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Althea Gibson
1927–2003 · 76 years Tier II
She once dismissed tennis as a game for weak people
Gibson was born to sharecroppers in Clarendon County, South Carolina, and moved with the family to Harlem around 1930, part of the wave the Depression pushed off failing cotton land. She grew up on 143rd Street, dominated the block's Police Athletic League paddle-tennis courts, and was New York City's women's paddle champion by twelve. Her father hit her, and at 13 she quit school and spent time in a shelter for abused children before neighbors raised the dues for her to join the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in 1940. She thought tennis looked like a sport for people with no strength, entered a tournament anyway in 1941, and won it.
Physician Walter Johnson took her on and pushed her toward the sport's still-segregated institutions. She won ten straight ATA national titles from 1947 to 1956, then broke through in 1950 as the first Black player admitted to the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills, with retired champion Alice Marble's public backing forcing the issue. In 1956 she won the French Championships. In 1957 she took Wimbledon, the first Black champion in its 80-year history, and the U.S. Nationals, and repeated both in 1958 on a 57-match winning streak, taking Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year twice. She retired that year with 11 Grand Slam titles and, because tennis was still amateur, almost no money to show for any of them.
Being the queen of tennis, she said on retiring, is all well and good, but you cannot eat a crown. A brief professional exhibition tour and a singing career brought in little. At 37 she joined the LPGA in 1964, its first Black woman, changing in her car because clubhouses would not have her and still ranking among the top 50 money winners for five seasons. None of it added up to security. Two cerebral hemorrhages hit her in the late 1980s and a stroke in 1992 left her isolated and broke, and when she asked tennis's own institutions for help, nothing happened until her former doubles partner, Angela Buxton, went public and raised nearly a million dollars from strangers around the world.
She died in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 28, 2003, of complications from respiratory and bladder infections, and is buried at Rosedale Cemetery. The honors came in a wave the money never had: the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971, a U.S. postage stamp in 2013, a statue at the U.S. Open grounds in Flushing Meadows in 2019, a spot on a 2025 U.S. quarter. Serena and Venus Williams have both credited her directly for making their own careers possible. Her Wimbledon trophies now sit in the Smithsonian, a museum case standing in for the paycheck the era never gave her.
Lifespan
Althea Gibson's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
I Always Wanted to Be Somebody
book
Her autobiography, published the year she retired from amateur tennis 1958 -
Wimbledon singles title
other
First Black champion in the tournament's 80-year history 1957 -
U.S. National Championship singles title
other
Repeated in 1958 1957 -
Althea Gibson Sings
album
A brief recording career after leaving amateur tennis 1959 -
LPGA Tour membership
other
First Black woman to play the tour, at 37 1964
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1930 aged ~3 Family moves from South Carolina to Harlem
- 1940 aged ~13 Neighbors fund her membership at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club
- 1947 aged ~20 Wins the first of ten straight ATA national titles
- August 1950 aged 22 Becomes the first Black player at the U.S. National Championships
- 1956 aged ~29 Wins the French Championships singles title
- July 1957 aged 29 Wins Wimbledon, the first Black champion in the tournament's history
- 1958 aged ~31 Retires from amateur tennis after repeating her Wimbledon and U.S. titles
- 1964 aged ~37 Joins the LPGA Tour at 37
- September 28, 2003 aged 76 Dies in East Orange, New Jersey
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