Dr. Brown’s rejection, first reported by The Post and Courier newspaper, drew widespread condemnation. The local March of Dimes said it would no longer hold its annual bowling tournament at the club, as it had done since 1945. The Kiwanis Club no longer meets there. The College of Charleston and Porter-Gaud, the prestigious local prep school that Dr. Brown attended, have also severed ties.

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The club’s president and members of its board did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them for comment. One reform-minded club member who spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of damaging professional relationships, wondered whether the club’s days might be numbered. “Who’s going to touch us?” he said. “We’re radioactive.”

The rifle club, with about 800 current members, has played a significant role in Charleston’s history. Founded by German immigrants, the club’s annual schützenfest, a festival built around sport-shooting, grew after the Civil War into the city’s biggest public party.

During the volatile days of Reconstruction, though, the club allowed other clubs of armed white men to march in the schützenfest parade. Jeff Strickland, an associate professor of history at Montclair State University in New Jersey, contends that their presence turned the parade into an intimidating expression of white paramilitary force, as groups like the Ku Klux Klan began terrorizing newly freed blacks in the South.

The connection with German ethnic pride had long since dwindled when Dr. Brown was growing up a couple of miles away. He knew the place as just another whites-only club still dotting neighborhoods like his on Charleston’s upper peninsula, which had once been majority white but had flipped to majority black after the city desegregated its schools.

But in other ways, Dr. Brown felt welcome in the city. His father, the founder of a military contractor that at one point employed more than 300 people, served on civic boards and commissions and moved easily in white society; Mayor Riley eulogized him when he died in 1994.