Gibson, Althea

(b. 25 August 1927 in Silver, South Carolina; d. 28 September 2003 in East Orange, New Jersey), Wimbledon and United States women’s tennis champion (1957 and 1958) who integrated tournament tennis and professional women’s golf.

Gibson was born in a four-room cabin in Silver, South Carolina. She was the oldest of five children born to Daniel Gibson, a cotton farmer, and Annie Bell Washington Gibson, a homemaker. The Gibsons struggled to make ends meet, as South Carolina had suffered a rural depression long before Black Monday, 29 October 1929, when the American stock market crashed. The one-two punch of a drought and an infestation of boll weevils caused cotton production, the general economy, and the Gibson family’s income to plunge.

When Gibson was three her parents sent her to Harlem, New York, to live with her aunt, Sally Washington. As soon as her father received his meager earnings from his last cotton crop, he joined her and the nearly 34,000 others who left South Carolina for Harlem in 1930. He found a job as handyman at a garage and sent for his wife and their new baby. Despite the Depression, Gibson’s parents made sure that she and her four siblings lived well. Gibson had a carefree but restless childhood, marked by truancy and discontent. Her unhappiness with school, however, was offset by early signs of her athletic prowess in such sports as stickball, basketball, and softball. Her family’s apartment building stood on a play street cordoned off by the Police Athletic League (PAL). On a makeshift court in front of her home, Gibson played paddleball—a sport similar to handball except for the fact that paddles, rather than hands, are used for hitting the rubber ball into the serve wall. She played the sport nonstop, vanquishing challengers with her lightning-quick serve. She became the citywide champion of paddleball from 1938 to 1942.

Gibson also began to play paddle tennis, which is more similar to tennis than handball; it features a smaller, spongier racket, a smaller ball, and a smaller court than those of traditional tennis. She outshined competitors in this sport as well. Buddy Walker, the PAL play leader by day and a bandleader by night, thought that if Gibson could win at paddle tennis she could also excel at regular tennis. In the summer of 1941 the tall, lanky young woman that Walker had been praising so impressed the members of Harlem’s Cosmopolitan Tennis Club that a few contributed to pay for her lessons with their one-armed coach, Fred Johnson. A year later Gibson won the 1942 New York State Open Championship and advanced to the finals of the girls’ championship of the American Tennis Association (ATA), the oldest black sports organization in the United States. Gibson won back-to-back girls’ titles in 1944 and 1945. In 1946 Dr. R. Walter Johnson approached her and asked if she’d like to play in the national lawn tennis championship at Forest Hills in New York some day. Known as “Whirlwind” in tennis circles, he believed that Gibson could be the “key to unlock the door” to integrating tournament tennis. Johnson, who was a physician in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Dr. Hubert A. Eaton, a surgeon in Wilmington, North Carolina, offered Gibson a wonderful opportunity: professional training, the use of their private courts, and a college education. Gibson was initially reluctant to accept the offer because she had dropped out of high school after only a year. So the plan was revised to have Gibson move in with Eaton’s family to complete her education in North Carolina and spend summers with Johnson in Virginia.

The same type of machinations that were needed for Jackie Robinson to integrate baseball in 1947 came into play for Gibson, as ATA officials worked feverishly behind the scenes with their white counterparts in the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA). Gibson, who was five feet, eleven inches tall, had speed, reach, and a powerful serve-and-volley game. In the winter of 1949 the ATA informed her that if she applied to compete in the USLTA’s Eastern Indoor Championship, her application would be accepted. Gibson advanced to the quarter-finals, resulting in an invitation to the National Indoor Championship, where she had similar results.

That June, the former dropout graduated tenth in her class at the age of twenty-one from Williston Industrial High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. Two days later she headed to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Florida A&M University) in Tallahassee, Florida. A star forward, she helped the women’s basketball team win a conference title and played on the men’s golf team and the tennis team. In early 1950 the freshman physical education major was invited back to the USLTA Eastern Indoor Championship, which she won. At the national indoor championship, she made it as far as the finals. To Gibson’s surprise, she returned to a hero’s welcome from the school’s president and marching band at the train station.

Despite Gibson’s good showing, the USLTA still had not budged. But change came quickly after the four-time national champion, Alice Marble, wrote an editorial for the July 1950 issue of American Lawn Tennis magazine. In the editorial Marble called her peers “sanctimonious hypocrites” for excluding Gibson from key invitational tournaments. By 28 August, Forest Hills was swarming with photographers and reporters, supporters and hecklers, who witnessed Gibson’s opening day triumphs. Her second-day match was moved to the larger grandstand courts, where she nearly upset Louise Brough, the reigning Wimbledon champion and former national winner.

Gibson graduated from Florida A&M in 1953 and took a teaching position at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Her USLTA ranking rose to seventh place but fell to thirteenth the following year. After that disappointment, she considered quitting tennis to join the Women’s Army Corps; however, she changed her mind when the State Department invited her on a tennis tour of Asia in 1955. Playing with other outstanding athletes for a solid six weeks improved Gibson’s game and confidence. As her tour stretched to eight months, she won sixteen of eighteen tournaments from Rangoon to London, including her first grand slam title, which she achieved by winning the French Open singles title against Britain’s Angela Mortimer in 1956.

