Althea Gibson
August 25,1927 to September 28, 2003
Althea Gibson was a resilient trailblazer, pioneer and visionary.
She made history as being the following:\the first African American to win a Grand Slam title (the French Championships). The following year she won both Wimbledon and the US Nationals (precursor of the US Open), then won both again in 1958 and was voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in both years. In all, she won 11 Grand Slam tournaments: five singles titles, five doubles titles, and one mixed doubles title. In the early 1960s she also became the first Black player to compete on the Women’s Professional Golf Tour.
Althea was born in Silver City, South Carolina on Thursday, August 25, 1927, to Daniel and Annie Bell Gibson. The family relocated to Harlem, NY during the Great Depression era. Her family life was met with hardships being in a dysfunctional family on a welfare government system. She faced a lot of racism during that time period in time. She did attend school but had emotional issues due to the environment she immediately lived in. She would miss out on classes. She wanted more in life and fell in love with sports and would play and win in many tournaments such as table tennis, ECT which she was very excellent at. She also won games sponsored by the Police Athletic Leagues and the Parks Department.
In the late 1980s, Gibson suffered two cerebral hemorrhages, followed by a stroke in 1992. Ongoing medical expenses left her in dire financial circumstances. She reached out to multiple tennis organizations requesting help, but none responded. Former doubles partner Angela Buxton made Gibson’s plight known to the tennis community and raised nearly $1 million in donations from around the world.
Gibson survived a heart attack in 2003 but died on September 28 that year from complications following respiratory and bladder infections. Her body was interred in the Rosedale Cemetery, Orange, New Jersey, near her first husband Will Darben.
Her Legacy
It would be 15 years before another non-White woman—Evonne Goolagong, in 1971—won a Grand Slam championship; and 43 years before another African American woman, Serena Williams, won her first of six US Opens in 1999, not long after faxing a letter and list of questions to Gibson.[90] Serena’s sister Venus then won back-to-back titles at Wimbledon and the US Open in 2000 and 2001, repeating Gibson’s accomplishments of 1957 and 1958.
A decade after Gibson’s last triumph at the US Nationals, Arthur Ashe became the first African American man to win a Grand Slam singles title, at the 1968 US Open. Billie Jean King said, “If it hadn’t been for [Althea], it wouldn’t have been so easy for Arthur, or the ones who followed.”
In 1980 Gibson became one of the first six inductees into the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, placing her on par with such pioneers as Amelia Earhart, Wilma Rudolph, Gertrude Ederle, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Patty Berg. Other inductions included the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame, the International Tennis Hall of Fame, the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, the Black Athletes Hall of Fame, the Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey, the New Jersey Hall of Fame, the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame.She received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1988.
In 1991 Gibson became the first woman to receive the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the highest honor from the National Collegiate Athletic Association; she was cited for “symbolizing the best qualities of competitive excellence and good sportsmanship, and for her significant contributions to expanding opportunities for women and minorities through sports.”Sports Illustrated for Women named her to its list of the “100 Greatest Female Athletes”.
In a 1977 historical analysis of women in sports, The New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden wrote,
On the opening night of the 2007 US Open, the 50th anniversary of her first victory at its predecessor, the US National Championships, Gibson was inducted into the US Open Court of Champions. “It was the quiet dignity with which Althea carried herself during the turbulent days of the 1950s that was truly remarkable,” said USTA president Alan Schwartz, at the ceremony:
Gibson’s 1956 Wimbledon doubles trophy, her first of three, and the first Wimbledon trophy won by an African American
Gibson’s five Wimbledon trophies are displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The Althea Gibson Cup seniors tournament is held annually in Croatia, under the auspices of the International Tennis Federation (ITF). The Althea Gibson Foundation identifies and supports gifted golf and tennis players who live in urban environments. In 2005 Gibson’s friend Bill Cosby endowed the Althea Gibson Scholarship at her alma mater, Florida A&M University.
In September 2009, Wilmington, North Carolina, named its new community tennis court facility the Althea Gibson Tennis Complex at Empie Park. Other tennis facilities named in her honor include those at Manning High School (near her birthplace in Silver, South Carolina),the Family Circle Tennis Center in Charleston, South Carolina, Florida A&M University, and Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey.In 2012 a bronze statue, created by sculptor Thomas Jay Warren, was dedicated to her memory in Branch Brook Park.In August 2013, the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp honoring Gibson, the 36th in its Black Heritage series. A documentary titled Althea, produced for the American Masters Series on PBS, premiered in September 2015.
In November 2017, the Council of Paris inaugurated the Gymnase Althea Gibson, a public multisport gymnasium in the 12th arrondissement of Paris.
In 2018, the USTA unanimously voted to erect a statue honoring Gibson at Flushing Meadows, the site of the US Open. The statue, created by sculptor Eric Goulder and unveiled in 2019,is only the second Flushing Meadows monument erected in honor of a champion. “Althea reoriented the world and changed our perceptions of what is possible,” said Goulder. “We are still struggling. But she broke the ground.”
“I hope that I have accomplished just one thing”, she said, in her 1958 retirement speech, “that I have been a credit to tennis, and to my country.”By all measures,” reads the inscription on her Newark statue, “Althea Gibson certainly attained that goal.”