[music]

Alison Stewart: Sally, you've got three pages in the back of the book listing the interviews you did for this book, well over 100 people. Who were three people you knew you had to interview to write this biography?

Sally Jacobs: Okay. That's an easy one. I didn't know it right away, but as I began interviewing people, I began to learn who those people were. The first person I interviewed and probably one of the most important was Rosemary Darben. That was Althea's best friend during her tennis playing days with the ATA, the Black tennis community. She was from New Jersey. She too play there, and they became really good friends. Althea met her husband because that was her brother. Rosemary's brother became her first husband.

The second person was Angela Buxton. That was a white woman, British, who became her closest tennis friend in the white world. She had endured a lot of discrimination as a Jewish person, and they became incredibly bonded and very close really until Althea's death.

The third person, let me think about that for a second. There was a fellow named Bob Ryland who has since passed on. He was a black tennis player and very prominent, and he knew Althea. He just had a very unique perspective on both her life in Harlem and also in later years in the white tennis world. I interviewed him a couple of times, and I felt like I learned a lot from him, so probably those three.

Alison: Will you share how you gained access to Althea Gibson's papers?

Sally: Yes. By that, I think you mean her personal papers, right? Personally.

Alison: I do, yes.

Sally: I got to know Althea's cousin Don Felder. He's a second cousin on her mother's side of Washington family member. As I began to interview different people, I got closer to him and also a woman who had ended up with Althea's papers, long story-- probably not worth going into, but there had been a woman who was a friend of Althea's, maybe not the best person in the world, but she slowly gathered Althea's things over her declining years. She lost a lot of them, put a lot of them in a storage unit on the New Jersey Turnpike in Newark.

They sat there forever till I showed up talking to the daughter of that person and the cousin, Don Felder. One day, the three of us headed out there, broke the padlock, got in-- not broke, sorry. Unlock the padlock because they had the keys and got in, and it was just incredible for someone, a reporter, an author like me. There were boxes and boxes that had not been opened for years.

There were golf clubs. There were tennis rackets, hair curlers, you name it. That was when I began to really get to the heart of Althea's personal stuff, her love letters, a lot of great stuff for an author.

Alison: What was your goal, Sally, when you first sat down to write this biography of Althea Gibson?

Sally: Well, as you know, when you first sit down, you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really know what your story is. You know what the topic is, but you don't know where it's going to take you and that was certainly true with Althea. I spent about four years on this. I knew very little. In fact, I barely knew who she was when I started. I feel like I really came to understand her with each consecutive year.

My goal, of course, was to tell the story of a championship athlete who broke the color barrier, not just in one sport but two, which many people don't know. She also broke the color barrier in golf and to tell that story, because many people to this day, don't know who Althea was and don't know that she was the first Black woman to be the number one tennis player in the world.

Alison: When you say you didn't know her, you mean you didn't know her personally? You knew of her?

Sally: I didn't.

Alison: You didn't? How did you come to the subject?

Sally: Every time someone asked that question, I always wish I had a better answer, a more original answer, but unfortunately, I'm just going to give you the truth. The truth is I was looking for another book topic. I had written a biography of Barack Obama's father. I was looking around, and my boyfriend said, "Well, why don't you read something about Althea Gibson? Nothing's really been written on her." I said, "Who the hell is Althea Gibson?"

I didn't know who she was. Lucky for me, there really had not been a great deal written about her. She had written her own autobiography. There were a couple of books, one authorized biography of her and a couple of books in which she was half of the story. There was a lot of uncovered ground. As a book writer, it was just a really great topic to walk into.

Alison: This is full bio. We are discussing the book Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is author, Sally Jacobs. Most people associate Althea Gibson with Harlem, but she was born to a sharecropping family in South Carolina on August 25th, 1927. You found the sales record for Gibson's great-great-grandmother named Tiller. She was sold for $378 to Benjamin Reese Gibson.

Sally: Yes. We started in South Carolina Clarendon County. I had an excellent research assistant who knows the records. We just started going through a lot of documents, unfolding old envelopes, getting the clerks to help us, and we did find that bill of sale, traced Tiller to her son, who was an amazing person, who was a very intelligent guy.

He had not had an education but really believed in education. January Gibson was his name, a really standout guy. He broke a lot of ground in Clarendon County for other folks and help people get education at a time when that was very, very rare. That was her background.

Alison: On the other side, the maternal side of the family, Althea Gibson's grandfather, Charlie Washington, you describe him as the man. He had a little bit of status. How did he rise to prominence?

