Content area
Full Text
Twenty years ago Alabama's Shoal Creek Country Club never considered the possibility of a black member. At the same time, two New Yorkers, one white and one black, were getting teed off because there was no private club in New York where they could comfortably meet their peers.
But now, thanks to the efforts of those two, some help from a top management consultant and a cash infusion from a Korean entrepreneur, they now have a club.
The New Yorker Club will formally open next month with 300 charter members as New York's first multicultural business and social club. It will take over three floors in the Town Hall building on West 43rd Street vacated by the defunct New York University Club. It has been bankrolled by many of New York's leading black professionals, executives and business owners.
One of those is Robert Samuels, a vice president at Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., who founded the Urban Bankers Coalition, a group of black banking executives, in 1971. "One of our problems," he says, "was where to meet in a neutral environment. I didn't want to meet to discuss our mutual problems...