When Althea Gibson was born in the South Carolina town of Silver in 1927, her birth certificate made no sense whatsoever. Chalk it up to an overexcited family member or an exhausted midwife; both her name and gender were inaccurately recorded.
“Instead of recording the birth of a girl named Althea, the record documented the birth of a boy named Alger,” writes Sally Jacobs in “Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson” ( St. Martin’s Press). “
In time, the whole world would come to know the name of Althea Gibson as a global tennis sensation and sports legend.
The daughter of sharecroppers, the Gibson family had moved north in 1929 in the Great Migration.
They settled in an apartment in Harlem, located on West 143d Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenue.
School wasn’t Althea’s thing.
A chronic truant, she was the leader of the 146th Street gang, gaining a reputation as one of the toughest street fighters in upper Harlem.
She was taught to box by her father, Daniel, who also beat her regularly.
“More than once, when she couldn’t bear to go back to their cramped third-floor apartment and endure another one of his beatings, she passed the night dozing on a subway car, riding the train alone for the entire night, up and down the length of the city,” writes Jacobs.
Gibson was a natural at sports; basketball, boxing, bowling, baseball — she could turn her hand to anything.
It was a local band leader, Buddy Walker, that noticed her natural athleticism, and bought her a pair of restrung racquets for five dollars apiece, suggesting she try tennis at Cosmopolitan Club on 149th Street.
“Althea wasn’t at all sure she wanted to play such a sissy sport as tennis,” writes Jacobs.
When she left school at 13, Gibson spent several years working all manner of jobs; counter girl at Chock Full o’ Nuts, elevator operator, laborer at a dress factory and even cleaning the guts out of chickens at a butcher shop.
But she was increasingly intrigued by tennis.
“The more Althea learned about the game, the more it appealed to her, and not just because she was good at it,” Jacobs writes.
“Tennis offered a potential escape.”
Soon, Gibson was beating everyone at the Cosmopolitan Club and, recognizing a rare talent, the members raised money to send her to American Tennis Association (ATA) events, a circuit that accepted Black players.
She hit the ground running.
By the age of 20, in 1947, she had her first ATA title, before going on to win 10 more national championships, a record that still stands today.
By 1950, her achievements were such that the United States Tennis Association had little option but to invite her to play in the US National Championships (the forerunner to the US Open) at Forest Hills in Queens.
While she lost in the second round, Gibson had become the first African-American player to compete in the event.
“As one reporter put it, ‘No Negro player, man or woman, has ever set foot on one of these courts,’” writes Jacobs.
“In many ways it’s even a tougher personal Jim Crow-busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s when he first stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.
“It’s always tougher for a woman.’”
What followed was remarkable.
In 1956 she became the first black woman to win a Grand Slam title when she took the French Championships.
The following year, she won at Wimbledon and the US Nationals before repeating the feat in 1958.
In both years, she was named Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press.
Gibson would win 11 Grand Slam titles in her career and when she retired from tennis in 1958, she turned her attentions to professional golf and, in 1964, became the first African-American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA).
But, like tennis, golf made her life difficult, purely because of her color.
Often, she was denied access to the country clubs’ locker rooms and had to change in her car. Hotels refused to honor her reservations. And, time and again, she would be the subject of vicious racist abuse.
Gibson also routinely received hate mail — but kept the letters to remind her of her struggle.
As in her tennis career, there wasn’t much money to be made in golf either, at least not for women. Gibson would often remark that the IRS would not accept trophies in lieu of payment and that everybody was making money in the sports she played — apart from the players themselves.
“ Play aggressively and with spirit. Since you’ll be the underdog, you’ll have nothing to lose. But most of all, be who you are and let your racquet do the talking.”
Althea Gibson’s advice to Serena and Venus Williams
Fortunately, times have changed.
When Serena Williams retired in 2022, for example, she did so having won nearly $100 million in prize money alone.
From a young age, both Williams sisters have paid tribute to the pioneering play of Gibson and the pivotal role she played in breaking down tennis’s color barrier.
In 1999, a 17-year-old Serena faxed Gibson with some questions for a school project.
Later, when she and Venus created a newsletter to mark Black History Month, they knew exactly who to put on the cover.
It’s testament to the esteem in which Althea Gibson, who died in 2003, aged 76, was held then — and now.
And the sisters have always remembered what Gibson told them: “Play aggressively and with spirit. Since you’ll be the underdog, you’ll have nothing to lose. But most of all, be who you are and let your racquet do the talking.”
