1950
Althea Gibson Becomes First African-American on U.S. Tennis
Tour
On this day in 1950, officials of the United
States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) accept Althea Gibson into their annual
championship at Forest Hills, New York, making her the first African-American
player to compete in a U.S. national tennis competition.
Growing up in Harlem, the young Gibson was a
natural athlete. She started playing tennis at the age of 14 and the very next
year won her first tournament, the New York State girls’ championship,
sponsored by the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was organized in 1916
by black players as an alternative to the exclusively white USLTA. After
prominent doctors and tennis enthusiasts Hubert Eaton and R. Walter Johnson
took Gibson under their wing, she won her first of what would be 10 straight
ATA championships in 1947.
In 1949, Gibson attempted to gain entry into
the USLTA’s National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor
of the U.S. Open. When the USLTA failed to invite her to any qualifying
tournaments, Alice Marble–a four-time winner at Forest Hills–wrote a letter on
Gibson’s behalf to the editor of American Lawn Tennis magazine. Marble
criticized the “bigotry” of her fellow USLTA members, suggesting that if Gibson
posed a challenge to current tour players, “it’s only fair that they meet this
challenge on the courts.” Gibson was subsequently invited to participate in a
New Jersey qualifying event, where she earned a berth at Forest Hills.
On August 28, 1950, Gibson beat Barbara Knapp
6-2, 6-2 in her first USLTA tournament match. She lost a tight match in the
second round to Louise Brough, three-time defending Wimbledon champion. Gibson
struggled over her first several years on tour but finally won her first major
victory in 1956, at the French Open in Paris. She came into her own the
following year, winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Open at the relatively advanced
age of 30.
Gibson repeated at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open
the next year but soon decided to retire from the amateur ranks and go pro. At
the time, the pro tennis league was poorly developed, and Gibson at one point
went on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing tennis during halftime of
their basketball games. In the early 1960s, Gibson became the first black
player to compete on the women’s golf tour, though she never won a tournament.
She was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971.
Though she once brushed off comparisons to
Jackie Robinson, the trailblazing black baseball player, Gibson has been
credited with paving the way for African-American tennis champions such as
Arthur Ashe and, more recently, Venus and Serena Williams. After a long
illness, she died in 2003 at the age of 76.