To the casual observer, the hundreds of people gathered at a downtown hotel looked like they were just having a good time playing bridge. But behind the trumps and tricks lies a little-known chapter of racial discrimination in America that African-Americans confronted for decades before the civil rights movement.
Nearly 3,000 blacks from across the country met at the Chicago Hilton and Towers this past week for the 64th annual national tournament of the American Bridge Association, which formed in 1932 after blacks were excluded from membership in the American Contract Bridge League, which was then and still is a predominantly white group.
Although the implications of prejudice in a card game may seem insignificant compared to what blacks fought for in the realm of education, housing and politics, the story behind the gathering serves as a reminder that racial struggle has infiltrated even the most mundane aspects of American life.
That the thousands of players in Chicago have chosen to maintain an identity as a black subset of the bridge world shows that the specters of the past have not quite vanished, even as many African-Americans are assimilated in the white bridge-playing world.
Although there have been no stars in the bridge world to compare with Tiger Woods in golf, players and teachers of the game now say bridge is a color-blind pastime in which blacks and whites are uniting to revamp the image of the game: as youthful and challenging rather than the province of graying retirees or middle-age matrons.
Ron Smith, an African-American player who has won several major American Contract Bridge League tournaments, says he has never felt discriminated against in the serious bridge world dominated by whites. Today, he is the only black to have achieved the highest level of stature in the ACBL–that of a “grand life master.”
“I was never made to feel I was a spectacle. I didn’t think anything about it,” said Smith, 47, an options trader who lives in San Francisco.
When Smith began playing 33 years ago, he started in the predominantly white league, the more serious of the two major bridge organizations in the United States. When he won his first big tournament in Jackson, Miss., white colleagues took him to a fancy restaurant in town where a black wait staff served him, their first black customer, he recalls.
“Everybody I know who is black, they are welcome at ACBL–and they feel welcome too,” Smith said.
The American Bridge Association actually grew out of the American Tennis Association, a group of black tennis players who were barred from the all-white clubs of the 1930s. The tennis players wanted something to do after their afternoon matches in Buchroe Beach, Va., and bridge seemed like the logical choice. The group held its first national tournament in Virginia for a few dozen people in 1933 and gradually grew in membership to the 5,000 players it claims today.
Many local chapters of the American Contract Bridge League began opening up to blacks in 1952 and by 1967, the league included a clause in its bylaws banning discrimination on the basis of race. Today, most black American Bridge Association members also belong to the 180,000-member American Contract Bridge League but maintain their allegiance to the African-American group because of its social and philanthropic emphasis.
In the early years of the African-American league, black players met informally in one another’s homes and then formed regional groups for local tournaments. At the time, the bridge clubs were one of the best outlets for blacks to socialize, says Ken Cox of New York City, a member for 50 years.
When the black group’s popularity grew and members traveled to national tournaments across the country, the association often had trouble finding hotels willing to sponsor the event, said Chicagoan Arnold Jones, a group past-president and member since 1968.
In those years, players en route to national tournaments carried little black books listing hospitable motels and addresses of fellow members willing to host visitors, Jones said. “If you wanted to drive and not have to go out to the woods to go the bathroom, you needed to know where to go,” he said.
Tom Smith, editor of The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge , said “clear-cut discrimination” existed in the bridge world for several years. It stemmed from racial segregation found in all aspects of society, not to mention the nature of the card game as a genteel pastime for the well-to-do.
In the group’s early years, black professionals who could afford the long trips to tournaments dominated the black league. But the club gradually got more diverse, and now blacks from all economic backgrounds belong, says association spokeswoman Carrolena Key.
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Bridge is a serious game requiring intense concentration and skill, but black league players say their tournaments have a much more social and laid-back atmosphere than the larger league. This past week, players sitting around card tables in groups of four often engaged in quiet conversation and laughter between games.
Black players compete simply to win points and titles, and the group donates its funds to college scholarships and service organizations such as the Urban League and the Rainbow Coalition. Last year, $19,400 in donations and scholarships were awarded, Key said.
American Bridge Association members never seriously considered merging their own group with the mostly white league, although the American Contract Bridge League president proposed the idea to Jones while he was the black group’s president in the 1970s.
“It wasn’t that we had any major opposition to it. It’s just that our members didn’t want to lose our identity after we’ve struggled so much socially,” Jones said.
Master bridge teacher John Wilson, a retired hospital administrator, was one of two African-American teachers to attend the recent American Bridge Teachers Association meeting in Albuquerque.
Wilson said that while there continues to be discrimination in the bridge culture, it is no more prevalent than in the everyday world.
“It’s less in many respects because if you go to an ACBL tournament, it’s to play bridge. You’re accepted in accordance with your ability more so than in the general business world, where they throw in a lot of other ramifications,” said Wilson, who lives in Winter Springs, Fla.
Still, both major bridge groups now face the same major challenge–overcoming the stereotype as an hours-long math problem played by older people.
“We’re going to start a marketing campaign of bridge as fun and intellectually stimulating,” said Brent Manley, executive editor of the Bridge Bulletin, the monthly magazine of the American Contract Bridge League.
It won’t be an easy sell.
At the Chicago tournament, which ended Saturday, just a handful of players in their 20s and 30s attended, but there were plenty of white-haired seniors. Teenagers recruited to work the event said bridge has failed miserably in capturing their interest.
“It’s just so boring,” Brian Palmer, a 14-year-old from New York City, said while looking on at the hushed crowd of older players sitting in quiet concentration.
Although Palmer’s grandparents tried to turn him on to the game, he’s much happier with ’90s style video games like Nintendo. “Young people are going to want action and fast-paced music,” he said.
Donald Pedro, an on-and-off American Bridge Association member from Chicago since 1954, said the group’s roots as a haven from discrimination still embody the spirit of the African-American association.
“Now that we can join (the predominantly white league) many of us do, but we still owe our allegiance to the ABA,” he said. “It’s hard to think of thousands of people as your friends, but these are our friends here. It’s because we’re together. It was made that way.”