Lawrence, Kan. (May 17, 2016) —  Larry Powell, the 64-year-old golf course superintendent who has spent his life tending to the dream of his father, Bill, at Clearview Golf Club in East Canton, Ohio, will be one of four new inductees into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame (NBGHF) on May 21, at the Peachtree Hotel and Conference Center in Peachtree City, Ga.

Powell will join his well-known sister Renee, a former LPGA Tour golfer who still teaches at Clearview, and be inducted along with European Senior Tour player Jerry Bruner, and Ann and Tom Cousins, who share responsibility for rebuilding Atlanta’s historic East Lake Golf Course and the surrounding community. The Chicago Women’s Golf Club, the country’s second oldest African American women’s golf club (1937), will also be recognized.

Powell, who has been mowing fairways since he was eight, is into his fourth decade as caretaker for the 130-acre tract that has been elevated to the National Register of Historic Places. He has also been a proud member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America since 1975, serving on the association’s diversity task group for five years.

“This a great honor, and one that I never expected,” said Powell. “It is nice to be appreciated and recognized. The people who have gone before me were outstanding people with heart and determination.”

Since its beginning in 1986, the NBGHF has inducted 113 members. Bill, who was famous for saying, “the only color that matters is the color of the greens,” was inducted in 1996. Renee joined her father in the Hall in 2006.

The NBGHF mission is to “recognize and honor the contributions of black golfers for their skills and to honor persons, regardless of race or ethnicity, who have done the most to promote golf in the black communities.”

Read more from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America

The philosophies of Alfred (Tup) Holmes and Georgia governor Marvin Griffin collided in the mid-1950’s when Holmes and his family challenged segregation in Atlanta: not in the schools or work places, but on the golf course.

In 1951, Tup, his brother Oliver and their father, Dr. Hamilton M. Holmes, were turned away from the Bobby Jones course, one of seven public golf courses in Atlanta at the time, because they were black. Then, they launched what their lawyer, Roscoe E. Thomas, recently recalled was “the first desegregation suit in Atlanta.”

The suit began in United States District Court in 1953 and reached the Supreme Court two years later. Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the Court’s decision in Holmes v. Atlanta, the case that desegregated public golf. (Discrimination still exists at many private country clubs, which continue to practice exclusionary membership policies based on race and religion.)

When most people think of desegregation, they think of Brown v. Board of Education. Brown was rendered a full year earlier, but the case filed by the Holmeses, all now deceased, had a more immediate effect. “The first scene of court-ordered desegregation in Georgia was a golf course rather than a school house,” wrote the Atlanta historians Norman Shavin and Bruce Galpin in “Atlanta: Triumph of a People.”

Holmes v. Atlanta began in the aftermath of the incident at the Jones course when Tup Holmes and a community committee decided to bring suit against the city. They won a hollow victory in 1954 when District Court Judge Boyd Sloan ruled that blacks had a Constitutional right to play golf, but only in accordance with the city’s “separate but equal” doctrine. He ordered the city to devise a system to accommodate blacks while “preserving segregation.”

The city offered to let blacks use the public courses Mondays and Tuesdays which was agreeable to some. “They said this was enough, we don’t need to go further because it could jeopardize our jobs,” Gary Holmes, one of Tup Holmes’s sons, recalled last week.

But Tup Holmes “didn’t have that fear,” Gary Holmes said of his father, who died in 1967. “He was a mover and shaker, bold enough to do that kind of stuff.” An amateur golf champion and a black union steward at his job at Lockheed Aircraft, Holmes was determined to fight on to win full use of city courses.

The case moved to an Appeals Court in New Orleans, where Thurgood Marshall and the N.A.A.C.P. intervened. But when the Court ruled the original decision had given the plaintiffs “all the relief they asked for,” the Holmeses were forced to take their fight further, all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Court accepted the case in the 1955 fall term, a year after Brown, when it was “knocking down all kinds of things,” according to Jack Greenberg, a Columbia University Law School professor who was the long-time director of the N.A.A.C.P’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Greenberg worked with Thurgood Marshall on the Holmes case. “The Court was saying, ‘Haven’t you got the message?’ ” In fact, the Court quickly overturned the previous rulings in Holmes, sending it back to District Court for a decree in favor of the plaintiffs.

The decision was applauded in an editorial in The New York Times of Nov. 9, 1955: “The court’s perfectly logical position is that desegregation means desegregation, not segregation on an equal basis.” But the Atlanta Constitution wrote, “A majority of Southerners will be shocked and angered by this decision.”

Griffin and other segregationist politicians condemned the decision and vowed to fight it. The Mayor urged the city to sell its course to private individuals who presumably could have kept them segregated. The town of Leland, Miss., sold its course to the Lions Club for $1 to avoid the challenge of integration.

But when Judge Sloan got the case again, he ordered the city to desegregate its courses “immediately.” The Holmeses took their game public the very next day.

Dec. 24, 1955, was “a happy day in town for black folks,” said Gary Holmes, who was 12 at the time. But the joy in the community was tempered by a fear of white retaliation. There were threatening calls to the Holmes household, prompting “talk in the community of a bloodbath or race war,” Holmes remembered. Some blacks considered stuffing guns in their golf bags, he said, before heading to the course.

Read more of this story by By Ken Liebeskind at NewYorkTimes.com