“Martina couldn’t touch her. I think she’d beat
the Williams sisters.” These words, from
legendary US tennis coach Bob Ryland,
referred to the woman who shattered the race
barrier in tennis and became the first black
person to win Wimbledon. She was described
by Billie Jean King as “one of my she-roes”,
and was a direct inspiration for Venus and
Serena. Her name was Althea Gibson, and she
changed everything.


Born in 1927, she hailed originally from South
Carolina was raised in New York’s Harlem, an
epicentre of African American life and culture.
Her childhood was a tough time for the nation,
as the Great Depression crushed lives from
coast to coast. Her father was also a harsh
disciplinarian. “Daddy would whip me,” she
later recalled, “and I’m not talking about
spankings.”
She found solace by riding the New York
subway late into the night. And also by
getting stuck into sports – particularly a New
York variation of tennis called paddle tennis,
which local kids played in a playground
created by the police using traffic barricades
on an ordinary Harlem street. Her talent
caught the eye of friends and neighbours, who
banded together to buy her rackets and
membership of a tennis club. As she herself
put it, she was “aggressive, dynamic and
mean” – a tall, terrifying powerhouse on the
courts. And when she won her first victory in a
New York State championship, it was a
breakthrough moment. “The girl I beat in the
finals was a white girl,” Gibson said. “I can’t
deny that made the victory all the sweeter to
me.”

AS SHE
HERSELF PUT IT,
SHE WAS
“AGGRESSIVE,
DYNAMIC AND
MEAN”.

The issue of race was the major obstacle in
her path. Despite earning the support of top
tennis patrons, and an athletic scholarship to
a university, she wasn’t able to compete in the
US National Championships, the forerunner of
today’s US Open. While black players weren’t
technically barred from the tournament, they
could only qualify by playing in various tennis
clubs, which were largely whites-only. Things
only changed after top (white) tennis player
Alice Marble penned an acerbic open letter
saying “It so happens that I tan very easily in
the summer, but I doubt that anyone ever
questioned my right to play in the Nationals
because of it.”
She also wrote, damningly, “If tennis is a
game for ladies and gentlemen... it's time we
acted a little more like gentle-people and less
like sanctimonious hypocrites”.
The intervention made an impact, and Gibson
was soon on her way to the Nationals. She
didn’t win, but big things were about to
happen. In 1956, she became the first ever
African American to win a Grand Slam
tournament – the French Championships. The
year after that, Althea Gibson won the US
Nationals, as well as the women’s singles title
at Wimbledon. “Shaking hands with the Queen
of England was a long way from being forced
to sit in the coloured section of the bus going
into downtown Wilmington, NC,” she later said.

“IF TENNIS IS A
GAME FOR
LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN...
IT'S TIME WE
ACTED A LITTLE
MORE LIKE
GENTLE-PEOPLE
AND LESS LIKE
SANCTIMONIOUS
HYPOCRITES”

After the historic Wimbledon victory, she was
honoured with a ticker tape parade in New
York City, like Jesse Owens had been before
her. She would go onto win Wimbledon again
the very next year, appearing on the cover of
Time magazine and being feted as one of the
biggest names in the game. And yet, Althea
Gibson was struggling to survive. In those
days, there simply wasn’t the kind of prize
money in tennis as there is today.
“My finances were in heartbreaking shape,”
she later wrote. “Being the Queen of Tennis is
all well and good, but you can't eat a crown.
Nor can you send the Internal Revenue Service
a throne clipped to their tax forms.”
She branched out into other fields, including
music and acting. A talented singer, she
released an album of jazz standards, and even
performed on the legendary Ed Sullivan Show.
She also appeared on game shows, and in a
Western by iconic director John Ford – though
she bravely refused to play her role with the
cartoonish “Negro” accent the script originally
demanded.
The fact was, despite smashing through the
two separate glass ceilings of gender and
race, her identity still counted against her. She
said: “When I looked around me, I saw that
white tennis players, some of whom I had
thrashed on the court, were picking up offers
and invitations. Suddenly it dawned on me
that my triumphs had not destroyed the racial
barriers once and for all, as I had – perhaps
naively – hoped.”
In her final years, she was so broke that her
close friend Angela Buxton, with whom she’d
won the Wimbledon doubles title in 1956, had
to secretly raise donations to pay her medical
and living expenses. But when she died in
2003, the world hailed the woman who single-
handedly opened the game of tennis up to
everybody – not just the privileged few. In the
words of US tennis official Alan Schwartz,
“Every time a black child or a Hispanic child or
an Islamic child picks up a tennis racket for
the first time, Althea touhes another life… this
is her legacy.”

Finally Musa is impressed...