History isn’t always made – and changed – in the spotlight. As often as not, it starts in the shadows.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four North Carolina A&T students walked into the F.W. Woolworth Co. on South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter and politely asked for service. It was refused. Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond remained calm in the face of injustice. Most importantly, they remained, and they kept returning every day with more and more Black men and women.
Those four young men sparked a sustained movement of civil disobedience that quickly spread to 78 cities across the South and nine states. Woolworth opened its lunch counters six months later as the nation slowly awoke from the darkness of segregation. It was an act of courage and moral righteousness that could have gone different ways.
“If I were lucky, I’d be going off to jail for a long, long time,” McCain remembers of that first day sitting at that counter. “If I were not so lucky, then I would be going back to my campus in a pine box.”
The “Greensboro Four” stepped into the spotlight. However, they were merely the most celebrated members in that city’s fraternity of civil rights heroes. They didn’t start the mission, they just merely brought it to prominence.
Four years before the Woolworth sit-in became a flash point – and just more than a mile up the road now named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – six Black men initiated their own act of defiance in the battle against civil injustice.
On a golf course.
On Dec. 7, 1955 – just six days after Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to leave the whites-only section – six Black men in Greensboro paid their greens fees and played nine holes of golf at Gillespie Park.
“6 Negroes Play Links; 5 Placed Under Arrest” read the headline on the front page of the next morning’s Greensboro Daily News. They were charged with trespassing on a private golf course, even though Gillespie Park was owned by the city and white “non-members” were routinely allowed to pay greens fees and tee off.
The nine-hole round prompted five trials all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a city’s stubborn withdrawal from the recreation business, a mysterious destruction by fire of the clubhouse shortly before the course was to be integrated and a five-year condemnation of the entire facility.
“It was horrible. The judge and solicitors were laughing and they were lying on the stands. It was just a mockery of justice, so I devoted my life to erasing some of this crazy stuff.” –Dr. George Simkins Jr.
In the end, however, it led to the constitutional validation that all tax-paying citizens of Greensboro had the right to use all public facilities.
“I didn’t have any idea we would go through what we had to go through,” Dr. George Simkins Jr., a Greensboro dentist who was the last surviving member of the “Gillespie Six” until his death in 2001 at age 77, told me just a year before his passing for a story at the Greensboro News & Record. His playing partners that day were Phillip Cooke, Leonidas Wolfe, Samuel Murray, Joseph Sturdivent and Elijah Herring.
“They really got my goat with the way they treated us in the courts,” Simkins said. “It was horrible. The judge and solicitors were laughing and they were lying on the stands. It was just a mockery of justice, so I devoted my life to erasing some of this crazy stuff.”
It was the start of Simkins’ life-long mission for social justice. In addition to helping open public golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, he led the movement to desegregate hospitals – a successful court venture that medical journal, The Annals of Internal Medicine, claims “did for hospitals what Brown vs. Board of Education did for public schools.”
Simkins also registered voters and helped integrate the Greensboro City Council. He spent 25 years as president of the Greensboro NAACP and was leader of the Guilford County Citizens Political Action Committee, which spotlighted significant political and humanitarian issues.
His work, outside of dentistry, started that day in 1955 with a $0.75 greens fee that he only got 37-and-a-half cents worth out of it.
Like so many communities, Greensboro did not enter quietly into integration of its public recreational facilities. When Blacks requested the use of Gillespie Park in 1949, the city instead built a nine-hole course for the black community called Nocho Park. Simkins called it “a cow pasture” which wreaked from the odors of the adjacent sewage treatment facility.
The city also tried to claim Gillespie was a private club, leasing the operation for $1,000 a year. Evidence accepted by the courts showed that beyond a token membership, whites were welcome to play without memberships upon payment of a greens fee. Blacks were turned away as non-members.
But Gillespie Park Golf Course was public to its core, nine holes built with a majority of federal Works Progress Administration funds in 1940 on school board property. Before 1950, the city constructed nine additional holes on adjacent land. (It remains as a nine-hole course today, costing $15 for one loop with a cart or $20 for 18.)
Just four days before Simkins and his five friends paid to play Gillespie, four other black men asked to play but were turned away by the head professional, Ernie Edwards. He told the men the club was private, that annual dues were $60 and he would submit their names to the club’s board of directors for approval.
What happened next was a harrowing tale of courage that Simkins recalled with clarity nearly a half century later.
On Dec. 7, Simkins and his friends met at his dental office situated across from a local filling station. They arrived at Gillespie at noon and stepped to the counter in the pro shop. Edwards was out for lunch. The assistant pro in charge refused their money.
“We put our 75 cents on the counter – that was the 18-hole fee – and tried to sign the book,” Simkins recalled. “But the guy pulled the book back and wouldn’t let us sign it. So we left our money on the counter and said we were going to play.”
All six men stepped to the first tee with their own four caddies and started playing.
“I was so nervous, every time I tried to hit one up the fairway it went way to the right,” Simkins said. “I had butterflies in my stomach.”
It didn’t take long before the situation escalated and turned ugly. Edwards returned to the course and confronted the sixsome on the third hole.