Wimbledon was Gibson’s focus in 1957. This time she competed in only a few grass tournaments and did not defend her French title. Confident that she’d take home the Wimbledon crown, Gibson chose a gown for the ball and wrote her acceptance speech beforehand. “At last! At last!” Gibson exclaimed as she defeated Darlene Hard, 6–3, 6–2. She was officially the Queen of Tennis—the first black champion in Wimbledon’s eighty-year history. Gibson fought back tears as Queen Elizabeth II presented her with the twenty-eight-inch gold salver engraved with the names of past champions. In addition to Gibson’s singles title, she won the doubles title with Hard. Back on U.S. soil, Gibson was honored with a parade through lower Manhattan as ticker tape rained on 100,000 cheering onlookers.

Gibson capped 1957 with a dream come true as she won her first United States national championship, 6–3, 6–2, against Brough. Gibson broke another barrier as the first black player on the U.S. Wightman Cup team, which beat Great Britain 6–1. As she prepared to defend her titles, sports journalists voted her Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. She was the first black woman to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and she also graced the cover of Time magazine.

Gibson’s return to London in 1958 was a near repeat of the previous year. At Wimbledon she retained her singles crown against Angela Mortimer and teamed with Maria Bueno of Brazil to capture her third consecutive doubles titles, each won with a different partner. Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the mayor of New York City, proclaimed 16 July 1958 as Tennis Day in Gibson’s honor. At Forest Hills, Gibson lobbed Darlene Hard into submission to hold onto her title, 3–6, 6–1, 6–2, despite suffering from a cold and two sprained fingers. After accepting her awards from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, however, Gibson stunned the crowd by announcing that she planned to retire for at least a year.

During Gibson’s retirement from tennis, she accepted her second Female Athlete of the Year award as well as a minor role in a film, The Horse Soldiers, with John Wayne and William Holden. In early 1959 she went on a goodwill tour of Latin America and the Caribbean; served as a sports correspondent at Wimbledon for the London Evening Standard; and won the women’s singles title at the Pan American Games. She signed a $100,000 contract for a 100-game tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, making her the highest-paid woman in tennis. She rented her first apartment and made a down payment on a ten-room house for her family in Queens, New York. Instead of renewing her contract with the Globetrotters, however, she started her own tour, which failed without the basketball team as an additional attraction.

Having only a professional tennis title, no competition, little money, and few commercial endorsements, she turned to professional golf at the age of thirty-three. Gibson became the first African-American member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) in 1963, after qualifying in three years. The LPGA welcomed its famous new member; however, some sponsors, country clubs, and hotels were not as receptive. The LPGA felt caught in a double bind in its desire to take a stand against bigotry while struggling to survive after being in existence only since 1950. Officials appealed to Gibson for patience as they worked behind the scenes to replace sponsors and change venues for the tour. Unlike the men’s Professional Golf Association (PGA), which had upheld its “Caucasian clause,” banning black golfers as members from 1943 to 1961, the LPGA voted shortly after its formation to exclude such a clause.

Between tournaments, Gibson married William A. Darben, a businessman, in Las Vegas in October of 1965. As she continued to develop her golf game, she noted the debut of open tennis in 1968, which allowed amateurs and professionals to compete for the first time and earn lucrative prizes. Envisioning a comeback, she agreed to participate in the Oakland Pro Invitational in February of 1969. The tournament had been organized by Billie Jean King, a Gibson admirer since childhood. At forty-one, however, Gibson was competing against professional players half her age.

Gibson left the LPGA tour in 1977 after participating in 171 golf tournaments. Although she had been one of the LPGA’s top fifty winners for roughly five years, her lifetime earnings in golf amounted to barely $25,000. She continued a pattern of swinging between golf and tennis with serial comebacks well into her sixties.

After divorcing her first husband in 1976, she married Sydney Llewellyn, the tennis coach under whose guidance she had won at Wimbledon on 11 April 1983. This marriage, however, lasted for only three years. Gibson next became an early advocate of Title IX, which requires federally funded educational institutions to promote gender equality in sports. She thus acted as a champion for education, fitness, and equality. She ran for the New Jersey State Senate and became the first woman and African American to serve as a state athletic commissioner. She served on the Governor’s Council for Physical Fitness until she lost her position due to budget cuts in June 1992.

Gibson died at the age of seventy-six, following complications of respiratory and bladder infections that came on the heels of a heart attack in the summer. She is buried in Rosedale Cemetery in East Orange, New Jersey. Gibson had been reclusive in her later years, preferring to inspire others and be admired from afar as age and depression began to take their toll. “She didn’t get her due,” said Billie Jean King, who added that Gibson might have received greater recognition had her triumphs occurred after the debut of open tennis in 1968. Such was the case for the late Arthur Ashe, who won the U.S. Open in 1968, becoming the second African American to win a grand slam title. Ashe always credited Gibson for paving the way for him and others who came later.

Gibson won a total of eleven grand slam titles and roughly 100 other titles worldwide. It took four decades for another black tennis player to catch up to her back-to-back national and international championships. It is likely that no one will ever break Gibson’s ATA record of winning ten consecutive singles titles. Gibson was pleased to have been a pioneer and leave behind the Newark-based Althea Gibson Foundation as a way to give back what had been given to her—the opportunity to transform one’s life through sports and education.

Gibson’s papers are housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida; and the Althea Gibson Foundation in Newark, New Jersey. Her autobiographies are I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, ed. Ed Fitzgerald (1958), and So Much to Live For, with Richard Curtis (1968). Recent biographies include Frances Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb, Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson (2004). Obituaries are in the New York Times (29 Sept. 2003) and the London Guardian (30 Sept. 2003).

Yanick Rice Lamb