Historical Significance
Defiant Round of Golf Sparks Lasting Change

On Dec. 7, 1955, two days after the beginning of the Montgomery, Ala., Bus Boycott, the longtime President of the Greensboro branch of the NAACP, Dr. George Simkins, along with five colleagues, placed the required 75-cent greens fee on the counter at the City-owned Gillespie Park Golf Course. Against the demands of the manager, they played a 9-hole round of golf, defying the policy of racial segregation at the federally funded whites-only public facility. Later that day, each of them was arrested for trespassing. Pursuing their cause for civil rights, against the charges, the trespassing case was ultimately lost in both the North Carolina and United States Supreme Courts, but Gov. Luther Hodges later commuted the sentences. Concurrently, in a separate case that formed part of Dr. Simpkins’s larger strategy, the policy of racial exclusion at the golf course was held to be unconstitutional by the U.S. District Court and the Court of Appeals. At an intervening stage in State court, the course had also been ordered to be desegregated, but its clubhouse had burned down two weeks before the ruling. The course was closed. Seven years later, after a campaign to reopen it, Dr. Simkins was the first to tee off.

Citizenship in the United States imposes uniform burdens, such as paying taxes and bearing arms for the preservation and operation of our government. In like manner, whatever advantages or privileges one citizen in the United States may enjoy through his liberty becomes the constitutional right of each citizen and without regard to race, color or creed.

— Simkins v. City of Greensboro (M.D.N.C., 1957)