Althea Gibson

“I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.”

Happy Wednesday, Golden Divas!

Since this is Women’s Month, I would like to continue with a trailblazer in the enormously segregated sport of tennis. Last week I had the pleasure of watching a documentary about a woman who was vaguely mentioned when I was in school. She was not at the top of the historical line of people that we had to study, because she was an African woman who hailed from the streets of Harlem. 

Ladies, this is someone you should know, Althea Neale Gibson was a woman of many “firsts,” a “Barrier Breaker” and a “History Maker!” Gibson defied the odds against her, and she was a woman who deserved better than what life gave her. As I watched her story unfold, it made me proud, happy, and sad, it ultimately haunted me because of the intense prejudicial scrutiny that she had to endure.

Such scrutiny happened in the summer of 1950, at the national women’s tennis championships. This event took place at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens. It reached a turning point! Whether, a boiling point for the non-blacks in the club. One side was the favorite, Louise Brough, a blond Californian and the reigning Wimbledon champion. On the other side (as the non-blacks described Althea), the rangy, Harlem-raised Althea Gibson. “Seriously!” Althea 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.”

Ladies, can you imagine trying to push on to try to prove that you belong at that tennis match as much as your opponent when the backdrop of prejudices is shouting out from the stands for your demise to fail? Well, this trailblazer pushed against all of the hurtful comments that were hurled against her during one of America’s most tumultuous times. 

MEET ALTHEA GIBSON

Althea Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, and she died on September 28, 2003. She was an American tennis player and professional golfer, and one of the first Black athletes to cross the color line of international tennis. In 1956, Gibson became the first African American to win a Grand Slam title (the French Championships). The following year she won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals (precursor of the U.S. Open), then won both again in 1958, and was voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in both years.

In all, Althea won 11 Grand Slam tournaments, including five singles titles, five doubles titles, and one mixed doubles title. Gibson was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.

“She is one of the greatest players who ever lived,” said Bob Ryland, a tennis contemporary and former coach of Venus and Serena Williams.

“Martina (Navratilova) couldn’t touch her. I think she’d beat the Williams sisters.”

Even while winning tournaments, Gibson was denied rooms at hotels. One hotel refused to book reservations for a luncheon in her honor. She said she didn’t care.

“I tried to feel responsibilities to Negroes, but that was a burden on my shoulders,” she said in 1957.“Now, I’m playing tennis to please me, not them.”

At a time when racism and prejudice were widespread in sports and in society, Gibson was often compared to Jackie Robinson. “Her road to success was a challenging one,” said Billie Jean King, “but I never saw her back down.” “To anyone, she was an inspiration, because of what she was able to do at a time when it was enormously difficult to play tennis at all if you were Black,” said former New York City Mayor David Dinkins.

“I am honored to have followed in such great footsteps,” wrote Venus Williams. “Her accomplishments set the stage for my success, and through players like myself and Serena and many others to come, her legacy will live on.”

The loser is always a part of the problem; the winner is always a part of the answer. The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program. The loser says it may be possible, but it’s difficult; the winner says it may be difficult, but it’s possible.

—Althea Gibson, 1991

In her “second act” in the early 1960s, she also became the first Black player to compete on the Women’s Professional Golf Tour.

Gibson had turned into a recluse in her well-kept garden apartment in East Orange, N.J., according to Time magazine. The magazine said she is suffering in silence from a series of strokes and ailments brought on by a disease she is simply said to have described as “terminal.”

In the late 1980s, Gibson suffered two cerebral hemorrhages, and in 1992, a stroke. Ongoing medical expenses depleted her financial resources, leaving her unable to afford her rent or medication. Though she reached out to multiple tennis organizations requesting help, none responded. Former doubles partner Angela Buxton made Gibson’s plight known to the tennis community and raised nearly $1 million in donations from around the world.

In early 2003 Gibson survived a heart attack, but died on September 28, 2003, at the age of 76 from complications following respiratory and bladder infections. Her body was interred in the Rosedale Cemetery in Orange near her first husband, Will Darben.

It would be 15 years before another non-white woman—Evonne Goolagong, in 1971—won a Grand Slam championship; and 43 years before another African-American woman, Serena Williams, won her first of six U.S. Opens in 1999, not long after faxing a letter and list of questions to Gibson. Serena’s sister Venus then won back-to-back titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 2000 and 2001, repeating Gibson’s accomplishments of 1957 and 1958.

A decade after Gibson’s last triumph at the U.S. Nationals, Arthur Ashe became the first African-American man to win a Grand Slam singles title, at the 1968 U.S. Open. Billie Jean King said, “If it hadn’t been for (Althea), it wouldn’t have been so easy for Arthur, or the ones who followed.”

The title of Gibson’s autobiography, which was written in 1958, is “I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.” To tennis fans, she always will be. Though she didn’t go looking for the role of pioneer, she was one.

Over the years, the United States Tennis Association has paid tribute to the tennis legends Billie Jean King, for whom the national tennis center at Flushing Meadows is named, and Arthur Ashe, for whom there is both a statue and a stadium that bears his name. Virtually nothing had been done on the grounds to honor Gibson.

Althea Gibson was a star ahead of her time and in a league of her own ladies, she finally gets her due at Last. 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. 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.

On August 26, 2019, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, in a long-overdue tribute to the first African American to break international tennis color barriers, a granite sculpture of Gibson, was unveiled at the opening day of the U.S. Open.

Golden Divas, Althea Gibson was the“Unlikely Queen” of the highly segregated tennis world of the 1950s and she is a woman we should know!

Source:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/althea-gibson-is-first-african-american-to-win-wimbledon
https://www.espn.com/sportscentury/features/00014035.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/sports/tennis/althea-gibson-statue-us-open.html