connected with their community,” Barr said. “How do you design a place where people linger, where they want to stay?”
Initially, her decision to pursue a landscape architecture degree wasn’t popular at home. To Barr, helping urban families use land to support one another seemed like a natural extension of her personal experiences. To Barr’s grandparents, though, who grew up in South Carolina during Jim Crow, hearing their Black grandchild talk about working the land sounded very different. “There is so much collective trauma among Black and brown people around land,” Barr explained.
Nevertheless, Barr moved forward, and entered UGA’s landscape architecture program. There were no Black faculty. She found some degree of interest in recruiting Black students, but less interest in fostering their interests. During one class project, Barr and other students were asked to design a park in a predominantly Black neighborhood; Barr drafted plans with spaces for protests, and vacant lots to grow food. The idea was squashed. “One of the professors told me, ‘You really shouldn’t worry so much about social justice,’” Barr said. “But that’s the whole reason I came into the program.” On another project, Barr suggested including a basketball court to help revitalize a downtown space; her instructor rejected it as “too rowdy.”
Barr also found her white classmates and teachers unable to articulate ideas that complement the full experience of Black people. “When they do talk about Black people, it’s juxtaposed with poverty,” Barr said, “and that’s not telling a full story either.”
Like Barr, Butler came to landscape architecture despite questions at home about the discipline’s usefulness; her mother is an accountant, and her father is a business owner. But the chance to marry practicality with creativity (she originally planned to study graphic design) won her over. “A lot of Black families are making sacrifices for their kids to go to college,” Butler said. “And so a lot of times, kids are trying to get into guaranteed money-making professions — things on the higher end. And landscape architecture really isn’t one of those programs.”
Butler entered college with experiences closer to landscape architecture than most: when her father’s real estate business took off during her teenage years, he took up golf to meet with business partners. Butler frequently came along and played with him. But even she had never heard of landscape architecture until the day she changed her major. Black teenagers who come to college with even less experience seeing purposeful transformations of outdoor spaces are never going to consider a field they know nothing about.
“Clarke County [where Athens is located] is a very Black county. UGA kind of throws off the numbers, but the county is a Black county,” Butler explained. '“There are two separate high schools that are full of young Black kids, and we don’t ever do any events to pull them in and let them learn about what we do and teach them what we do. That’s where I feel like there’s not enough work being done on our side, as landscape architects, to pull people in who don’t have exposure to what we do.”
. . .
Systemic racism, like all systems, is complicated. It’s the idea that individual systems inherently disadvantaging Black people converge into an architecture over every imaginable aspect of American life; the sum of this convergence is that no matter where life takes Black people in America, they will always face longer odds than white people. Imagine a series of ropes, spread over the ground and meeting in a massive, impossibly tangled knot in the middle. Each rope represents one puzzle piece for life in America: one for healthcare, another for education, another for access to voting; there are dozens of them in all. Start at the end of any rope and follow it for long enough, and eventually, you arrive at the knot — wherein it intersects with every other rope. Theoretically you might be able to twist and bend the knot enough to weave one rope out and disentangle it from the mess; but even if you did, the knot would remain. Untangling the knot, then, demands that you stop looking at it as lots of individual ropes: first, it demands that you admit there’s a knot.
Systemic racism doesn’t require complicity from its beneficiaries. But its complexity is its greatest hope for survival: the more ropes involved, the harder the knot is to untie — and the greater the chance that advantaged people will throw up their hands at the problem’s magnitude and walk away, because they can.
The dearth of Black people in golf course architecture, therefore, cannot be explained in one sentence, nor can it be ascribed to a malice of the profession’s white architects; in most cases, that malice undoubtedly does not exist. The problem’s causes are legion, like any other result of systemic racism. It’s a knot with a lot of ropes.
Some of those causes are familiar to other aspects of golf. Golf is insular; golf is expensive; its greatest works of architecture are not open to the public; and many of the clubs that own America’s greatest courses have histories marked not only by racial segregation, but also physical segregation — literally walled off from the communities that surround them, invisible to all but an elite few. There is a code to these places, now mostly unspoken: white people belong here, and Black people work here.
