Free to use Westminster, CO, United States Close-Up Photo of Golf Ball | Thomas Ward
Free to use Westminster, CO, United States Close-Up Photo of Golf Ball | Thomas Ward
The Shady Rest Golf & Country Club was listed in the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places in 2022.
The Shady Rest Golf & Country Club is the oldest African American country club in the United States founded at a time when separate black institutions were surging in an increasingly segregated America. In September 1921, a group of prominent Black investors, purchased the nine-hole golf course and circa 1740 clubhouse once known as the Ephraim Tucker Farmhouse from Westfield Country Club. With its 9-hole course, six tennis courts, croquet, horseback riding, a baseball diamond and skeet shooting, Shady Rest Golf and Country Club likely was the first African American country club established with the same amenities as its white counterparts.
During the years 1921-1937, the golf club was nationally significant for its associations with the earliest African American golf pioneers and cemented its legacy as one of our nation’s oldest surviving community centers dedicated to the social and recreational pursuits of an emerging black middle class.
For 33 years (1931-1964), it was the home and workplace of John Matthew Shippen, Jr. (1879-1968), the first African American to compete in the U.S. Open, he was also the first American professional golfer and is recognized as a pioneer of the sport.
In addition to golf, the club provided opportunities for tennis, the New Jersey Tennis Association, Inc. (NJTA), formed in 1922, was headquartered at Shady Rest. The Association hosted tournaments sanctioned by the all-Black American Tennis Association (ATA) founded in 1916. Through the 1950s, Shady Rest was the pre-eminent African American tennis venue. Two-time Wimbledon champ Althea Gibson, a regular on the tennis courts at Shady Rest, was national runner-up in the women's singles.
It was a significant entertainment venue, playing host to some of the biggest names in American jazz and cultural history including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, and Cab Calloway. Shady Rest was also a forum for Black leaders and social activists including W.E.B. DuBois, a Harvard Ph.D. scholar in African American studies.
Original source can be found here.
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