Althea Gibson: A peerless pioneer

She just wanted to be somebody. For Althea Gibson, it was an equally simple and impossible quest. She had the talent, certainly. She was, as she many times described herself, “a born athlete.” But she also was born into a time when the color of your skin could limit your opportunities to showcase your talents. And while the effort to achieve “somebody” status is very much your own; the official recognition invariably comes from others. It’s hard to become somebody when nobody can see you.

Happily, dreams are without parameters, and Gibson never stopped dreaming. Yes, she was Black and she was a woman at a time when the sporting world—and for that matter, the greater part of the world at large—saw those two things as reason enough to exclude. Yet Gibson held tight to the belief that if you had a champion’s fire burning inside you, no outside influence could dampen the flame. She believed that with dreams and desire as fuel, that fire might just become so bright that it couldn’t be ignored. And she was right.

Three years after the great Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, this brilliant young woman, born to sharecroppers in South Carolina and raised in Harlem, cast her singular glow upon the sport of tennis as the first African-American to compete in the U.S. National Championships. Her 1950 debut at Forest Hills at age 23 was at once historic and prophetic. When a violent thunderstorm interrupted her second-round match against that year’s Wimbledon champion Louise Brough, a bolt of lighting separated one of the monumental stone eagles from its perch atop the stadium, sending it crashing to the ground.  Afterward, Gibson said: “It may have been an omen that times were changing.”

Change came gradually, as did success.