On April 8, 1975, Rose Elder held her husband’s hands tightly as their red limousine eased down Magnolia Lane. They had met years earlier on the driving range at a golf tournament in Washington D.C. He was Lee Elder, the best player on the all-Black United Golf Association tour and she was an amateur with a 12 handicap. She would become his wife, travel companion, business manager and best friend. They didn’t have children unless you count Esa and Birdie, their two poodles, who traveled with them on the tour. Lee had wanted to name one Bogey, but Rose said no. While Lee played on golf courses in the south where African Americans were not welcomed, she walked behind him in the galleries and heard the bigots call him the n-word. She was there when he had to change his shoes in the parking lot at the Pensacola Country Club because Black players weren’t allowed to use the clubhouse.
For almost a year since Lee had earned an invitation to the 1975 Masters after winning the Monsanto Open in Pensacola, Rose had managed her husband’s hectic schedule of appearances and interviews to promote his achievement as the first African American to play in golf’s most prestigious event. Only a year into their marriage, she had helped him save the $10,000 to join the PGA Tour in 1968. And she was the one who stopped him from sharing his earnings with fellow Black players who were having a harder time than him surviving on the meager purses on the Black golf’s chitlin circuits. Lee liked to say that he went to the racetrack and Rose ran their business. Rose made sure that when her husband told stories about his gambling escapades to make ends meet, or his Army stint in the '50s that he didn’t add new details from the last time he told them.
Rose loved nature and was looking forward to walking the grounds of the Augusta National Golf Club, and seeing all the beautiful flowers and trees that she had seen on the telecast of the tournament. The other wives on tour had assured her that everything at the Masters looked prettier in person. It was spring and the azaleas had reached their colorful peak.
A Beautiful Plantation
This natural world that Rose was excited to explore was of course more complex than the sum of its beautifully landscaped flowers and trees and sublime setting for a golf course. In June 1852, Dennis Redmond, a correspondent for the Southern Cultivator, a leading agricultural reform journal, visited with his editor, Daniel Lee, the Bedford Plantation, an 800-acre fruit orchard located west of Augusta, Ga. Promoting a move away from a reliance on cotton and slaves, the two men were investigating fruit production as means of crop diversification in the South. At the Bedford orchard, they found 50 varieties of apples and at least 40 types of peaches and plums, pears, apricots and nectarines.
For Lee, the orchard evoked what he would later describe as “a beautiful plantation,” where fruitfulness was “an essential element of rural beauty” and where any planter “has the constant assistance of those wonderful powers known as vegetable and animal vitality, to multiply his agricultural wealth and beautify his plantation. Groves of forest trees, orchards of fruit trees, as well as all the benefit of the garden, are at his command.” Slaves were invisible in his idyllic world.
Two years later in 1854, Redmond had his opportunity to create his own beautiful plantation when the owners of the Bedford property were forced to sell portions of the land. A young writer with no previous experience in farming, Redmond purchased a 315-acre tract that included the orchard. He would name his new experiment the Fruitland Nursery. His intentions were to establish a commercial nursery that would serve Southern growers. One of the first things he did when he took over the property was to build a new family residence for his wife and children.
Set on the southern boundary of his property between the Savannah River to the north and Rae’s Creek, the new house was a two-structure with a concrete foundation that measured 50 feet wide by 55 feet long. The house’s thick concrete walls were built to make the interiors cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The grounds included the main residence, the kitchen and the “negro quarter,” a 52-by-14 foot structure that Redmond described as “a very comfortable adobe house.”
When the houses were being built between 1856 and 1857, Redmond didn’t own slaves so it is unclear who lived in the dwellings or who built them, but by 1858 Redmond did own two slaves, which made him one of the 20% of slaveholding families who had at least one slave in Richmond County. In 1860 it ranked only by behind Savannah’s Chatham County with the highest number of slave owners in the state. This ambivalence toward slavery fit with Redmond’s rejection of cotton for fruit production.
In 1858, Redmond sold Fruitland to Louis Berckmans and his son, Prosper, who were natives of Belgium and had moved from New Jersey to Augusta to start their own horticulture enterprise on land adjacent to Fruitland. The Berckmans were well-established horticulturists with national reputations for their contributions to national trade publications such as The Horticulturist and the Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste. Prior to the sale they had been in a partnership with Redmond in running Fruitland Nurseries. On the red clay soil, they harvested strawberries in April, raspberries, apricots and apples in June and by July, the peaches, nectarines and grapes were ripe.
