Althea Gibson

Althea Gibson was born on the twenty-fifth of August 1927 at Silver, South Carolina, the eldest of five children of Daniel Gibson — a cotton sharecropper — and Annie Bell Washington Gibson. The family migrated to Harlem in 1930 in the Great Migration. She was raised at 135th Street in Harlem during the Depression in straitened circumstances. She struggled in school and dropped out of the Yorkville Trade School in 1942 to take a series of casual jobs across Harlem. She came to the attention of the Police Athletic League paddle-tennis programme on West 143rd Street.

She was introduced to lawn tennis at fourteen by the New York jazz musician Buddy Walker, who recognised her aptitude. He bought her her first tennis racket. She was admitted in 1942 to the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club at Harlem — the principal Black tennis club of the Eastern American Tennis Association — and at fifteen won the American Tennis Association New York State Girls' Singles. She was the New York ATA national girls' champion in 1944 and 1945 and the New York ATA national women's champion ten consecutive years from 1947 to 1956.

She completed Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1953 on a Williston-American Tennis Association scholarship. The colour line that had restricted Black players to the ATA circuit was broken in her favour by the petition of Alice Marble in the July 1950 American Lawn Tennis magazine. She played her first United States National Championships at Forest Hills in August 1950 — the first African American admitted to the U.S. National Championships at the West Side Tennis Club. She played her first Wimbledon in 1951 — the first African American admitted to the All-England Championships.

She won the French Championships in 1956 — her first Grand Slam title and the first by an African American in any Grand Slam tennis event. She won the Wimbledon singles in 1957 and 1958 and the United States Championships in 1957 and 1958. The 1957 Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year — the first African American so named. She was photographed by Vogue and feted at City Hall in New York with a ticker-tape parade after the 1957 Wimbledon victory.

She turned professional from the amateur tennis circuit in 1958 to earn a living, the amateur game then conferring no income. The professional tennis circuit of the period had no place for women; she joined the LPGA Tour as a golfer in 1964 — the first Black member of the LPGA Tour.

She died of complications of multiple chronic conditions at East Orange, New Jersey, on the twenty-eighth of September 2003, at seventy-six.

She is honored here as the first Black Grand Slam tennis champion.