Sally: Charlie was a merchant. He ran a store. It was one of three stores in the tiny, tiny town of Silver, South Carolina. He rose because he was smart. A lot of the goods that he sold were secondhand. I mentioned the cousin, Don Felder, his mother worked in the store, and she would describe for me when the train would come into town with the boxes of goods, secondhand clothes.

They would lay out the fresh fish they would bring down. It was a really very popular store and had a little cafe in it. Charlie really was the man. He was a minister. He didn't have his own church, but he really was the kind of go-to guy there, so that was part of her background in this small town.

Alison: There's an interesting fact about Charlie Washington that he is tied to the landmark Brown versus Board of Education School Desegregation case. How so and why was the detail you wanted to include in this biography of Althea Gibson?

Sally: Well, it was relevant to me. He was a young man who was teaching in the school system for a while, who was linked to the Brown versus Board of Education case. It was such a critical case that we're being able to link Althea to it, although she never knew this fellow, whose name I'm spacing on right now. I just wanted to put that as a perspective for where she was, how this tiny town in a way played a really significant role.

There were a number of people-- There was a petition signed to get the local school system to be part of the case that ultimately turned into Brown. There were a couple of Gibsons I could never make the link directly to Althea. I did find one cousin. I had hoped to find a more direct link, but clearly, the community and that one connected cousin, not a first cousin, really tied her to a major civil rights landmark case. That was my aim in mentioning it.

Alison: The two family lines come together in the '20s when Annie Bell Washington and Daniel Gibson marry. Althea's born, the first of five children. What was life like for the Gibson's before they moved to New York City?

Sally: Well, in a word, as you can imagine, in the South, in the late '20s and early '30s, it was hard as possible. Sharecropping was, in many ways, a thinly veiled form of slavery. You only could make a part of the money you actually earned. You had to pay a lot of it to the white man. I think, in one year, her dad made $10. It clearly was not going to be a viable place to make a living. There had been a lot of bad weather, a lot of rain. It was not great. As everybody knows, the great migration was coming. It was in the offing after the depression.

In the early 1930s, the writing was on the wall. One of Annie's sisters, Sally comes down to Silver for a funeral. She sees the situation, sees little Althea, and said, "I'll take her back with me to New York." She was only one of I think two children at the time who had been born, but it was taking a little bit of the burden off the parents. Within a year, Annie goes up, and then her father comes up to Harlem. They've gradually migrated up there by the early '30s.

Alison: There's a story about-- It's a little bit of a harbinger for how things are going to go for Daniel Gibson. He gets ripped off when he arrives in New York.

Sally: Exactly. There was a fellow there, a fellow on the train, a conductor, who says that he's going to tell him about Harlem, tell him how to get up there, to take the train up there. He charges him $5. In fact, the price of the train ride is about $0.5. They get off the train, and the conductor says to him, "Welcome to Harlem." He's just gotten ripped off. The rest is coming at him fast.

Alison: There are two very different kinds of Harlem, and you get into this in the book. There's a Harlem of the new Negro of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Then there's the Harlem of working folks trying to get by which is more of the Gibson family story. For the average working family at this time, early '30s, mid-'30s in Harlem, what were the issues?

Sally: The issues were trying to make a living and stay alive, basically. There was, as you say, the Harlem a lot of people think of as a vibrant dancing, beautiful, Black people flourishing, endless nightclubs, that kind of a thing. The truth was, as many social workers knew but had trouble getting attention to, was that many, many people were struggling to get food on the table. It was hard to get work. Many people were boxed into Harlem, wages were low.

I found that Althea's own block was known as the lung block because of the high rate of lung disease, all different kinds of diseases, but that she survived on the lung block, which, of course, I doubt she even knew. Probably, it wasn't even made public until years later. It was really a reflection of how hard life was then. There were five of them, children, two parents. They lived in, I think it was a four-bedroom apartment at one point. Her father worked as a garage mechanic, and her mom stayed home and cooked and took care of the children.

Alison: That was up on 143rd Street?

Sally: 143rd. You got it. Between 7th and Lenox.

Alison: We're discussing the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is Sally Jacobs. It's our choice for full bio. Althea Gibson was, as they used to say in the day, a kid who was running in the streets. How did she entertain herself pre-tennis? We'll get there.

Sally: Althea, better known as Big Al in those days as her father nicknamed her, had a lot of fun. She broke the rules. She did what she wanted. She was a pickpocket. She dropped out of school after junior high. She loved to sing. She went to the famous Apollo Theater and would sing with other people. She competed. She was out on the streets a lot, a lot. She was a really tough girl. Frankly, she looked the part which would come to matter in subsequent years.

