Scottsdale has sold hospitality since the 1930s. In the 1950s, while it was becoming a resort town and calling itself “The West’s Most Western Town,” it also had a guest list. Who was left off it is documented, in baseball biographies, Jewish newspapers and the city’s own historic context. It just isn’t on any of the plaques. This note puts the three main episodes in one place: a ballplayer, a resort and a golf club.
February 1959: Pumpsie Green and the Safari
The Boston Red Sox moved their spring training to Scottsdale in 1959. They were also the last team in the major leagues without a Black player. According to his Society for American Baseball Research biography, every other club had integrated by June 1958. That spring the Red Sox brought Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, an infielder who had hit his way up through their farm system.
Green signed his 1959 contract in Scottsdale on February 25, put on the uniform and worked out the same day. The Boston Globe’s Roger Birtwell opened his story: “The Boston Red Sox – in spring training, at least – today broke the color line.” After the workout Green had to travel alone to the Frontier Motel in Phoenix, about 17 miles away. He had been turned away at the team hotel, the Safari on Scottsdale Road. Birtwell explained why: “Negroes are not permitted to live in Scottsdale.” Jack Malaney, the club’s publicity director, told reporters the Safari had simply run out of rooms. The writers didn’t believe him.
The columnist Milton Gross described the arrangement: “From night to morning, the first Negro player to be brought to spring training by the Boston Red Sox ceases to be a member of the team he hopes to make as a shortstop.” He quoted Green on his evenings: “I get a sandwich and a glass of milk and a book and I read myself to sleep.” Green eventually took a room at the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, where the San Francisco Giants, integrated since 1949, housed their whole team.
He hit .327 that spring (18 for 55), was voted the top rookie in camp, and was sent to Minneapolis anyway on April 7. The Boston NAACP asked the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to look into the club’s hiring. On June 12 the commission accepted a pledge from general manager Bucky Harris that a Red Sox executive would visit Scottsdale to get guarantees of integrated housing for 1960. Green made his major-league debut in Chicago on July 21, 1959. Whether the executive came, and what the hotels told him, is not in the biography.
“Not permitted to live in Scottsdale”
Was that true as law, or only as practice? Nobody has produced a written ordinance. Tougaloo College’s national database of sundown towns lists Scottsdale as a “probable” one. Its year of interest is 1959, it answers “Yes, Strong Oral Tradition” to the question of an ordinance, and its only cited source is a National Public Radio conversation between Scott Simon and the baseball writer Howard Bryant about Green. Bryant’s line on air was that Black people “could not live there after dark.” Treat the label as a contested one, resting on the Globe’s 1959 sentence and on memory.
The census shows the effect either way. The city’s 2012 historic context counts 46 nonwhite residents in 1960, half of one percent of a town of about 10,000. The Black population was 123 in 1970 and 336 in 1980, still well under half a percent. In 2010 it was 1.6 percent. In Arizona a 1953 court decision, won by Phoenix civil rights activists, had already declared school segregation laws illegal, a year before Brown v. Board of Education. Phoenix passed a public accommodations ordinance in 1964, the state passed a civil rights law in 1965, and the federal Civil Rights Act of July 2, 1964 made the Safari’s kind of “full” illegal.
“Restricted”: Camelback Inn and the ADL
For Jewish travelers in the 1950s the industry’s word was “restricted,” and everyone knew what it meant. The city’s historic context says the Arizona Biltmore was the only major resort in the Phoenix area that welcomed Jews in the 1950s and 1960s. A 1957 Anti-Defamation League study, cited by Phoenix’s Jewish News, found that nearly 25 percent of American hotels discriminated by religion, and 44.6 percent in Arizona. Lawrence Bell, executive director of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society, calls much of it “gentlemen’s anti-Semitism”: a resort that suspected a guest was Jewish said it was full and suggested another “very fine establishment” nearby. He also points out that Jews were not the only people turned away.
The ADL’s Arizona members, among them Joe Stocker and Fran Waldman, focused on one target: the Camelback Inn, Jack Stewart’s 1936 casita resort on Lincoln Drive in what is now Paradise Valley. Their theory, in the city’s summary, was that if a resort that prominent changed, the rest would follow.
