Tennis

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Tennis

A Bermuda socialite, Mary Outerbridge, brought tennis to America in 1874, and national tournaments restricted to whites began in 1881. But enterprising black players organized local tournaments as early as 1895 at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the early twentieth century, varsity teams were formed at Howard University, Lincoln University, Tuskegee Institute, Atlanta University, and Hampton Institute. On the eve of World War I, tennis was firmly rooted in black communities in the Northeast, South, and northern California.

In 1916 a group of black tennis enthusiasts formed the American Tennis Association (ATA). The ATA is the oldest continuously operated independent black sports organization in the United States. The first ATA National Championships were held in 1917 at Druid Hill Park in Baltimore. The first ATA women's champion, Lucy D. Slowe, became the first black female national titleholder in any sport.

The ATA has formed the backbone of black tennis participation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. It sponsored traveling tours by good players and sought assistance for top black college players. The ATA began serious junior development programs in the late 1930s. Hundreds of tennis courts were built by the federal government during the Great Depression to help provide work, and the ATA wanted to take advantage of these public facilities, as well as ensure a steady flow of players for its events.

Tuskegee Institute sisters Margaret "Pete" Peters and Matilda Roumania "Repeat" Peters (Pete and Repeat) won a record fourteen ATA doubles championships on two streaks from 1938 to 1941 and 1944 to 1953. Roumania Peters also won ATA singles titles in 1944 and 1946, making her and her sister the first set of African-American siblings to make tennis history. In the 1946 tournament, Roumania defeated another woman who would make international tennis history, Althea Gibson.

In September 1950 Althea Gibson became the first black player to compete at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, the site of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) National Championships. In addition to winning the ATA junior and senior singles and doubles titles, Gibson also captured the French singles and doubles (1956), the Wimbledon singles crown (twice, in 1957 and 1958), and the United States singles title (twice, in 1957 and 1958), as well as the Australian mixed doubles event (1957). After Gibson's initial appearance at Forest Hills in 1950, the USTA and the ATA announced that they had arrived at an arrangement whereby for twenty years to come the ATA would nominate black players who would be automatically entered in the main draw.

Althea Gibson's coach, Robert W. Johnson, led the ATA junior development effort, while his son, Robert Johnson Jr., provided much of the on-court expertise. One of the products of the program was Arthur Ashe Jr., who from 1955 to 1962 won eleven ATA titles. Ashe went on to capture singles crowns in the U.S. Open in 1968, in the Australian Open in 1970, and at Wimbledon in 1975. He was co-ranked number one in the world in 1968 and again in 1975, and was a member of the American Davis Cup team in 1963, 1965 to 1970, 1975, 1977, and 1978. He served as team captain from 1981 to 1985.

The era of "open" tennis (with amateurs and professionals playing together) began in 1968, and black players, schools, and coaches responded with growing numbers and excellence. The 1990s witnessed the development of African-American tennis stars such as Zina Garrison, who in 1990 at Wimbledon became the first African-American woman to reach a Grand Slam final since Althea Gibson thirty-two years earlier. In Garrison's fifteen-year professional career she won fourteen singles titles and twenty doubles crowns. Like Garrison, MaliVai Washington, who won four career singles titles, has transformed tennis success into philanthropic ventures supporting young African Americans. Chanda Rubin, who first gained international recognition in the 1990s, has earned at least seven singles titles. In addition, the number of people of African descent on the tour increased dramatically during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Perhaps the most famous African-American women in tennis history, Venus and Serena Williams have transformed women's tennis in the twenty-first century, turning it into a game requiring far more fitness, agility, speed, and power. They have repeatedly made history, each of them earning dozens of singles and doubles titles, as well as numerous grand slam championships, and often being "first" in everything from service speed to sisters facing each other as finalists in multiple major tennis events.

The success of the Compton, California-reared Williams sisters inspired growing numbers of African Americans to play tennis and encouraged the USTA to invest in developing tennis programs in urban centers. Although great strides have been made in tennis for African Americans, history is still being made. In 2004 eighteen-year-old Scoville Jenkins became the first African American to win the USTA boys title in the event's eighty-nine year history.