Washington Road was a dirt highway that ran along the Fruitland property. Over time it would grow into one of the busiest thoroughfares in Augusta with restaurants and hotels, but in the 1850s it was a rocky carriage ride that connected the farms to the downtown business district. Between 1858 and 1859 with seeds from a nursery in Athens, Ga., the Berckmans planted a double row of magnolia trees along the bumpy driveway to the nursery from Washington Road. They planted 122 magnolia trees: 61 on each side of the 330-yard-long driveway that would become known as Magnolia Lane.
When Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts first visited the nursery in 1931 as a potential site for a new golf course, they found a place that had not been in operation since Prosper’s death in 1910, but there were still many plants and trees on the property that didn’t exist anywhere else in the country. Jones and Roberts were captivated by the two rows of magnolia trees that led to the old plantation house, but considered briefly moving the club’s main entrance somewhere else because two cars could not easily pass side by side between the rows.
Magnolia trees were an emblem of the natural landscapes of the South, popularized in Gone With the Wind and grown widely on southern plantations. The magnolia, which takes its name from the French botanist, Pierre Magnol, who helped classify plants in the 1700s, came to represent the values and treasured institutions of the Old South. In 1861 when Arkansas seceded from the Union, a Confederate general and poet named Albert Pike used the magnolia tree as a metaphor in the first stanza of “The Magnolia,” a song that became a battle cry for the Confederacy.
“What, What is the true Southern symbol?” the song asks. “The symbol of honor and Right/The Emblem that suits a brave people/In arms against number and might?/’Tis the ever green stately Magnolia,/Its pearl-flowers pure as the truth,/Defiant of tempest and lightning,/Its life a perpetual youth.”
Strange Fruit
Sitting in the rear of the limousine with Rose and his personal physician, Dr. Phillip Smith, the medical director of a Black hospital in Los Angeles, Elder looked out the window at the canopy of magnolia trees and felt the world closing in on him. He knew some of the history of this famous club and he carried the weight of it on his shoulders. “I go to bed thinking about the Masters,” he told an interviewer. “I dream about the Masters and I wake up thinking about the Masters.” Since joining the tour in 1968, Elder had been on a personal crusade to qualify for the tournament. He’d seen the rules change to seemingly keep him and other Black players, such as Charlie Sifford, from playing in the event and that the club’s chairman, Clifford Roberts, once vowed it would always have Black caddies and white players.
For Elder, the Masters and Augusta National must have represented an unusual juxtaposition. Here he was on this drive meant for a king, with all of its horticulture splendor. This was the mecca of golf. Legends had been made on these grounds from Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus. Lee and Redmond’s vision of “Beauty in Agriculture” would translate for Jones and Roberts into a beauty in golf on a property that evoked the Old South with its ordered world of white golfers and Black servants.
Yet for Elder and many African Americans this place also bore deep physical and emotional scars that the beauty could not easily help them forget. For them, these magnolia trees could tell another story. Between 1882 and 1968 when there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States, magnolia trees were weaponized for the slaughter and murder of primarily African American men. After being accused of assaulting a white woman in a Louisiana town in 1899, a Black man was followed by a band of white men. “The fellow took fright, was followed, and finally climbed a magnolia tree,” according to a newspaper account of the incident. “The tree was surrounded and the Negro [was] ordered to remain where he was while one of the pursuers was sent for rope to hang him.”
These lynching trees found their way into a song by a New York schoolteacher and songwriter named Abel Meeropol, who was moved to write about lynching after seeing a photo in 1930 of two young Black men hanging from a magnolia tree in Marion, Ind. The song, “Strange Fruit,” was made famous by Billie Holiday. In Holiday’s nasally jazz phrasing the song is a haunting rebuke of both Pike’s “The Magnolia” and Redmond’s vision of a southern landscape unburdened by slavery and cotton plantations.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
As heavy as this history must have weighed on Elder, he had more immediate concerns as his limousine neared the circular driveway in front of the clubhouse. Anybody who was associated with him—relatives, business associates and his attorneys—wanted Masters badges. He’d rented two houses for the week so that his exact location couldn’t always be certain just in case a white supremacist tried to fulfill a death threat. He was in the biggest slump of his career. Off-course distractions were pulling him away from practicing, but the gravity of the moment was too overwhelming to keep to his old ways. After playing in relative obscurity for most of his early career, he was now 40 years old and one of the best-known Black athletes in the world.
