Althea Gibson

Althea Gibson did not lack places to put her energy. On Harlem play streets she excelled at paddle tennis and other games. She also skipped school, wandered the neighborhood for days, and fought. By thirteen she had stopped attending classes. Winning came naturally; losing did not. She later admitted that, even after she started tennis, “I kept wanting to fight the other player every time I started to lose a match.”

Buddy Walker, a play-street supervisor and musician, noticed how quickly she learned. He found rackets and urged her to try court tennis at Harlem’s Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. Gibson was not immediately grateful. She wanted to know what she would get for showing up. Once Fred Johnson and other club members saw her play, they took up a collection for a junior membership, a racket, and regular instruction. Johnson also went to her parents for permission.

The new sport revealed as much as it repaired. Gibson could serve hard, cover the court, and beat more experienced players, but she remained volatile. By 1945 she had reached the final of the American Tennis Association’s national championship, the leading competition then open to Black players. Watching her there, physicians Hubert Eaton and Robert Johnson saw a rare athlete whose life off court—and conduct on it—could still close the path.

They proposed more than extra lessons. With Gibson’s mother’s permission, she would live with the Eaton family in Wilmington, North Carolina, during the school year and return to high school. Summers would be spent with Johnson in Lynchburg, Virginia, training and traveling to tournaments. Two households would maintain the same plan across the calendar.

The arrangement lasted for years. In Wilmington, the Eaton home supplied affection, expectations, school, and a court on which Gibson could practice. She captained the school basketball team and graduated in the top ten of her class. In Lynchburg, Johnson refined her game, entered her in stronger competition, and handled the travel that made a national schedule possible. Black families, professionals, and tennis clubs supplied homes, money, courts, and instruction because the segregated sport denied Gibson an ordinary route upward.

After high school, Gibson attended Florida A&M on an athletic scholarship and graduated in 1953. She had already become the first Black player to enter the U.S. National Championships in 1950. In 1956 she won the French Championships. The next year she became the first Black singles champion at Wimbledon and also won the U.S. title; she repeated both victories in 1958. Her career produced five major singles titles and eleven major titles in all.

Those victories did not make exclusion disappear, and the adults around Gibson could not know they were training a future champion. What they could see was that a few hours of tennis were not enough. Walker opened a door. The Cosmopolitan members paid for a real beginning. Eaton and Johnson then connected the game to school, home life, travel, and conduct, each carrying part of a plan that no one adult could have sustained alone.