The City of Tallahassee has agreed to sell the Capitol City Country Club golf course to the club for about $1.2 million.
The almost 180-acre property is currently leased to the club for a dollar a year. That’s due to a hundred-year agreement the city entered to allow the course to remain white only after segregation was outlawed in the 1950’s.
The site is also a former plantation and includes unmarked graves of people who were enslaved.
The deal will sell the golf course but allow the city to maintain a memorial for the deceased. A deal was also struck with Florida A&M university to allow their golf team to use the course for practice and tournaments.
Public comment on the issue took several hours. Most of the speakers opposed the sale.
One of them was Delaitre Hollinger.
“Knowing that black people were shut out of this club by a racist leasing agreement enacted to illegally deny them access to public lands. I do not, under any circumstances, agree to the sale of this property to this club,” he said.
The sale was approved in the commission’s common 3-2 split. Commissioner Curtis Richardson supported the sale and criticized some of the sentiments of those who spoke against it.
“I have worked hard to improve the life of African Americans in this community from the time they gave me the opportunity to serve them as a member of the Leon County School Board, almost 30 years ago, I have served almost half of my adult life,” he said.
Commissioner Jeremy Matlow disagreed with the sale.
“If we want to keep golf in perpetuity, we need to be talking about how we make sure people who live here, who vote here, who own this property, now have the ability to play golf on that golf course in the future. Selling this golf course for $1.2 million takes that all away from us,” he said.
Some of the money from the sale will be used for the burial site.