“Boy did he raise all grades of hell,” Simkins recalled. “I had to keep a club in my hand for protection. I wasn’t going to use it, but I was going to make him think I was going to use it. He cursed us and went on and the deputy sheriff was out there listening to him curse us.”
Simkins said he addressed Edwards.
“We’re not out here cursing you, we’re out here for a cause,” he said.
“What kind of damn cause?” asked the pro.
“The cause of democracy.”
Edwards did not quietly accept the terms.
“Boy, he just turned red and his lips were trembling as he went on, ‘You black SOBs, if you don’t get away from here …’” Simkins recalled of the heated encounter.
Despite the threatening distractions, the group continued playing – with Edwards still cursing them all the way around the course. When they finished the ninth hole, Simkins felt the point had been sufficiently made.
“Let’s go,” he said to his friends, and they left the course without further incident.
“I’d had about as much as I can take and we quit,” Simkins said.
But it was far from over – which is the important part and exactly what the Gillespie Six had hoped would happen.
“That night they had the Black policeman come to our houses and arrest us for trespassing on a privately owned golf course,” Simkins said.
When they arrived in city court, the judge tried to keep it simple and contained. In return for a guilty plea from each of them, he’d impose a small fine and end it there.
“No, sir,” Simkins told the judge. “We plan to go all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to on this case.”
In a second trial, which was ordered because the arrest warrants had been altered to call Gillespie a “club” instead of a “course,” a list of everyone who played at Gillespie was obtained. Two members of the all-white jury were on the list.
“We put them on the stand,” Simkins recalled. “They claimed you had to be a member or the invited guest of a member to play Gillespie. We asked them, were they members. They said, no. Were they invited guests of a member? And they said, no. Yet they found us guilty of trespassing.”
The judge imposed a maximum 30-day jail sentence. Before the appeal to the state Supreme Court was presented, Middle District Court Judge Johnson J. Hayes of North Wilkesboro gave the Six a strong declaratory judgment, calling the “so-called lease” as a private facility invalid.
Hayes ruled that the Six were unlawfully denied access to use Gillespie Park “solely because of the race and color of the plaintiffs” and said he intended to open the golf course to all citizens.
“To hold otherwise would open a Pandora’s box by which governmental agencies could deprive citizens of their constitutional rights by the artifice of a lease,” Hayes wrote in his opinion.
Hayes ruled that the Six were unlawfully denied access to use Gillespie Park “solely because of the race and color of the plaintiffs” and said he intended to open the golf course to all citizens.
“The golf club permits white people to play without being members, except it requires the prepayment of green fees,” Hayes wrote. “The plaintiffs here paid their fees, were forced off the course by being arrested for trespass. Everybody knows this was done because the plaintiffs were Negroes and for no other reason. This court cannot ignore it.”
Hayes’ statement and evidence, however, were left out of the record presented to the state Supreme Court, which denied the criminal appeal. That omission essentially doomed the case when it was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958, which ruled 5-4 against the Gillespie Six.
“(Chief Justice) Earl Warren and the rest of the justices couldn’t understand why something so important as that was left out of the record,” Simkins said. “Thurgood Marshall (who was then the director-counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund) said our lawyers ought to be the ones who go to jail instead of us for the way they screwed this case up.”
A strong dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Warren prompted N.C. Gov. Luther Hodges to commute the jail sentences of the five surviving plaintiffs.
Racism, however, didn’t yield so easily to the judgment of the courts. After the clubhouse was burned two weeks before Hayes’ order to integrate the course, the fire marshal condemned the entire facility. Greensboro’s City Council voted to go out of the recreation business, eventually selling the property on which nine of the holes were built. White civic leaders would rather the community have nothing than share it with Black citizens.
It took seven years, a campaign to vote in a completely new City Council and the pleading of the entire community – including former pro Edwards – to get Gillespie Park reopened.
The Gillespie Six never got the same kind of national exposure or credit as the Greensboro Four, but Simkins understood the significance of him hitting that tee shot seven years to the day after he and his friends each put their 75 cents on the counter and stepped to the tee.
On Dec. 7, 1962 – nearly three years after the Woolworth’s sit-in helped shape racial history in the U.S. – the nine remaining holes of Gillespie Park welcomed golfers again.
Dr. George Simkins, then 38 years old, was the first man to tee off.
“It’s about time,” he said before striking the ball.
The Gillespie Six never got the same kind of national exposure or credit as the Greensboro Four, but Simkins understood the significance of him hitting that tee shot seven years to the day after he and his friends each put their 75 cents on the counter and stepped to the tee.
“It was a proud day,” Simkins later said. “I paid the price.”
Simkins is remembered as the “preeminent African-American leader in Greensboro during the 20th Century” and “a drum major for justice and equality” in his community.
“He’s one of the few people whom I consider to be a very strong activist who made it possible to both enjoy life and make a tremendous contribution to the community,” Hal Sieber, a local historian and author, said after Simkins’ death. “He was a very gentle person. He was a very open-minded person. He could stand up for something and very stubbornly and effectively bring about what his cause was.”