GOP Hopeful Belonged to Whites-Only Country Club

One of the candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee belonged for more than a decade to a whites-only country club, Greg Sargent notes on Talking Points Memo. Katon Dawson, chairman of South Carolina’s Republican Party, resigned from the club in September as he was preparing to run for the national leadership, saying he’d been working against the no-blacks rule.

The State of Columbia, SC, reported in September that Dawson ended his 12-year membership at the Forest Lake Club—“where,” Sargent notes, “the first African American president in history apparently need not apply”—only when he discovered the newspaper was planning to break the news. (More Katon Dawson stories.)