This high school dropout who grew up in poverty in both Dallas and Los Angeles had played golf with President Gerald Ford and received a standing ovation at the National Press Club. President Ford had been in attendance earlier that year at the dinner for the Lee Elder Scholarship fund at the Washington Hilton, where 1200 people paid $50 to support the golfer’s charity. But now Elder was 10 pounds overweight and bothered by a sore back and a nagging knee injury.
On this Monday at the Masters with three days until Thursday’s first round, his blue lounge suit fit him snugly. With the help of a tailor in Houston, he had put together an outfit for each day. On Tuesday, he would wear orange, red on Wednesday, green on Thursday, lavender on Friday and something special on the weekend if he made the cut. Elder had told fans in Jacksonville that he thought wearing green during Sunday’s final round would look good with the green jacket. With his fellow Tour player, Hubert Green, he had joked that “green draws green,” the color of money.
“He Is Here to Play a Tournament”
Rose was in no mood for jokes. As they got out of the limousine around 2 p.m. on Monday, she gave the throng of reporters assembled in front of the clubhouse a stern warning that they were here for business. “[Lee] has been talking for 52 weeks,” she said as she held his left arm. “He is here to play a tournament. All he asks is to be left alone for this week.”
Standing off to the side away from the reporters was Elder’s assigned caddie for the week, Henry Brown, a 36-year-old Augusta National caddie and part-time taxi driver. For the last four years Brown had been paying close attention to Elder’s quest to become the first African American to play in the Masters. So confident in Elder’s abilities to reach this goal, Brown had approached the caddie master in 1971 to request the assignment whenever the golfer got his Masters invitation. Like most of the Augusta National caddies at the time, Brown was African American and had grown up in the Sand Hills District, a historic Black neighborhood that is situated a few miles from Augusta National. Black Augustans began settling in the Sand Hills district after the Civil War. They were mostly unskilled laborers and domestic servants who worked in the homes of white Augusta families. When the Augusta Country Club was built in 1897 on land that bordered the Sand Hills district, Black men began caddying at the club, which borders the Augusta National Golf Club, which opened in 1932.
When Brown started working at Augusta National in 1952 when he was 13 years old, he and other caddies would often travel to the course by going through a hole in the fence at Augusta Country Club that led them across eighth fairway that bordered Augusta National. Brown was taught how to caddie by Willie Lee “Pappy” Stokes, who had five Masters wins with four different players. Stokes was born on the property and lived there with his family when Jones and Roberts bought the land in 1931 to build the golf course. Stokes’s father had worked at the Fruitland Nurseries and stayed on after it ceased operations in 1910. Before Stokes stalked this land looking for golf balls and reading greens, he had as a boy plowed it with a mule to grow cotton and corn. During the construction of the course, Stokes cut down trees to build the fairways. At the 1938 tournament, Stokes won his first Masters with Henry Picard. He was just 17.
As the tournament grew in stature, so did the aura surrounding these caddies who became as synonymous with this tournament as Magnolia Lane, the azaleas and the green jacket. On Masters week, these Black caddies were celebrities in their communities, capable of making more money in one week than they could make all year. With Lee Elder, Brown had one of the most talked-about players in the 1975 field and he was confident that he could do a great job. “All he has to do is stay cool and relax,” Brown told a reporter as Elder arrived. “I can walk this course backwards. I know every blade of grass on it. I am No. 1.”
The two men had become acquainted on Elder’s two earlier trips to the course for practice rounds. Clifford Roberts, who made the invitation to Elder to play in the tournament following his victory in Pensacola, sent a limousine to pick up the golfer at the Augusta airport on his first visit to the club in the fall of 1974. Roberts felt relieved following Elder’s win in Pensacola. “Believe me,” Roberts said, “that took a burden off my shoulders and, I think, eliminated the unfortunate label of ‘racism.’ All that we ever tried to do at the Masters was make it a great tournament involving the cream of the crop. I’m glad Elder qualified and I’m looking to the day when a Black becomes the Masters champion—and I think one will.”