Their best weapon was conventions. The ADL warned groups about the Inn’s policy, and a national meeting of prosecutors pulled out. The sources disagree on the details. The city’s 2012 context, citing William Collins’ history of Phoenix, says the National Association of Attorneys General cancelled its 1954 annual meeting there. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s 1961 report says it was the American Association of United States District Attorneys, “some years ago.” Either way, the cancellation made the policy a national controversy.
Their best story came in late 1956. Louis Vosburgh of Cleveland wrote asking for two weeks in early 1957. Jack Stewart wrote back asking about his church and club affiliations, and reservations manager Richard S. Den Uyl then asked for his “nationality.” Vosburgh, who was not Jewish, answered at length: “My ancestry is Holland Dutch. … My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch with a little French thrown in. If this is objectionable, I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.” His friend H.W. Hill, also not Jewish, wrote for early-1957 rooms too and was accepted without a question. The Inn then turned Vosburgh down, citing his “smart aleck” letter. When Hill wrote in Vosburgh’s defense, he was refused as well. Vosburgh let the ADL publicize the letters.
On August 25, 1961, the JTA reported that Camelback Inn had given up the policy. It quoted a letter from Stewart: “It is true that several years ago we had a restricted policy at Camelback Inn. Personally, I never favored it, but it was requested by those who were guests here. We have some Jewish bookings this season. If they are pleasant people, they can return. So it is with Gentiles, too.” Stanley S. Jacobs, the ADL’s regional director in Phoenix, reported that the Inn was keeping to it. The city’s history says the other resorts eventually dropped theirs too.
The club they built instead
When the clubs wouldn’t have them, some Jewish families built their own. The Jewish News says members of the community created two places open to everyone: the Arizona Manor Hotel at 24th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix, and the Century Country Club in Scottsdale, now the Orange Tree Golf Resort near 56th Street and Shea Boulevard. Golf-course histories date the course to 1957 and say the members sold it in 1977, after which it became the public Orange Tree. We have not confirmed either date against a primary record. The club’s incorporation papers at the Arizona Corporation Commission, and its founders in the Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s files, would settle both. Most golfers who play Orange Tree today have no idea why it was built.
The neighborhood around it later became the center of Jewish Scottsdale. Congregation Beth Israel, founded in Phoenix in 1920, moved to 56th Street and Shea in 1997. The Valley of the Sun JCC opened its Scottsdale Road campus in 2002.
What the record doesn’t show
- What happened in 1960. The Red Sox promised to secure integrated housing in Scottsdale. The Scottsdale Progress for February and March of 1959 and 1960, in the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library, is the place to look.
- Everyone else. Green is the case that made the Boston papers. How the Orioles (here from 1956 to 1958), the Cubs and the Giants housed their Black players in Scottsdale is not written up anywhere we found. Howard Bryant’s Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and the team files at the Society for American Baseball Research are the starting points.
- Black workers. The resorts employed Black staff whose stories are missing. The George Washington Carver Museum in Phoenix and the Arizona Sun, Phoenix’s Black newspaper from 1942 to 1965, held in ASU’s digital collections, are where to look.
- The restricted years in full. The Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center, 122 E. Culver St. in Phoenix, holds ADL regional files and oral histories. Collins’ The Emerging Metropolis: Phoenix 1944–1973 (2005) is the published source the city relies on. Resort brochures from the 1950s in ASU’s Arizona Collection would show which properties printed “restricted clientele.”
Where to stand
The Safari is gone. It was demolished in 1999, and the Safari Drive condos at Scottsdale Road and Highland carry the name. Stand there before a spring-training game at Scottsdale Stadium, down the road, and think about a 25-year-old infielder riding 17 miles to sleep. Camelback Inn is still open. Have a drink on its lobby terrace and remember that in the 1950s “Where Time Stands Still” could come with a question about your church. If you golf, book a round at Orange Tree, the course built so that the people the clubs refused had somewhere to play.
For the neighborhood this town cleared a decade later, see The Barrio Under the Civic Center. For the schools, see Coronado School’s segregated classrooms.