Althea Gibson, Tennis Star Ahead of Her Time,
Gets Her Due at Last
by Sally H. Jacobs
In the summer of 1950, the national women’s tennis championships at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, reached a turning point. On one side was the favorite, Louise Brough, a blond Californian and the reigning Wimbledon champion. On the other side was the rangy, Harlem-raised Althea Gibson. She was not only the first African-American to play in the iconic tournament, the forerunner of the United States Open, but she also appeared headed toward a historic victory, leading by 1-6, 6-3, 7-6.
“Fans were shouting from the stands for Althea’s opponent to: ‘Beat the nigger. Beat the nigger,’ ” Bertram Baker, a New York Assemblyman, would recall later.
Then torrents of rain suddenly began to fall from the darkening skies. Fans raced for cover as a bolt of lightning shattered one of the stone eagles atop the stadium, and play was suspended.
“I’ll always remember it as the day the gods got angry,” said Baker, executive secretary of the American Tennis Association, an African-American organization.
But when the match resumed the next day, Gibson, 23, was visibly unnerved by the hordes of photographers, and Brough beat her in just 11 minutes.
Nonetheless, Gibson had broken the color barrier at the highest level of tennis and would go on to become the first black player to be ranked No. 1 in the world. She was the first African-American to win a Grand Slam title, at the 1956 French Championships, and the winner of both the U.S. national championship and Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958.
Allyn Baum/The New York Times
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But on Monday, the U.S.T.A. will unveil a granite sculpture of Gibson, who won 11Grand Slam titles before she retired and became reclusive in her later years.
“This is not just a player who won a ton of titles — this is someone who transcended our sport and opened a pathway for people of color,” said Katrina Adams, the first African-American U.S.T.A. president. “If there was no Althea, there’d be no me, because tennis would not have been so open to me. Everything she had to do was three times harder than it was for the normal person.”
Gibson, who died at 76 in 2003, was often called the Jackie Robinson of tennis, though she disliked the term. “I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people,” she told a reporter in 1957. “I’m thinking of me and nobody else.”
She became the first black champion in Wimbledon history in 1957 and accepted the trophy from Queen Elizabeth II. A ticker-tape parade up Broadway in New York feted her return. Gibson appeared on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time that year, the first black woman to do so.
“Shaking hands with the Queen of England,” she wrote in “I Always Wanted to Be Somebody,” her 1958 autobiography, “was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus.”
More than 60 years later, Gibson’s pioneering triumphs are rarely celebrated, though Serena and Venus Williams are among those who have expressed their admiration for her. The only competition that bears Gibson’s name is a seniors cup in Croatia. And yet the top three American women in the world rankings are black, a vivid reflection of Gibson’s breakthrough.
Now, as some African-American women with long-ignored contributions are at last getting their due, Gibson’s legacy is being pushed to center stage on multiple fronts. Two proposed films about Gibson — one co-produced by Whoopi Goldberg — are in the works. This past weekend, the city of East Orange, N.J., where Gibson lived for years and was the director of recreation, sponsored a series of events in her honor.
Gibson’s family members are also seeking to have a portion of West 143rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenue where she grew up to be renamed Althea Gibson Way.
Donald Felder, Gibson’s cousin, said he decided to act when he found that many people were unaware of Gibson and “realized it was just time for her legacy to be known.”
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Gibson was born on a cotton farm on Aug. 25, 1927, in the small town of Silver, S.C., and migrated north with her family around 1930. A tenacious athlete from a young age, Gibson learned boxing from her father and easily won the sports competitions sponsored by the Police Athletic League outside her building. In 1939, she won the city’s girls paddle ball championship; soon after, Harlem’s Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, composed of mostly African-American professionals, offered her a junior membership.
“Even as a girl, Althea was in a league of her own,” said Bill Davis, 89, a Hall of Famer in the American Tennis Association, the African-American organization, who was Gibson’s training partner. “She had unbelievable determination.”
At age 13, Gibson dropped out of school to devote herself to street fighting, a basketball team called The Mysterious Girls and watching movies. Fearful of her father’s beatings, according to her autobiography, she lived for a while at the Society for The Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
At first she dismissed tennis as a sport for weak people.
“I really wasn’t the tennis type,” Gibson wrote in her book. “I kept wanting to fight the other player every time I started to lose a match.”
Gibson won her first A.T.A. tournament in 1942. At a time when most female players wore tailored dresses, she often wore shorts with a collared shirt. Some observers, seeing her lean 5-foot-11 frame and short cropped hair, mistook her for a man.
