Maggie Hathaway: The Activist With a Golf Course to Her Name
A case can be made that the most consequential figure in Los Angeles golf history never won a professional tournament. She took up the game in her mid-40s, on a bet, and topped out around a 14 handicap. Yet at the corner of 98th Street and Western Avenue in South Los Angeles, tucked behind Jesse Owens Park just down Century Boulevard from SoFi Stadium, sits a Los Angeles County golf course that carries a civil rights activist's name — and in March 2026 it reopened after a renovation with a $21 million total project budget, designed pro bono by Gil Hanse, the architect who restored Los Angeles Country Club's North Course.
Maggie Hathaway was not born an Angeleno — almost nobody in LA golf's story was. She was born in Campti, Louisiana, on July 1, 1911, and came west in 1931. But the fights that define her happened here, on this city's public courses, and the course that bears her name is now the most vivid monument LA golf has to the people who pried the game open.
The Bet That Started It All
Hathaway's golf origin story is one of the great anecdotes in the game. In 1955 — she was 43 or 44 — she went out to Griffith Park, the city's flagship municipal complex, not to play, but to confront heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Louis had been playing in celebrity pro-ams while genuinely excellent Black professionals like Bill Spiller were still barred from the field, and Hathaway intended to reprimand him for it.
She caught up with him at a short par 3. As she recounted to the Los Angeles Times in 1997: Louis hit his shot onto the green, and she scoffed that anybody could do that. "He said, 'OK, you try. If you hit the green, I'll buy you a bag of golf clubs.' I hit the green with the first shot I ever took in my life, and he bought me the clubs."
She played for the rest of her life. What she found almost immediately was that many Southern California courses wouldn't let her — and that most amateur and professional tournaments were open to whites only. Changing that became her life's work.
From Campti to Hollywood
Golf was Hathaway's third act. In Hollywood she found work as an extra and, eventually, as a body double for Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky and a stand-in on Stormy Weather. She walked away from the studios after refusing a stereotypical role in a Woodrow Wilson biopic, and recorded blues sides including "Bayou Baby Blues" and "School Girl Blues." A 1940s photograph held by UCLA Library Special Collections captures the company she kept: Hathaway at the Gibbs Jockey Club Cafe in Los Angeles alongside the singer Hadda Brooks and Dorothy Dandridge.
That same refusal to accept the industry's terms carried into her organizing. She co-founded the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP, chartered on June 1, 1962, and served as its president. In 1967 she joined Sammy Davis Jr. and Willis Edwards in holding the first NAACP Image Awards to honor Black performers the mainstream award shows overlooked — an institution that outlived her and now fills prime-time television every year.
"I'm a Militant": Cracking LA's Public Golf Open
Hathaway never softened her own description of her methods. "I'm a militant," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997.
Her campaign ran on every track at once. She fought to integrate play at the Western Avenue course now known as Chester Washington Golf Course, the historic hub of Black golf in Los Angeles. In 1963 she organized the Minority Associated Golfers (MAG) — rendered in some accounts as the Minority Association for Golfers — to support young Black players working toward the professional ranks. That same year, two years after the PGA of America finally deleted the "Caucasian-only" clause from its constitution, she led a picket at the Long Beach municipal course during a PGA event over the continued exclusion of Black professionals.
She later admitted exactly one regret from those years: picketing Bing Crosby's tournament, before learning Crosby had been quietly pushing the PGA to admit Black players. It says something about her that the regret wasn't the militancy — it was the target.
The through-line of her activism connects directly to the rest of Los Angeles golf's breakthrough story. Charlie Sifford, the first Black member of the PGA Tour, won the 1969 Los Angeles Open at municipal Rancho Park — a victory in front of the public-course galleries Hathaway had spent a decade agitating alongside. And when Lee Elder became the first Black golfer to play the Masters in 1975, Hathaway — who had campaigned publicly for his invitation — was at Augusta National to see it. When Elder's opening drive was announced at the first tee, she fainted. She came to in the course medical facility next to Gary Player, the South African star whose appearance in a tournament she had once protested. They left the room friends, and stayed friends.