By chance, on an April morning in 1997, Johnson found himself at one such club: Augusta National. He’d been invited to a Masters practice round and still remembers standing beside the sixth tee when Tiger Woods came through (coincidentally making that tee an unforeseeable meeting place of two of the Twenty-First Century’s only Black golf course designers). Johnson was awed to see another Black man, nearly his own age, at the heights of his powers; he was equally blown away by Augusta’s famous architecture.
But for all the pageantry, it did not escape Johnson that nearly all the club’s employees shared his skin color.
“You see who’s working there. They’re all African Americans,” Johnson said. “That, to me, is the striking thing: how un-diverse their work force is. I know everybody needs a job, and I hope those are good jobs and that they’re treated well. But to me, it’s a troubling image.”
But Johnson also is quick to acknowledge the benefit of seeing Augusta National during a time when his ideas of good golf course architecture were developing. Doak points to his own childhood experience seeing Harbour Town, and theorizes that more Black children would grow up interested in golf architecture with more access to great golf courses.
“But most of those very good golf courses are either high-end resorts or private country clubs, and Black teenagers are likely not exposed to them as much as white kids interested in golf,” Doak said. “So it’s a question of access; as with many subtle mechanisms of discrimination, they don’t know what they are missing.”
And then there is money, the common thread in so many of the rope’s of systemic racism’s knot (Black people charged with crimes are more likely to rely on public defenders than are white defendants; Black college students are more dependent on student loans; and banks charge Black people higher interest rates on home loans).
“Here [in America], the big problem is that if it’s not separated by exclusive membership, it’s separated by price,” Doak said. “One of the kind of disappointing things for me to learn when I started designing golf courses on my own was that you could try to do everything right and build a golf course affordably so that the owner could afford not to charge so much for it. But never mind that, because on the day it opened, the price was whatever the market would bear. So if you did something good, it was gonna cost a lot. That’s our system. It sucks, but that’s our system.”
. . .
Bartholomew was the first Black golf course designer to come through Audubon Park. And he might be the last.
When COVID-19 sent Louisiana into weeks-long quarantine earlier this year, Audubon Park Golf Course closed temporarily. Locals in search of fresh air and socially distant exercise seized on Audubon, and its grounds became a popular walking spot while golfers weren’t allowed. In June, the golf course reopened to play — but its future as a golf course is suddenly in doubt. The Audubon Nature Institute, which oversees the golf course, has not committed to preserving it for golf, and a Change.org petition seeking to repurpose the golf course has gathered 3,800 signatures.
Joseph Bartholomew (second from left) in 1956 at the opening of New Orleans’ Pontchartrain Park Golf Course, which he designed. Bartholomew died in 1971. In 1979, Pontchartrain Park was renamed Joseph M. Bartholomew Municipal Golf Course.
There lies a cruel irony: golf’s richly earned perception as an elitist, white sport is fueling communities to close municipal golf courses; yet those municipal golf courses present one of golf’s best chances to introduce Black children to the game and begin changing its perception. Access to golf does not happen by itself, nor is it happening adequately under golf’s existing efforts. And the threats to golf’s future endanger players and architects alike, both Black and white.
“Golf has a unique position that can break down barriers,” Johnson said. “If you’re an African American playing golf, obviously you’re crossing racial barriers constantly and have wonderful friends and relationships through golf that you might not have gotten anywhere else — and they’re lifelong ties with beautiful stories, despite this troubling history. That’s my frustration: golf could do so much better, and is so much better. Everyone who plays understands this. I’ve had an incredible life in golf, traveled the world, and met some great people. But still, it’s tainted by its inability to reconcile its past to move forward.”
This is not a story about Brandon Johnson or Joseph Bartholomew, or Whitney Barr or Devin Butler. This is a story about white people — and whether white golfers will realize that their fate is tied up with Black golfers before it’s too late for both of them. The end of the story is not written. Yet.
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