In 1957, a 29-year-old woman from Harlem stood on Centre Court at Wimbledon and lifted the trophy. She was the first Black champion in the tournament’s 80-year history. Her name was Althea Gibson.
Most people have never heard of her. That is a problem worth fixing. From Sharecropper’s Daughter to Paddle Tennis Champion. Althea Neale Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, in Silver, South Carolina. Her parents worked as sharecroppers on a cotton farm. The Great Depression hit them hard, and in 1930, the family moved to Harlem as part of the Great Migration .
Their apartment sat on a block that the Police Athletic League had turned into a play area. That is where Gibson discovered paddle tennis. She was good. By 1939, at 12 years old, she was the New York City women’s paddle tennis champion.
She quit school at 13. She spent her time street fighting, playing basketball, and watching movies. A group of neighbours saw something in her. They raised money for a junior membership at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in Harlem. At first, she hated tennis. “I kept wanting to fight the other player every time I started to lose a match,” she later admitted.
But she kept playing. By 1942, she won her first tournament. By 1947, she won her first of ten straight national ATA women’s titles. The ATA was the American Tennis Association, an organisation founded by African Americans because the USTA would not accept them.
Breaking the Color Line In 1950, everything changed. A former tennis No. 1 named Alice Marble wrote a scathing open letter in American Lawn Tennis magazine. She lambasted her sport for denying a player of Gibson’s caliber. The letter worked. Gibson became the first Black player invited to the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills.
A journalist wrote at the time: “No Negro player, man or woman, has ever set foot on one of these courts. In many ways, it is even a tougher personal Jim Crow-busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s”.
The next year, she became the first Black player to compete at Wimbledon. She lost in the third round. But she kept winning elsewhere. In 1955, the State Department sent her on a goodwill tour of Asia. She won 16 of 18 tournaments in Europe and Asia, playing against the world’s best players.
The Year She Conquered Tennis In 1956, she became the first African American athlete to win a Grand Slam tournament, the French Championships . She won the doubles title that same day, partnered with Briton Angela Buxton.
The 1957 season was, in her own words, “Althea Gibson’s year” . She won Wimbledon singles and doubles. She won the U.S. National Championships singles and mixed doubles. She won the Australian doubles championship. She finished second in three other Grand Slam events. She was voted Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year.
When she returned to New York, she received a ticker tape parade. She was only the second Black American, after Jesse Owens, to receive that honour. Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. gave her the Bronze Medallion, the city’s highest civilian award.
She repeated her Wimbledon and U.S. National singles titles in 1958. She was voted AP Female Athlete of the Year again. “Shaking Hands with the Queen” After winning Wimbledon in 1957, she received her trophy personally from Queen Elizabeth II. She later said: “Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the coloured section of the bus”.
That quote captures her entire career. She traveled from the back of a bus to the royal box at Wimbledon. And she did it alone.
Life After Tennis. Gibson won 11 Grand Slam titles in total: five singles, five doubles, and one mixed doubles. She retired from amateur tennis in 1958 . There was no professional tennis tour for women. Prize money was almost nonexistent.
So she did something else. In 1964, she became the first Black player to compete on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour. She was not as successful in golf. But she was still breaking barriers.
In 1971, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She served as commissioner of athletics for New Jersey State for ten years.
In her final years, she nearly went bankrupt. Former tennis great Billie Jean King stepped in to help her.
She died on September 28, 2003, in East Orange, New Jersey, at 76 years old. Her Legacy. Bob Ryland, a tennis contemporary and former coach of Venus and Serena Williams, said of Gibson: “She is one of the greatest players who ever lived. Martina [Navratilova] couldn’t touch her. I think she’d beat the Williams sisters”. That is a bold claim. But it comes from someone who saw her play.
Gibson never claimed to be a crusader. She wrote in her 1958 autobiography: “I have never regarded myself as a crusader. I don’t consciously beat the drums for any cause, not even the negro in the United States”. She did not need to. She picked up a racket and played. That was enough.
Sources:
- Wikipedia – Althea Gibson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althea_Gibson)
- Britannica – Althea Gibson (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Althea-Gibson)
- Biography.com – Althea Gibson (https://www.biography.com/athletes/althea-gibson)
- Darik.news – Althea Gibson was the first black tennis star (https://darik.news/newjersey/althea-gibson-was-the-first-black-tennis-star/518512.html)
- K8 News – Althea Gibson (https://www.kait8.com/story/6010858/althea-gibson/)
• • Oxford Academic – “A Winner Who Hasn’t Won Yet” (https://academic-oup-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/book/44926/chapter/385042472)
