Michele Samuels likes to joke about the reason she’s the president of Detroit Golf Club.
“Because I have a hard time saying no to things,” she said with a hearty laugh just before the 2025 Rocket Classic teed off at her club earlier this week.
Samuels, 62, has some serious historic leadership coursing through her veins. Lifeblood that propelled her through a life of accomplishment. She strived for more, took risks, set precedents and helped people along the way, en route to becoming Detroit Golf Club’s first Black female president since its founding in 1899.
“I’m humbled to be in this position,” she said, “because I know it’s it means a lot to the membership and even to the community.
“I sat in a session the other day that Rocket put on about the history of Black golf in Detroit, and that really gave me a strong perspective about where Black people in Detroit were kind of denied access to membership in clubs.”
A historic resistance
But they found a way, Samuels said. Black Detroiters played city municipal courses. They played Chandler Park on the east side and Rouge Park on the west side.
“So they had kind of their own community that worked together,” she said, touching on a theme that has run through her life and one that harkened back to her great, great grandfather, William Parker, an escaped slave and a central figure in the historic Christiana Riot on Sept. 11, 1851.
Parker was part of a successful resistance against a federal marshal raid at his house in Christiana, 50 miles west of Philadelphia. At his home — where he and his wife, Eliza, protected escaped slaves — Parker and others fought off slave catchers in a battle that resulted in the death of a slave owner. He immediately fled to Canada through New York.
The Christiana Riot, which appeared on the front page of the first edition of The New York Times, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 were high-profile precursors to the Civil War. Parker even wrote an essay about it called “The Freedman’s Story” in an 1866 edition of The Atlantic magazine.
Harper and his family settled in Buxton, Ontario, an Underground Railroad community 50 miles east of Detroit. He became a conductor and station master who guided people to freedom through the secret network. He later moved to Kenton, Ohio, where he died in 1891, when he was about 70.
Samuels grew up in Windsor knowing none of this. She was entirely unaware of Parker’s legacy until she was in her 30s because the family avoided the topic for generations.
“It’s kind of same thing that happened to the Japanese after the internment camps,” she said. “Everybody just wanted to integrate, right? Everybody wanted to live a peaceful life.”
By this time in her life, Samuels was well on her way to a successful 35-year career at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, instinctively applying her great, great grandfather’s leadership and instinct to succeed and help others.
“When I learned about it, I did draw a lot of inspiration from it,” she said. “It explained a lot about my who I am, and why I’m always fighting for something and leading.”
At Blue Cross, she held numerous leadership roles in various departments. She was promoted to vice president by Dick Whitmer, the father of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She retired in January as senior VP, general auditor and compliance officer.
Taking up the game
Samuels’ golfing life began in her early 20s when she realized the game’s full benefits.
“I started to recognize as I started to move up into management,” she said, “even when I was in public accounting, seeing the business that’s transacted on the on the golf course, the fellowship that happens at the golf clubs is really how I started.”
In her 30s, Samuels and her husband, Paul, started playing more. She knew DGC members through business connections and decided to join 2012.
“Love the environment, love the diversity of the club,” she said. “It’s very unique. I’ve always been a supporter of Detroit, and to be able to part of a golf club that’s centered in the city of Detroit is just an honor.”
Samuels doesn’t want it known she’s a 24 handicap, so please keep that to yourself.
“I’m a fun-time golfer,” she said, explaining how much she enjoys the women’s league at DGC that’s about a lot more than just chasing a little ball around a course.
“It’s a good time to fellowship,” she said. “And after golf, we usually have a D.J. on the patio and we dance, and we have a great time. It’s an environment that I think encourages women to come in and golf.”
That devotion to female fellowship extends beyond golf. Samuels bowled a 300 game in March at Luxury Lanes in Ferndale as part of the DGC’s couples league. But she made an even bigger mark on the Detroit Athletic Club’s lanes.
Before she left the DAC in January, she helped create the first prime-time women’s league — which required moving a men’s league — in order to give working women, and especially younger ones, a better chance to participate, network and meet some of the city’s female power brokers.
“I was the leader of the committee that helped us get a Wednesday league at 5:30 (p.m.) and that league has been hugely successful,” she said. “So that’s part of the legacy that I left there. Really proud of it.”
From golf and bowling to Harleys
Lest you think Samuels sticks to safer sports and activities, you should know she’s an avid motorcycle rider. She was inspired by watching young women she saw one day riding “crotch rocket” motorcycles on Jefferson Avenue.
Now that she owns three Harley-Davidsons, she has ridden the treacherous Million Dollar Highway in Colorado and the Tail of the Dragon route that borders North Carolina and Tennessee. She also has taken trips across the country, through Canada and even in Africa.
“I love the planning, you know, to do a long-distance ride and to plan it out,” she said. “Have some things on the ride that are certain and some things that are uncertain. I love challenging myself.”
The DGC presidency also put plenty on Samuels’ plate. It’s enough for anyone to guide a club through the preparations of an annual PGA Tour event. But Samuels also was a key figure in getting the club ready for the $16 million course renovation that starts right after this year’s tournament, and in hiring general manager Bruce Pruitt in March as DGC moves from being a member-led club to one led by a GM.
With her one-year term winding down, Samuels plans to enter full retirement mode. That means working on her golf game and planning a special motorcycle trip. She wants to follow her great, great grandfather’s path from his enslavement on a Maryland plantation to Christiana, where there’s a memorial stone in his honor.
“So I want to do that ride all the way to Rochester (N.Y.), take the ferry across to Canada, back down to Buxton,” she said. “And every Labor Day, there’s a homecoming in Buxton for all of the families that originated in that Underground Railroad community.”
What would William Parker have said about all this?
What would he have said if he knew near the end of his life, with the embers of the Civil War only recently extinguished, that his great, great granddaughter would fly fearlessly down highways on another continent, climb the highest rungs of the corporate ladder (while helping to pull people up with her) and then become the first Black female president of one of Michigan’s most esteemed golf clubs?
No one knows what William Parker would have said to his great, great granddaughter. But it might have started with something like this: “Madam President, it’s an honor.”
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on X @cmonarrez.