We last talked about Babe Didrickson, an athlete whose accomplishments began to break down the prejudice against women in sports. But it was another athlete who attacked not only the gender barrier, but the barrier of racial hatred as well.

            In 1950, 23-year-old tennis player Althea Gibson became the first African American player, man or woman, to compete at the U.S. National Championships, now known as the U.S. Open. She went on to become the first African American woman to win major titles: the French Open in 1956, and Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in 1957 and 1958.

            Those last two years, the Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year — no racial qualifier, just the best. After her first Wimbledon triumph, she was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, only the second African American person to be so recognized, after Olympic runner Jesse Owens, who was lauded along the Canyon of Heroes in 1936.

            Gibson credited Jackie Robinson, the Black baseball player who in 1947 broke through the color barrier in Major League Baseball, as her inspiration. But historians believe Gibson smashed an even greater barrier than Robinson.

             “You’re talking about an elite, country-club sport, which has a very different meaning in society” than baseball or other team sports, noted Damion Thomas, a curator for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.*

Lightning strikes the tennis world

            In fact, at Gibson’s first appearance at the Open in 1950, even nature seconded that statement. She won her first match, but the second match was halted by rain. During the ensuing storm, lightning shattered a stone eagle at the top of the stadium.

            “It may have been an omen that times were changing,” Gibson said.**

            Gibson was born to a family of sharecroppers in Silver, South Carolina, a speck of a town barely on the map, and the family moved to Harlem when she was 3 years old. She was a problem child — she hated school and often skipped to spend her days playing ball sports of all kinds. She excelled at women’s paddle tennis, and at the age of 13, she dropped out of school.

            Taking on the game of tennis, Gibson competed in tournaments for the American Tennis Association, which was almost exclusively Black in the 1940s. In 1946, two Black tennis-playing doctors, took Gibson under their wings.

            Soon-to-be welterweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife also befriended Gibson. The families of the doctors provided homes, tennis instruction and academic structure.  She graduated high school in 1949 in Wilmington, N.C., and from Florida A&M in 1953.

Show ‘em who you are

            Gibson had won the national Black women’s tennis championships two years running. But in 1950,  it looked like the lily-white United States Lawn Tennis Association would exclude her from the Nationals. Another tennis player took up Gibson’s cause.

            “If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of players, then it’s only fair that they meet this challenge on the courts,” wrote Alice Marble, a tennis star of the 1930s. To Alice, she wrote: “Don’t bother to tell ‘em who you are; prove it instead.”*** 

            Marble’s challenge prevailed and Gibson made her debut that year. Unlike Jackie Robinson, though, Gibson didn’t see herself a trailblazer for the entire Black community. She found that role too oppressive.

            “I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people,” she said. “I’m thinking of me and nobody else.”****

            Gibson believed instead that individual achievement on its own would lead to opportunities for everyone. Yet, no matter what she said, she did indeed broaden people’s ideas about who exactly gets the chance to excel.

            “Althea’s accomplishments set the stage for my success, but she also made a difference for people of all backgrounds in all areas,” said tennis star Venus Williams. “Through beneficiaries like me, Serena, and many others to come, her legacy will live on.”*****

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* Alicia Ault, “Althea Gibson’s Momentous Achievement,” Smithsonian (June 1, 2021).

** Mark Preston, “Gibson’s Forest Hills Debut,” United States Tennis Association (February 5, 2020).

*** American Lawn Tennis (July 1, 1950). Alice Marble wrote an editorial for this issue of the magazine, along with an open letter to Gibson in February 1950, to which Gibson replied in the same issue.

**** Sally H. Jacobs, “Althea Gibson, Tennis Star Ahead of Her Times, Gets Her Due,” New York Times (August 26, 2019).

***** Endorsement for Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson, by Frances Clayton Grey (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).