![]() We talk about the club in Westchester that rejected black Scarsdale resident and millionaire magazine publisher Earl Graves, who sits on Fortune 500 boards, owns a Pepsi-distribution franchise, raised three bright Ivy League children, and holds prestigious honorary degrees. My black Ivy League friends and I talk about black company vice-presidents who have to beg white subordinates to invite them out for golf or tennis. So why shouldn’t we-especially when we have the same ambitions, social graces, credentials, and salaries? When I talk to my black lawyer or investment-banker friends or my wife, a brilliant black woman who has degrees from Harvard College, law school, and business school, I learn that our white counterparts are being accepted by dozens of these elite institutions. I am not ashamed to admit that I one day want to be a partner and a part of this network. How many clients and deals am I going to line up on the asphalt parking lot of my local public tennis courts? As a young lawyer, I realize that these clubs are where business people network, where lawyers and investment bankers meet potential clients and arrange deals. Today, I’m back where I started-on a street of five- and six-bedroom colonials with expensive cars, and neighbors who all belong somewhere. My grandparents owned a Memphis trucking firm, and as far back as I can remember, our family was well off and we had little trouble fitting in-even though I was the only black kid on the high-school tennis team, the only one in the orchestra, the only one in my Roman Catholic confirmation class. In my crowd, the question wasn’t “Do you belong?” It was “Where?” ![]() ![]() The family next door belonged to the Scarsdale Golf Club. My teenage tennis partner from Scarsdale introduced me to the Beach Point Club on weekends before he left for Harvard. Across the street, my best friend introduced me to the Westchester Country Club before he left for Groton and Yale. I grew up in an affluent white neighborhood in Westchester, and all my playmates and neighbors belonged somewhere. Back then, in 1972, I saw these clubs only as a place where families socialized. I remember stepping up to the pool at a country club when I was 10 and setting off a chain reaction: Several irate parents dragged their children out of the water and fled. Quite frankly, I got into this country club the only way that a black man like me could-as a $7-an-hour busboy.Īfter seeing dozens of news stories about Dan Quayle, Billy Graham, Ross Perot, and others who either belonged to or frequented white country clubs, I decided to find out what things were really like at a club where I saw no black members. Although these might seem like good credentials, they’re not the ones that brought me here. I’m a graduate of Princeton University (1983) and Harvard Law School (1988), and I’ve written eleven nonfiction books. I’m a 30-year-old corporate lawyer at a midtown Manhattan firm, and I make $105,000 a year. Before me stands the 100-year-old Greenwich Country Club- the country club-in the affluent, patrician, and very white town of Greenwich, Connecticut, where there are eight clubs for 59,000 people. The building’s six huge chimneys, the two wings with slate-gray shutters, and the white-brick façade loom over a luxuriant golf course. At one bend of the drive, a freshly clipped lawn and a trail of yellow daffodils slope gently up to the four-pillared portico of a white Georgian colonial. I drive up the winding lane past a long stone wall and beneath an archway of 60-feet maples.
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