The Greensboro Six: Phillip Cooke (left), Samuel Murray, Elijah Herring, Joseph Sturdivant, Dr. George Simkins and Leonidas Wolfe Greensboro News & Record
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA | Golf history isn’t limited to places such as St. Andrews, Augusta National and the game’s various museums around the world.
It happened at Gillespie Golf Course, a nine-hole municipal course just down an industrial road crowded by large metal buildings and the heavy trucks moving back and forth in this golf-rich city.
Six days after Rosa Parks changed the course of American history in 1955 by refusing to sit at the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, six Black golfers paid their 75-cent green fees and teed it up at Gillespie, defying a whites-only rule in place at the course that was built on city land.
Those six golfers, called the Greensboro Six and led by local dentist Dr. George Simkins Jr., were arrested later that evening, but they had made their point. It was an important civil-rights moment in a place that would draw national attention in 196...