By ALAN MARSHALL

From the rise and fall of great nations to the life and death of the neighbor down the street, the tide of human affairs ebbs and flows without beginning and without end. As time passes the only constant is change.

For some this change represents the process of the inevitable. For others it is resisted or ignored, and given time, even forgotten. Variables such as blame and responsibility, acceptance and forgiveness often but do not always enter the equation. The history of Greensboro’s first, last, and as it turns out, only golf course for African-Americans is a case in point.

From the beginning in 1902 when Southern Real Estate Company President A.W. McAlister and a group of his wealthy friends began to play the game in a cow pasture near what is now the intersection of Bessemer and Summit Avenues, golf in Greensboro was as white as a shiny new Titleist.

In the Jim Crow South of "Whites Only" water fountains, "Colored' theater entrances and segregated public schools, black and white worlds were separate but decidedly unequal. Golf was no different. Golfers were white and caddies were black. As had been the case in the American South for centuries, slave served master and quietly watched and waited. Their time was closer at hand, but emancipation on Greensboro's forbidden fairways would still be a long time coming.

Nearly half a century would pass before blacks would have a place in The Gate City where they could play golf. And in the short span of another half dozen years – as they attempted to play

Greensboro's other "public" course – they would for another half dozen years lose that privilege, too. The process of the inevitable would be resisted, and tensions would explode. The target of the integration effort would be firebombed, and the course, closed.

The course and land upon which blacks had originally played the game would be shut down, too – deemed off limits – and abandoned. Relegated literally to a city dump, when years later renewed and renamed with a portion of the land devoted not to golf, but to jogging and nature trails and the game of tennis. And the tennis facility would be named for one of the men who engineered the integration effort of the other golf course.

In 1932 the Greensboro City Council established the Greensboro Parks Commission and plans for two community parks were begun. One parcel of land on the West Side of town became Country Park, later to be known as Guilford Battleground.

The other, on the East Side of Greensboro, in an area around North Carolina A&T State University, became Nocho Park. Named for J.R. Nocho, an early educator, mail agent and civic leader in the black community, it was situated on the outskirts of a neighborhood developed in 1925 by and for Greensboro's middle-class blacks. Though according to Alexander Sloesen's Guilford County: A Brief History, "many of the houses black people occupied were owned by white landlords who put them up as profit-making ventures."

Windsor Community Center, a city sponsored recreation facility for blacks in the Nocho Park area, opened in 1937. It was a first. Four years later Gillespie Park Golf Course opened nearby. Funded largely with WPA money the nine-hole course cost an estimated $38,900 in federal funds.

As blacks began to try to play the Gillespie course an arrangement was established to keep them out. A private corporation leased it the first year for a $1,000 annual fee. After the first year of the segregation deal "operational hardships" convinced the Greensboro City Council to reduce the lease to $1 per year and allow that rate to continue for five more years.

Gillespie Park Golf Course, though constructed with federal and local tax money, was a public course but a "private" club. This meant simply that blacks were not welcome.

Time had passed, but those resistant to change still prevailed. "Here we were taxpaying citizens who could not enjoy its (Gillespie's) facilities. We were called to fight and die for our country but we couldn't use its facilities on an equal basis," Dr. George Simkins, a leader in the integration effort, recalled in a 1971 interview.

Segregation was still the law of the land, and change was slow in coming. Meanwhile in 1945 a group calling itself the Negro Recreation Advisory Committee requested that a course for blacks be established, Four years would pass before the Greensboro City Council would act on that recommendation. On April 7, 1949 at the same meeting when the leasing of the Gillespie Park Course was extended, thus ensuring that it remained private, the Greensboro City Council approved construction of the course that would become Nocho Park Golf Course.

Construction of the nine-hole par-36 course was completed in 1950 on a parcel of land known as the John Young property out East Lee Street near the South Buffalo Creek Sewage Disposal Plant. Near completion of the project an emergency fund appropriation of $1,148.79 approved by the city council for additional expenditures at the course.

