The Black Women Who Helped Build Golf in Detroit

Detroit’s Black golf story is one of the deepest in America — and its women’s chapter is still being written back into the record. This page is BLAC Golf’s living record of the players, clubs, and courses that built it, and it will grow as the research does.

The city’s landmarks set the stage. Rackham Golf Course was for years one of the few integrated courses in the nation; Joe Louis made it his golfing home and staged the Joe Louis Open there in the 1940s as a national showcase for Black players. In 1952, Ben Davis became the first African American head professional at a municipal course anywhere in the country — at Rackham, after serving as head pro at Palmer Park — and taught Detroit’s golfers for more than fifty years.

Detroit raised champions, too. Thelma Cowans, whose family moved to the city in 1922 and who competed in swimming and track at Northwestern High School, became a five-time United Golfers Association National Women’s Open champion in the 1950s — a record built while mainstream golf remained closed to Black women. The LPGA today calls her a “hidden pioneer.”

The community organized itself against exclusion: the Detroit Handicappers Golf Club, founded in the early 1950s by Black professionals who “were limited as to where they could play,” is still active today, and the UGA circuit regularly brought national Black tournaments through the city.

This is a living page. Records of Detroit’s Black women’s golf clubs of the segregation era remain under-documented, and BLAC is continuing the archival research. Explore the players, the courses, and BLAC Golf — and if you hold a piece of this history, we want to hear from you.