Charlie Sifford carried a dream when he returned home from World War II, an Army veteran of the Battle of Okinawa: He wanted to be a professional golfer.

The son of a factory worker, he had caddied as a youngster at his whites-only hometown country club in Charlotte, N.C. — earning 60 cents a day and giving 50 to his mother — and at age 13 he sometimes broke par when caddies were allowed to play the course on Mondays. By his mid-20s he was a top-flight player.

When he met Jackie Robinson in 1947, soon after Robinson broke the modern Major League Baseball color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Sifford told him of his dream. Robinson replied that he could not be a quitter. Speaking from his own experience, Robinson told of the hostility that Sifford would face as a black man in a sport that had long been a white preserve. At the time, the P.G.A. of America maintained a Caucasians-only membership clause.

Sifford did encounter hostility, plenty of it, as he pursued his ambition, but he also did not quit, and as he neared 40 — an age when most golfers on the PGA Tour are winding down their careers — he broke pro golf’s racial barrier, becoming in 1960 the first black player in a PGA Tour event.