Roberts had hoped that Jim Dent, an Augusta native and one of a dozen African Americans on the PGA Tour, would be the first of his race to qualify for the tournament. Dent had caddied at the club and his cousin was the maître d’ in the dining room. But once Elder joined the tour in 1968, he quickly established himself as the most likely player to shatter this racial barrier.
Now after years of arguing through the press over the qualification standards for the tournament, Elder and Roberts finally met in person when Elder’s limousine arrived at the club for his first practice round on Oct. 28, 1974. Roberts was not there to greet Elder when he arrived for the tournament week, but they had been in contact about tickets. Elder needed more than 200 tickets, but was told that Masters badges were scarce. Rose had mailed the tournament a check for $2,000 for 67 tickets, but by the time he got to the tournament week he’d only received 25 tickets.
Maggie Hathaway and the Masters Press
After Elder registered and claimed his locker in the clubhouse, Brown took his golf bag and they spent time together on the driving range, where Elder hit a few practice balls. He had two more days to prepare and a big interview on Tuesday. The next morning wearing gray slacks and a red shirt underneath a gray sweater, Elder smoked a cigarette and nursed a cup of beer as he took questions from reporters around the world in the Masters press center. He was eager to get this part of the week out of the way. He would downplay the historical nature of his appearance at the Masters, because he needed to concentrate on the golf, which he had sorely neglected over this year-long buildup to this week.
“Lee Elder is playing for Lee and Rose Elder,” he told the reporters. “I know people are rooting for me, but I don't think they're looking for me to be a saint or something. I don't feel I have to play well to keep from embarrassing them or myself. I talked with Henry Aaron early this year. We didn't talk about being great men of history or anything like that, because we don't feel that way. And that's how we want to keep it.”
A year earlier in Atlanta, Aaron had broken Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run record with his 715th homer off of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Al Downing at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Aaron, who played briefly in the Negro Leagues before joining the Milwaukee Braves in 1954, received hate mail and death threats in his pursuit of one of baseball’s most heralded records. Calling the game before a national TV audience on April 8, 1974, the future-Hall-of-Fame announcer Vin Scully declared: “A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world!”
Elder said that he felt no pressure to represent his race. “I’ve played bad before and I’ve played good before in major tournaments, he said. “No matter how I play here this week, I’m not going to be embarrassed, not for myself or for anyone else.”
On Monday, Elder had received a welcoming telegram from Georgia governor George Busbee. That January in his inaugural address, Busbee told Georgians that the “politics of race has gone with the wind.” Even if Busbee knew better that racism was still deeply rooted in the fabric of the South, it was his testament of how far race relations had come in his state. For him, Elder’s presence at the Masters must have represented evidence of these changes in the wind. To Elder he wrote: “We are indeed honored to have you participate in this tournament. Please know you have my best wishes for a most enjoyable visit with us, and for much success in the tournament.”
Elder thanked the governor at the press conference and tried his best to keep the focus on his golf game. Tom Weiskopf, a long-hitting Ohioan who had tied for second in the previous Masters, gave Elder some tips on how to play the two par 5s on the second nine, 13 and 15. Since his first visit to the course in October, he’d bent his shafts to get more loft for the higher shots needed at Augusta National. “I feel like an old veteran, not a rookie,” he said. “I feel I can win if I get a few breaks.” Brown had won his confidence. “I got the finest caddie in Augusta,” Elder said. “Henry Brown could probably beat me. Maybe I should switch over and caddie for him.” He also apologized for his aloofness on Monday with the media. “I know I was a little hard. But it was a case of wanting to concentrate on my golf. I found it very difficult to say no yesterday, because the press can make or break you.”
Missing from that sea of 700 mostly white faces in the press room was the caramel complexion of Maggie Hathaway, an African American columnist from the Los Angeles Sentinel, who had earned the first credential for an African American reporter at the Masters. Through the Sentinel, one of the most influential African American weekly newspapers on the West Coast, Hathaway was one of the best-known golf writers in the Black press and the only woman. Before getting into journalism, she had worked as a cabaret singer and an actress as a body double for Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. The Campti, La., native took up golf only after losing a bet to the boxer Joe Louis in 1955. By the early ’60s, she was writing regular golf columns for the Sentinel and pressing the PGA for the inclusion of Black golfers in professional tournaments.
