Save "Muni" Campaign Ongoing, UT Determined To Not Listen

It's been nearly twenty years since Stanford alums had to fight off an attempt to develop that historic course, but that losing effort surely isn't on University of Texas system's radar as Lions Municipal Golf Course continues to be under siege.

Ralph Haurwitz in the Austin-American Statesman reports on the latest effort to register the first segregated course in the Confederacy states, which also happened to have been key to the development of Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite. Crenshaw supports the effort to save the course. The University does not.

Extensive scholarship on Southern golf course desegregation “proves that Muny was the first golf course to desegregate in the states of the former Confederacy,” said Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, a Yale University history professor, in a letter supporting national listing.

“It is as much a piece of the American story — and potentially as powerful as a teachable experience — as the historic battlefields we protect and embrace,” wrote Jacqueline Jones, who chairs UT’s history department.

The Board of Regents cited financial and ethical obligations when it decided in 2011 to let the city’s lease expire without renewal in May 2019. The city pays a few hundred thousand dollars a year in rent for land that could fetch at least $5.5 million a year if leased for a mixed-use development, the UT System’s executive director of real estate estimated at the time.

Got to help pay those assistant football coaches!

KXAN's David Scott filed a separate report (including video) on the effort to save a community treasure.