Initial reaction was mixed. Dr. George Simkins in an interview published in 1999 called it a "cow pasture" and complained that the place "reeked" from the fumes of the nearby South Buffalo Creek Sewage Disposal Plant.

Murphy Street, who won the first of his 28 combined amateur and United Golf Association tournaments at Nocho Park, remembers it a little more charitably. "It was pretty hilly and built right on top of red clay, but when they finally got a little grass to grow up on the fairways it was a pretty good golf course," he stated recently. "It was tight. You had to hit the ball straight, and every hole was different."

His first win, a junior tournament around 1953 was over Hubert Nichols in a playoff which Street remembers he won with a par 5 on the first playoff hole after a 36-hole match.

The "Caucasian Race" clause of the Professional Golfers Association bylaws kept the PGA tour white, but by 1952 Charles Stewart, the first pro at Nocho, and his staff were putting on the Gate City Open, a United Golf Association tournament that attracted the best black golfers from around the country.

Lone-hitting Howard "Butch" Wheeler, once a favorite caddie of Bobby Jones and the eventual winner of six UGA National Championships, held a golf club with an unorthodox cross-handed grip but still managed to win the inaugural Gate City Open with a 54-hole score of 219. Charlotte's Charlie Sifford, who later achieved success on the PGA tour, won the Gate City in 1953 and 1955, but in spite of its $1,000 purse, more, in fact, that the UGA National's $700 prize, Nocho's days were numbered.

On December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, 1955, less than a week after the beginning of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, six Greensboro residents, including Dr. Simkins, played nine holes of golf at Gillespie Park. All six black men were subsequently arrested and charged with criminal trespassing. Their actions that day would set in motion a process that would end segregated golf on Greensboro's public golf courses. That process would take six years to run its course, and, meanwhile there would be no place to play for Greensboro's black golfers.

The city council announced December 19, 1955, just twelve days after the Gillespie incident, that "Nocho Park Golf Club, the nine-hole course for Negroes completed in 1950 would be closed and the property used for expansion of the South Buffalo Creek disposal plant and possibly landfill operations." Nocho Park Golf Course became a city dump.

For a time, at least for those in power, no golf would be preferable to integrated golf. Gillespie was soon closed, too, when the clubhouse was firebombed and damaged beyond repair. The Gate City Open would not be held again until 1963 when it was put on at newly reopened and integrated Gillespie.

The case of the Greensboro Six as they came to be known charged with criminal trespassing would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which on June 21, 1960 in a 5-4 vote ruled that "no federal question is before us" and dismissed their conviction appeal. North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges eventually intervened and commuted the sentence of the group.

But even after all the years a taste of bitterness would remain with at least one who remembers Nocho Park Golf Course. The widow of one of the golf pros when asked recently to comment on her husband's role as one of the first black golf pros in Greensboro expressed suspicion, impatience and finally defiant indifference. "Really," she said, "I'm not interested."

The scores of citizens who visit the area in its current incarnation may not recognize

Nocho Park. It is now Jimmie I. Barber Park, named for the distinguished Greensboro City Councilman who served from 1969 to 1981. Typical park users – joggers and hikers, concertgoers and picnickers, dog walkers and visitors to the wildlife sanctuary – form a steady stream of happy humanity. The hilly spaciousness is pleasantly inviting. A sign on the bulletin board near the covered bandstand of the open-air amphitheater serves notice of the formation of a league of Frisbee golfers. Tennis and volleyball players in sweaty exhilaration come and go to the twin indoor sports pavilion named in honor of Dr. George C. Simkins.

The name of J.R. Nocho is nowhere to be found, and the golf course that bore his name is dead and gone, buried in an unmarked grave, a phantom footnote in the passage of a painful time.

Editor’s Note: Missing Links will be a regular feature in Triad Golf Today. If you know of a course in the Triad that has been lost for one reason or another, give us a call.