For years Hathaway had watched Elder’s career and had grown close with him and Rose. After Elder won in Pensacola, Hathaway wrote, “No longer will Rose have to run for miles to watch his shots to keep some jealous meanie from stepping on his ball to bury it. He is now a Champion of Champs and our first Black Master.” Hathaway said that she hoped that Elder would play with a white caddie “since the powers that have kept the Masters tourney with all white pros and all black caddies. What a switch!”
In 1971, Hathaway wrote to Roberts requesting a Masters press credential, but was rejected because the tournament didn’t grant credentials to weekly papers. Several years earlier the tournament had established a policy that credentials were made available only to daily publications, golf magazines and television sportscasters. When Hathaway got this response again from the tournament in December 1974, she appealed to the Elders and the wider Black community for support in gaining a press credential for the tournament. Hathaway believed that since the majority of Black publications were either weekly or bimonthly, the Masters meant that the Black press would always be omitted from the tournament. With the Jan. 31, 1975 deadline for press credentials rapidly approaching, Hathaway still hadn’t received permission to cover the event in person. But in mid-March, Hathaway was finally granted a credential through KAGB, a Los Angeles Black-owned radio station.
Three days after the Elders arrived in Augusta for Masters week, Hathaway flew into Atlanta from Los Angeles on Thursday morning before the first round of the tournament. Jim Brown, the retired NFL running back and actor, had helped to pay Hathaway’s expenses and accompanied her from Los Angeles for the historical occasion. When they arrived at the Atlanta airport, they rented a car and drove the 140 miles together to Augusta.
“I lost my breath when we drove through the city of flowered trees,” Hathaway wrote of her arrival in Augusta. “The dogwood trees were in bloom, all white and pink in the woods and on the highways and peeking out among the tall Georgia pines all over the golf course.” Hathaway had a credential and she hoped that Brown would be able to purchase a ticket, but they learned it was a sellout once they reached the course. While one of the greatest football players stood waiting outside the gates, Hathaway spent an hour scurrying around the course until she found him a ticket.
Good Luck Lee
Even before the start of the tournament, both Rose and Lee were looking forward to the end of the week when hopefully their lives could go back to normal. But now as it approached noon on Thursday for his tee time, the world was waiting to see not just how Lee would perform in the Masters, but also how the mostly white gallery would accept the first Black player to compete in the 40-year history of the tournament. Lee opted to wear all green, actually three shades of green, on Thursday because he felt that he should be at least be seen once in the color that was symbolic of the Masters green jacket.
Around 500 patrons, as spectators are called at the Masters, filled his gallery including about 100 African Americans who you could easily spot by the color of their skin and the “Good Luck Lee” buttons that they wore on their shirts or hats. Jim Brown, who had made it from the press center with Hathaway and through the crowd of autograph seekers, was dressed in a white suit and an Indian necklace. “I’m here because this is an opportunity for Lee to compete in the best tournament in the world,” Brown told a reporter. “But it’s not only important to Lee or to black players, it’s also important for all qualified people to compete and achieve.”
Elder was paired with Gene Littler, a soft-spoken Californian and the winner of the 1961 U.S. Open. “Think I’m nervous,” Elder told a reporter after arriving at the course. He still had tickets on his mind. He had distributed the 25 tickets that tournament officials had given him, but there were still friends standing outside the gate hoping to get in to watch him play. A locker-room attendant arrived with a bouquet of red, yellow and purple flowers, a gift from a local Black florist. A dozen red roses were delivered from a friend.
“C’mon, partner,” Littler told Elder. They walked to the putting green near the 1st tee for a few practice putts before it was their turn to play. At 11:15 a.m., it began to rain as Elder stepped on the first tee, a 400-yard par-4 named Tea Olive. It is a slight dogleg right that plays uphill to an undulating green. “Every caddie came out of the caddie shack to watch Lee hit his first shot,” Hathaway wrote. “Little white kids positioned themselves below the adults so they could catch a glimpse of his shot. The gallery was energized and full of anticipation, but showed respect by remaining quiet as Lee set up over his ball. Lee was under tremendous pressure, but he proceeded to hit his drive straight down the middle.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Fore Please, Lee Elder: A Half Century Since History at the Masters.
