A look back at when Mayor Coleman Young integrated the Detroit Golf Club

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.

The Detroit Golf Club on March 8, 2011. (Detroit Free Press file)

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.

Robert Paul Roselle. (Detroit Free Press file)

“This is a golf club in the heart of Detroit, in a city 65% Black,” Szoka told the Free Press.

Szoka’s support of Young generated its own controversy, as the spiritual leader of 1.5 million metro Detroit Catholics was forced to defend his membership in an all-white club. He said “it never occurred to me to ask if there were any” Black members when he joined two years earlier.

Some critics slammed the golf club issue as trivial.

Given the “greater social and moral issues facing the church and state,” Frank McSherry of Pontiac wrote that Szoka’s endorsement “is about as significant as the Rockefellers endorsing the Lodges.”

(left to right) Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and Detroit Archbishop Edmund Szoka. (Detroit Free Press file)

Young met with the club’s board in December 1985, and notice of his application was posted for 30 days, as was customary. He applied for a non-golfing membership, which allowed access to the dining room and other facilities and required a $1,250 entry fee and $175 monthly dues, adjusted for inflation. The initiation fee for a top-priced golfing membership for a family was $30,000 in today’s dollars.

Finally, in January 1986, the board approved Young’s membership.

“This action is a step forward for the club and for the city of Detroit,” Young said in a statement. “I hope it will be the beginning of a new era for the club.”

Archer said: “I think, hopefully, now that the mayor’s broken down the barriers, others will be able to be admitted in the full membership of the golf club.”

That’s exactly what happened.

In July 1986, National Bank of Detroit executive Walt Watkins became the second Black member. Watkins, who had a full membership, later recalled meeting Young at a dinner function at a home next to the club and thanking him, because the membership helped him to entertain current and prospective banking clients.

Walt Watkins. (Detroit Free Press file)

“I introduced myself to him and told him that ‘because of you, I’m a member and play on that golf course behind us there,’ ” said Watkins.

At the Rocket Mortgage Classic last year at the club, the John Shippen National Invitational was staged in honor of the first Black professional golfer, and to provide more playing opportunities for Black golfers. Shippen, the son of a slave, played in several U.S. Opens starting in 1896.

DGC has had three Black presidents since 2003: Walter Elliott, Lane Coleman and its current leader, Mark Douglas, a second-generation member. Mark’s father, Walt, who led New Detroit Inc. and operated the Avis Ford auto dealership, joined in the late 1980s.

“It obviously sends a good message in today’s environment with what we’re dealing with on a lot of fronts — racial equality and things of that nature,” Mark Douglas told the Free Press earlier this month.

“It’s a positive story in a time when you don’t necessarily have a lot of positive stories to tell.”

Conrad Mallett Jr., the deputy mayor and a Detroit Golf Club member, served as a Young appointee in 1986. He recalls that Young did not see club membership as an opportunity for himself but understood that it could be important for his cohorts as well as younger and future generations of Black people and other people of color.

“My dad was very proud that his son was a member of the golf club,” Mallett said, referring to his father, Conrad Mallett Sr., who worked as a caddy at a private golf club in Jim Crow Texas during the late 1930s and later became a chief executive assistant to former Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and transportation director under Young.

Jermaine Wyrick, a DGC caddy during the late 1980s and former Coleman A. Young Foundation scholar, attended the Rocket Mortgage Classic in 2021.

A Detroit attorney who is African American, Wyrick remembers when he and other Black caddies clapped in support when they saw Watkins play the course.

It was a far cry from the days when the only Black people at the club worked there. He credits Young for the change.

“He was definitely a trailblazer,” Wyrick said.

Ken Coleman is a lifelong Detroit resident who has a passion for chronicling Black life in the Motor City.