5 NOVEMBER 13-19, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Judge Flanigan’s courtroom was out of ses- sion on Monday, August 7, 1961. His honor had a 10:12 tee time. Flanigan was set to make his debut in the Colorado Golf Association Match Play Championship at Cherry Hills Country Club, where a year earlier, Arnold Palmer had overcome a seven-stroke defi cit to win the U.S. Open. But when Flanigan arrived at the course, he was prohibited from walking on the fi rst tee. Seeing the judge, executives from the CGA told him to go home: “Negroes are not allowed.” The CGA had an offi cial policy of rec- ognizing only the oldest private club that counted Denver’s public courses as its home, which kept membership all-white. Flanigan was a member of the East Denver Golf Club, an all-Black club he’d founded almost two de- cades earlier that played out of City Park Golf Course. After chastising the district court judge for not divulging that he was Black when he registered for the tournament, the CGA executive admitted the organization normally didn’t think about asking regis- trants their race. “If we allowed you to play,” Flanigan was told, “we’d be shut down.” A few days after Flanigan’s rejection at Cherry Hills, another East Denver Golf Club member, Jerome Biffl e, made a tee time at Park Hill Golf Club, the daily-fee golf course a few blocks northeast of City Park. Although Biffl e and his friends had played the course before, the foursome was turned away this time. After barring Biffl e, a local high school teacher and guidance counselor, from teeing it up, the starter declared golf was a “gentle- man’s game and we want to keep it that way.” Flanigan and Biffl e had exposed institu- tional racism in Denver golf. Their challenge to the barriers placed between them and certain tee boxes was years in the making, and these episodes occurred against the backdrop of civil rights demonstrations by Freedom Riders across the South, which had been constant throughout the summer. However, neither Flanigan nor Biffl e was an activist, and it’s unclear if they deliberately set out to change the course of golf. Flanigan was so intent on following pro- tocol that he ordered his court staff to wear gray jackets, which he purchased for them, to maintain “the dignity of the courtroom.” Biffl e, who grew up in the neighborhood, was surely aware of Park Hill’s reputation when he crossed Colorado Boulevard to make a tee time, though. “Negros are gener- ally not refused rental of the ballrooms and bars,” an East Denver Golf Club member had written earlier in 1961. “They patronize the dining hall for lunch, etc., but the course cannot be played.” Park Hill Golf Course was built on land formerly owned by George Clayton, Den- ver’s largest property owner in the 1860s, a decade before Colorado became a state and a hundred years before Biffl e set foot on the property. Clayton amassed his fortune sell- ing clothing, boots and mining equipment on Larimer Square. Upon his death, he left his property to the City of Denver in a trust “establishing, and forever maintaining a permanent college...[for] poor white male orphan children.” Before it was a golf course, the land was used as a dairy farm, part of the agricultural curriculum for the boys. In 1930, an engineer and stockbroker named Bob Shearer leased the farm from the Clayton Trust, got rid of the cows, and turned the property into a golf course. Shearer, a member of Cherry Hills, hosted a week-long tournament every July that attracted big- name golfers, as well as a six-fi gure Calcutta: an open auction where gamblers buy into participants. Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Babe Zaharias all participated in the event, as did heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, an exception to the policy that restricted Blacks from playing the course. Flanigan and Biffl e had navigated Den- ver’s spoken and unspoken rules of segre- gation for decades. continued on page 6 MONIKA SWIDERSKI