Hubert Eaton, a North Carolina doctor and a tennis champion, initially made that error. But during the 1946 A.T.A. Nationals tournament in Wilberforce, Ohio, he and Robert Johnson, a doctor from Lynchburg, Va., realized that they were watching a young woman of great skill with the potential to transform the sport they loved, even though she lost the match at hand. The two were leaders in the A.T.A.’s mission to find a player who could integrate the all-white U.S. Lawn Tennis Association competitions.
At the match’s end, Eaton approached a dejected Gibson and asked if she would someday like to play at Forest Hills. “Don’t kid me now,” Gibson said, according to a 1957 article in The New York Post.
The doctors invited Gibson, then 19, to live in their homes so they could help her develop her game.
Under the doctors’ coaching, Gibson’s game steadily improved, but her applications to play in white tournaments were often rejected or conveniently “lost.”
In 1950, Alice Marble, winner of 18 Grand Slam titles, jumped into the fray and wrote a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine that said, “If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it’s only fair that they should meet that challenge.”
“The entrance of Negroes into national tennis,” the letter added, “is as inevitable as it has proven to be in baseball, in football, or in boxing.”
One month later, Gibson was admitted to the U.S. national championships at Forest Hills, making her the first black player to compete there. In 1951 she was the first black player to compete at Wimbledon.
Bob Davis, an A.T.A. champion who played with Gibson, recalled that some people felt that she “was not relating to black people or supporting her race when she refused to condemn people who were racists. A lot of black people did not want to have anything to do with her.”
Gibson’s race, however, affected her tennis years despite her efforts to maneuver around it. One of her closest friends in the sport was a British player named Angela Buxton, who was Jewish. They became doubles partners, in part because other players refused to do so, and together they won at the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1956.
“When I came on the scene the other players wouldn’t speak to Althea, much less play with her, quite simply because she was black,” Buxton, 85, recalled recently. “She was completely isolated. I was too, because of being Jewish. So it was a good thing we found one another.”
Gibson and Buxton did not talk about the discrimination they perceived, Buxton said. Instead, they focused on tennis, and Gibson routinely stayed at Buxton’s apartment in London, where the duo went to the movies and shared corned beef sandwiches at the local butcher’s. When Gibson won Wimbledon in 1957, Buxton made the floral dress Gibson wore to the winners’ ball.
Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Gibson retired from amateur tennis in 1958, having made virtually no money from the sport, and struggled to earn a living in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1995, when Gibson was living alone in New Jersey and overcome by sickness and poverty, it was “Angie baby,” as she called her old friend, who she telephoned.
“She said she was calling to say goodbye,” Buxton said. “She said she was going to kill herself. I said, ‘Now, wait just a minute.’”
Buxton had a letter describing Gibson’s plight and calling for contributions placed in a prominent tennis magazine. Soon, funds began to pour in. Gibson pulled out of her slump, bought a silver Cadillac convertible and lived for almost another decade.
On Monday, Buxton will be one of a handful of her closest friends at the statue unveiling on the southeast side of Arthur Ashe Stadium. Others expected to be there represent the two doctors who were instrumental in Gibson’s life and whose homes and courts are now being restored.
It was a group of female students from One Love Tennis, the organization that is restoring the Wilmington, N.C., property, that prompted Adams two years ago to take action to honor Gibson in New York.
“I had some 50 letters from those kids asking me why Althea was not recognized at the U.S. Open,” Adams said. “One of them wrote, ‘Can’t you even have a hot-dog stand in her name?’ And I’m thinking, yeah, I think we can do a little better than a hot-dog stand.”
Shortly afterward, King, who as a teenager read Gibson’s biography over two dozen times, appeared before the U.S.T.A. board in 2017. King, like many others, had long felt that Gibson had not received her due for reasons including her gender and the fact that she played years before the Open era, when cash prizes became permitted. Gibson also was a somewhat reluctant public figure and never adopted a high-profile stance on behalf of tennis or African-Americans as Ashe did.
King lobbied the board on Gibson’s behalf for over two decades.
“I would say: ‘We have to do something. She was the first,’ ” King said, adding,
“And everyone would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea.’ ”
Gibson’s statue will be only the second on the U.S. Open grounds that honors a tennis champion.
“Althea reoriented the world and changed our perceptions of what is possible,” said Eric Goulder, the sculptor. “We are still struggling. But she broke the ground.”
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Sally H. Jacobs, a former reporter for The Boston Globe, is writing a biography of Althea Gibson for St. Martin’s Press.
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