Helen Webb Harris founded the Wake-Robin Golf Club in 1937. It is the United States' oldest registered

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

women's

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

club.

Career

Harris was an educator in the Washington, DC school system.

Wake-Robin Golf Club

The first meeting of the club was held at her house with thirteen women attending. The club was named after the Wake-Robin wildflower. Harris was the club's first president, and under her leadership the club joined the

United Golf Association The United Golfers Association (UGA) was a group of African-American professional golfers who operated a separate series of professional golf tournaments for Blacks during the era of racial segregation in the United States. It was said to have sta ...

and the Eastern Golf Association. In 1938 the club drafted and sent a petition to Secretary of the Interior

Harold L. Ickes Harold LeClair Ickes ( ; March 15, 1874 – February 3, 1952) was an American administrator, politician and lawyer. He served as United States Secretary of the Interior for nearly 13 years from 1933 to 1946, the longest tenure of anyone to hold th ...

seeking to desegregate the public courses of the District of Columbia. In response Ickes approved the construction of a nine-hole golf course on the site of an abandoned trash dump, called Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939. The Wake-Robin Golf Club and the Royal Golf Club continued to pressure Secretary Ickes, and he issued an order in 1941 opening public courses to all. In 1947 Harris was elected as the first female president of the Eastern Golf Association, a position which she held for two terms. The Wake-Robin Golf Club was part of the movement to force the Professional Golfers Association to drop its "White-only" rule for eligibility, which it did in 1961. Some of the Wake-Robin Golf Club's records are held at

Howard University Howard University (Howard) is a private, federally chartered historically black research university in Washington, D.C. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity" and accredited by the Middle States Commissi ...

Recognition

In 1973 Harris was inducted into the National Afro‐American Golfers Hall of Fame. The Helen Webb Harris Scholarship Fund was established in 2007.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harris, Helen Webb 20th-century African-American educators 20th-century American educators 20th-century African-American women African-American activists African-American golfers American civil rights activists People from Washington, D.C. Women civil rights activists Year of birth missing