On Thursday, the U.S. Open kicks off at the venerable Pinehurst No. 2 for the fourth time. The media coverage of the event will undoubtedly focus on past winners; the village of Pinehurst’s quaint New England style streets; and Donald Ross, the Scottish course architect who built the famed course. Acclaimed country singer Luke Combs, a North Carolina native, has voiced vignettes about the village for NBC’s coverage.
Yet the spotlight is unlikely to travel across Highway 211 to Taylortown, a historically Black community whose population has provided the backbone to golf in the region for over a century. If the media coverage excludes Taylortown, it will be a missed opportunity to recognize the crucial role skilled Black caddies have played in the game’s history. It will also be a lost chance to think critically about why Black golfers are vastly underrepresented in professional golf — especially at a course with such a rich Black golfing history.
In 1895, the land that will host the U.S. Open this week was unrecognizable. In the second half of the 19th century, the turpentine and lumber industries laid waste to one third of Moore County’s longleaf pines, leaving only tree stumps in their wake.
When James W. Tufts, a Massachusetts businessman who had amassed wealth by selling soda fountains, arrived in the North Carolina Sandhills that year, he could hardly have envisioned a future land of lush green fairways. He bought the land for one dollar per acre and began building a modern health resort. Tufts never intended to build a golf course and was dead before the sport became central to Pinehurst. For labor, he turned to local Black and white workers who had done much of the work of tapping and felling the trees in the preceding decades.
Likely among the workers who built Pinehurst was Demus Taylor. Born enslaved, Taylor found himself in Pinehurst after a long life of laboring. He gained his freedom after the Civil War. Taylor then attempted to achieve financial security through farming, then through the turpentine industry, and finally in lumber camps. But like hundreds of thousands of other formerly enslaved Black southerners, exploitative sharecropping and labor practices kept him from financial security.
With the construction of Pinehurst came jobs for local workers like Taylor.........