Althea Gibson (1927-2003)

January 23, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Zanice Bond

Althea Gibson

Image courtesy Library of Congress (2013650114)

Althea Gibson, a sharecropperโ€™s daughter, entered the world of sports when segregation severely limited opportunities for African Americans. She eventually became the first black athlete to cross the color line of international tennis and golf.

Althea Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, to Daniel and Annie Bell Gibson, sharecroppers on a cotton farm near Silver, South Carolina. In 1930, the family moved to Harlem where Gibsonโ€™s younger siblings were born. While growing up in Harlem, Gibson played paddle tennis on a section of 143rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues that was barricaded during the day so neighborhood children could participate in organized sports under the supervision of the Police Athletic League. Gibson became proficient in paddle tennis, and by 1939, at the age of twelve, she won the New York City, New York womenโ€™s paddle tennis championship.

The following year, a group of Gibsonโ€™s neighbors took up a collection to finance her junior membership at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in Harlem. In 1941, Gibson entered and won her first tournament, the American Tennis Associationโ€™s New York State Championship. She later won the ATA national championship in the girlsโ€™ division in 1944 and 1945.ย  After losing the womenโ€™s championship final in 1946, she won the first of ten straight titles beginning in 1947.

Gibsonโ€™s success drew the attention of Dr. Walter Johnson, a physician from Lynchburg, Virginia, who was active in the national black tennis community. He mentored her and helped her gain important competitions with the United States Tennis Association (USTA). In 1949, she became the first black woman and the second black athlete (after Reginald Weir) to play in the USTAโ€™s National Indoor Championship.ย  Later that year, she earned a full athletic scholarship at Florida A&M University.

In 1950, Gibson became the first black player to compete in the United States National Championships (now the U.S. Open) at Forest Hills, New York. Although she lost narrowly to Louise Brough, the reigning Wimbledon champion, the following year she won her first international title, the Caribbean Championship in Jamaica in 1951. After graduating from Florida A&M, Gibson took a job teaching physical education at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, but she continued her tennis competitions. In 1955, the U.S. State Department sent her on a goodwill tour of Asia. When the tour was over, she remained abroad, winning sixteen of eighteen tournaments in Europe and Asia.

In 1956, Gibson became the first African American to win the French Open. Later she won the Wimbledon doubles title with Briton Angela Buxton, the Italian National Championship in Rome, and the Asian championship in Ceylon. In July 1957, she won Wimbledon, considered at the time the world championship of tennis, and received the trophy personally from Queen Elizabeth. She won the doubles championship as well, and when she returned to New York City, she became only the second athlete, after Jesse Owens, to receive a ticker tape parade.

In late 1958, after having won fifty-six national and international singles and doubles titles including eleven Grand Slam championships, Gibson retired from amateur tennis at the age of thirty-one.

In 1964 after unsuccessful attempts to start acting and singing careers, Gibson at the age of thirty-seven became the first black woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour. While she broke course records during individual rounds in several tournaments, Gibsonโ€™s highest ranking was twenty-seventh in 1966, and her best tournament finish was a tie for second place at the 1970 Buick Open.

Gibson was the first African American woman named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. She was inducted into the South Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey Sports Halls of Fame, the International Womenโ€™s Sports Halls of Fame, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She was also among Sports Illustratedโ€™s Top 100 Greatest Female Athletes and was a member Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

On September 28, 2003 Althea Gibson died at the age of seventy-six in East Orange, New Jersey.

About the Author

Author Profile

Zanice Bond de Pรฉrez received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas (KU) in May 2012. While at Kansas she served as co-director of the Shifting Borders of Race and Identity Project, a KU/ Haskell Indian Nations University collaboration funded by the Ford Foundation which examines the intersections of African Americans and First Nations people. Zanice earned a B.S. in Communication from Ohio University and an M.A. in English from Tennessee State University where she was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. She also completed Gupton School of Mortuary Science and is a licensed funeral director and embalmer. She was a participant in the 1997 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute entitled โ€œPerformance and Text in Caribbean iteratureโ€ at the University of Puerto Rico; and attended the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a summer session which examined the military dictatorshipโ€™s impact on the arts. Her current research interests include immigration history, 20th Century African-American literature, Afra-Latina literature, and critical race theory. Two of her poems were included in the anthology, Dark Eros published by St. Martinโ€™s Press in 1997.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Bond, Z. (2007, January 23). Althea Gibson (1927-2003). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/gibson-althea-1927-2003/

Source of the Author's Information:

โ€œAlthea Gibson,โ€ in Womenโ€™s History, https://www.thoughtco.com/althea-gibson-3529145; Frances Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb, Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004).

Further Reading