10 Black Women Every Golf Fan Should Know

Person · legend

On September 17, 1956, Ann Gregory of Gary, Indiana walked onto the first tee of the U.S. Women's Amateur at Meridian Hills Country Club and became the first Black woman ever to compete in a USGA championship. She got there through the Chicago Women's Golf Club, which joined the USGA largely so she could enter. The "Queen of Negro Women's Golf" won some 300 tournaments, took the UGA national title in 1950, played 27 USGA championships, and finished runner-up at the 1971 U.S. Senior Women's Amateur. At 76, she won U.S. Senior Olympics gold.

Person · legend

Raised in Detroit from 1922, Thelma McTyre Cowans came to golf late — a doctor prescribed fresh air for anemia around 1940 — and became one of the most decorated women in United Golfers Association history, winning five UGA National Women's Open titles in the 1950s while mainstream golf remained closed to Black women. A Chicago Women's Golf Club member and a college athlete who started a golf team at Morris Brown with her sister, Cowans is the kind of champion the record books nearly forgot. The LPGA itself now calls her a "hidden pioneer."

Person · legend

The numbers alone make the case: seven UGA National Women's Open titles between 1959 and 1973, fourteen Wake-Robin Golf Club championships, more than 100 local and regional wins. Ethel Funches, a South Carolina native who moved to Washington, D.C. in 1932 and managed the cafeteria at Dunbar High School, won more UGA championships than anyone — before or since. Historian M. Mikell Johnson put it simply: "Between 1950 and 1980, Ethel Funches was the best of the best." Her home course was Langston, the course her club fought the federal government to build.

Person · legend

Althea Gibson had already changed sports once — eleven Grand Slam tennis titles, the first Black champion at Wimbledon and Forest Hills — when she took up professional golf. In 1964, at 37, she became the first Black woman to join the LPGA Tour, integrating a second sport in a single lifetime. Gibson sharpened her competitive golf in United Golfers Association events, and her presence on tour opened a door that Renee Powell, and every Black woman who followed, would walk through. No American athlete has broken barriers in two sports the way she did.

Person · legend

Renee Powell learned the game at Clearview Golf Club — the Ohio course her father Bill built by hand when America's fairways were closed to him — and in 1967 became the second Black woman to play the LPGA Tour. Her second act has been just as historic: PGA of America professional, head professional at Clearview, PGA of America Hall of Famer inducted alongside her father, and among the first women named honorary members of the R&A in St Andrews. Few people in golf, of any background, have carried a family legacy further.

Person · legend

For more than 30 years, LaJean Gould has been building the pipeline. As founder and president of the Atlanta-based Women in Golf Foundation, she has run the National Women's Collegiate Golf Championship — its trophy is the LaJean Gould Cup — supporting women's golf programs at HBCUs and contributing over $340,000 to collegiate women's golf. A Fisk University and University of Michigan graduate, Gould represents the institutional side of this story: champions get remembered, but someone has to build the stages they compete on.

Person · professional

Mariah Stackhouse announced herself with a 61 at Stanford — still an NCAA women's scoring record — on her way to four All-America seasons and a national championship. She was the youngest African American woman to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open at 17, the first on a U.S. Curtis Cup team in 2014, and the seventh to earn an LPGA Tour card, holding membership since 2017. Raised in Riverdale, Georgia and taught by her father, she carries the torch Gibson and Powell lit — BLAC Golf's standard-bearer for Black women in today's game.

Person · professional

Sadena Parks set a course record at the University of Washington, then won twice on the 2014 Symetra Tour and finished fourth on the money list — becoming the first African American to earn an LPGA Tour card through that tour, and just the fifth Black woman ever to hold one. Golf Channel viewers met her on Big Break Florida; Detroit met her at THE JOHN SHIPPEN, where she won the 2022 Women's Invitational and then teamed with 2021 winner Anita Uwadia to become the first SHIPPEN champions to make a cut with their earned exemption.

Person · professional

Ginger Howard was 17 when she turned professional — the youngest African American woman ever to do so — after becoming the first Black golfer named to a U.S. Junior Ryder Cup team in 2010. The Philadelphia native trained at IMG Academy in Bradenton and turned down Duke and Florida State to chase the tour, putting in seven seasons on the Symetra Tour before earning conditional LPGA status for 2016. Injuries interrupted the climb; she answered by winning on the Women's All Pro Tour in 2021. Her career is a study in what chasing the dream actually costs.

Person · professional

Cheyenne Woods grew up with golf in the family — her grandfather Earl was her first coach; Tiger Woods is her uncle — but built her own résumé: thirty-plus amateur wins, the 2011 ACC championship at Wake Forest, and the 2014 Volvik RACV Ladies Masters on the Ladies European Tour, one of the biggest wins by a Black woman on a major world tour. The sixth African American woman to play the LPGA Tour, she has since become one of golf's leading broadcast voices with Golf Channel and NBC Sports — keeping the game's history, and its future, on camera.