Black golfers in New Orleans had to play on makeshift courses during segregation.
“We’d go down to the levees or dig some holes in our neighborhood,” 71-year-old Burnell Scales told photographer Darren Carroll in 2016. “That’s where we would practice our game.”
Or they would sneak onto white-only courses, such as the one at Metairie Country Club. In the article, “History and Hope on Joe Bart Course in New Orleans,” caddie Joe Hall, 75, recalled a member who chased him and other Black golfers away with bulldogs.
“If he saw us, he’d turn them loose on us,” Hall said. “We’d have to jump into the canal to get away.”
Then came Pontchartrain Golf Course.
Designed by Joseph M. Bartholomew, the 18-hole course opened in 1956 as the only public course for Black golfers. Having designed two City Park courses and the one at Metairie Country Club, Bartholomew finally designed a course on which he could play.
According to Carroll, Bartholomew used his own equipment to fill the swampy land, employed local construction workers, and hired a Black man, John Roux Sr., to run it.
“His thing was to build a course for us,” Hall said.
Renamed for Bartholomew in 1979, the course is located in Pontchartrain Park, a subdivision established for middle- and upper-class Black residents in 1952. Now on the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places, the community also is home to Southern University at New Orleans and Wesley Barrow Baseball Stadium.
Still, Joseph M. Bartholomew Sr. Municipal Golf Course, renovated after Hurricane Katrina for $9 million, is the pièce de résistance.
“Like New Orleans, there is something about this place,” an article on the Lying Four website states. “A great municipal golf course drapes itself in the fabric of its community; it complements the neighborhood’s vibe instead of feeling like it was forced in. Joseph Bartholomew accomplishes that in spades.”
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