Thirty Years on the Golf Beat
Hathaway's other weapon was a typewriter. By 1958 she was writing a golf column for the California Eagle, and she went on to spend more than three decades as the golf columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the city's leading Black-owned newspaper — one of the first columns in the country dedicated to chronicling Black professional golfers. She was still filing in 1997 — at 85, going by her recorded birthdate; she pointedly refused to give her age — when she was preparing to cover her second Masters for the Sentinel. The headline on one of her columns that spring captured her whole career in seven words: "Have We Built Enough Bridges for Tiger?"
The Course With Her Name on It
The course itself opened in 1962 as the Jack Thompson Golf Course, a modest nine-hole par 3 behind Jesse Owens Park, built with children and beginners in mind. The Los Angeles Sentinel has described Hathaway as the course's longtime director and coach, teaching the neighborhood's kids on the county's most affordable fairways. In 1997 — while she was alive to see it — Los Angeles County renamed it the Maggie Hathaway Golf Course.
Maggie Hathaway Golf Course
Los Angeles, CA
Hathaway died on September 24, 2001, at age 90. For the next two decades her course soldiered on as one of the great bargains in American golf: nine friendly par 3s with green fees of about seven dollars, home to Western States Golf Association and Southern Area Youth Program events, its 450-square-foot "clubhouse" a concession stand where you paid your green fee through a window.
Reborn in 2026: A $21 Million Thank-You
Then the U.S. Open came to town. When the Los Angeles Country Club hosted the 2023 championship, organizers built a community legacy campaign — "Fore Youth" — around the question of what a major should leave behind in its host city. The answer landed nine miles south of LACC's gates: a rebuild of the tired par 3 with a total project budget of $21 million, roughly half of it earmarked for a clubhouse to be built in a later phase. Los Angeles County put in public money alongside private fundraising involving the USGA, the Southern California Golf Association, LACC members and other donors — published accounts differ on the exact split.
Gil Hanse — who had restored LACC's North Course and built the Cradle at Pinehurst — took the job pro bono, with the design credited to Hanse Golf Course Design, his firm with Jim Wagner.
The course closed in January 2025 and reopened with a ceremony on March 27, 2026, public play beginning the next morning. What came back is unlike any other short course in America: nine holes from roughly 56 to 126 yards whose greens deliberately echo the region's golden-age masterpieces — a reverse Redan, a double plateau, molar-shaped greens in the manner of George C. Thomas Jr.'s work at Riviera and LACC, even mounding that nods to the famous "Mae West" humps at Bel-Air. The practice facilities were rebuilt alongside the course, and a 4,100-square-foot clubhouse with a youth enrichment lab follows in the project's second phase.
The economics, pointedly, did not gentrify with the grass. The maximum green fee is $9.50 — still the most affordable in the county — and juniors play for about a dollar. Rounds roughly doubled within weeks of reopening.
Her Place in Los Angeles Golf History
Days before the reopening, Hathaway was inducted into the Southern California Golf Hall of Fame's class of 2026, alongside Bill Spiller — the same golfer whose exclusion had sent her marching up to Joe Louis at Griffith Park seventy-one years earlier. County officials at the ceremony called her Southern California's "First Lady of Golf."
Los Angeles golf history is mostly a story of spectacular stages — Riviera and Hogan's Alley, the Los Angeles Open's hundred-year run, Hollywood's clubhouses. Maggie Hathaway's story is the other half: the fight over who got to stand on those stages at all. Alongside Babe Didrikson Zaharias breaking the LA Open's gender line at Griffith Park in 1938 and Charlie Sifford's 1969 win at Rancho Park, Hathaway's pickets, columns and confrontations made LA's municipal courses the place where golf's barriers actually fell. The city's grandest monuments to golf are private. Hers costs $9.50, takes a little over an hour to play, and is open to absolutely everyone — which is precisely the point.
Maggie Hathaway Golf Course
Los Angeles, CA