She had very short hair. She wore blue jeans, which was not very common, and she wore t-shirts, which, for a girl of that era was very unusual. One of the things that defined her era, her days then, was boxing. Women's boxing was a quite flourishing sport. Women can make money. Her dad, who needed money, as did the whole family, decided that his tough Big Al was going to learn how to box.

He took her up onto the roof of their tenement and started to box with her. He knocked her down, and he knocked her down again. Now, this went on for a while. Althea was still growing. She would grow to be 5'10.5" and slowly, she began to be able to knock him down. The two of them would go up there and fight and fight. Her brother would be watching. He would later tell the stories of this, which is why we know some detail. Pretty soon, Althea could knock her dad out.

Now, that was a real milestone for her, but it didn't really solve what was her larger problem, which was that her dad would beat her up. He would hit her. He had a whip rope sometimes he hit her with. We know about this because Althea wrote about it in her own autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. She described in some detail the fear she had of her father, who frankly loved her very much. I think he was a deeply frustrated man in Harlem, and this was one of the ways he vented that.

Long story short, Althea tried to stop him. She would go to the police department. She would, as she wrote, pull her blouse off her shoulder and show the police the welts and the bruises on her back. What did they do? They called up Mr. Gibson, and they go, "Daniel, come on down here and get your girl," and back she would go to the house. She went to the SPCA, the Children's Welfare Organization, and they did help her.

They did call him initially, but in time, they gave her a room and gave her support, which really was a grace period for her. Most important, the way Althea tried to cope with that violence and the pain of her childhood was she would ride the train at night, the train that would go up and down the length of Manhattan. As she describes it in her autobiography, it starts when she's age 12 that she does this. All through the night, a 12-year-old girl riding the train by herself.

I mention it to you only because, to me, this was really a critical developmental point for her. As she describes it, as she's on the train, she's thinking, "I'm by myself. I am the only person who is going to take care of me." In a way, that really came to be true throughout her life. Althea was on her own a great deal, and she became a quite defended person, and that would color much about her tennis career.

[music]

Alison: Althea Gibson was an all-around athlete, boxing, basketball. You write in your book when 10-year-old Althea Gibson walked out of her building one morning in 1937 to find 143rd Street shut off with wooden barricades and a paddle tennis court awaiting her, she was beside herself. Sally, what was going on that day on 143rd Street?

Sally: It was a Sunday and something called the PAL, which stood for the Police Athletic League, had set that court up. The reason they did was because it was so darn dangerous in Harlem. There was very little playgrounds to speak of. Not many places a kid could go. There were statistics about the number of children who were hit by cars playing in the street, literally, some of them killed. It was a very dangerous place.

The Police Athletic League started putting up these paddle tennis courts. Bingo, one of them is right on Althea's block. Althea strides out there in her inimitable way and starts to play, and she plays hard, and she wins. She wins the next block and the next block. She starts to play in larger community paddle tennis games, and she starts to win there also. This is a great sport for her.

Alison: How long after that day did it become clear that she had a gift for racket sports?

Sally: It certainly became clear there. As you know from the book, a bandleader named Buddy Walker comes along in 1941 and says, "Wow, that girl can play." He takes her to a tennis court. He has a couple of his friends play against her and confirms that this girl, this young woman is very, very good. He takes her over to 149th Street to something called the Cosmopolitan Club. That was the Black Tennis Club, where all the crème de la crème of the Harlem Society played tennis.

Alison: When Althea Gibson won Wimbledon, Buddy Walker was one of the first people she thanked in a press conference in New York City. Let's listen.

Althea Gibson: I'd like to thank, first of all, Buddy Walker for being the first person to hand me a tennis racket, for being the first person to reach over a handful of youngsters playing paddle tennis in 143rd Street, and saying to me, "I think you can make a good tennis player."

Alison: How did Althea Gibson fit in at the Cosmopolitan Club?

Sally: Not is the first word that comes to mind. She really didn't fit in those early months. It was very tough. They looked at her and thought, "Who the hell is this?" I've told you what she looked like, blue jeans, short hair. This was not what the folks at the Cosmopolitan Club wanted. They would wear fine dresses, tailored white outfits. It was a very well-dressed showy community. To look at Althea, it was like the waif had walked in off the street.

Then they saw her play and watched how she hit and saw her incredible athleticism, and that was that. Althea would never really get along well with that kind of community. It was a struggle for her. She was who she was. They knew sheer talent when they saw it, and the compromise was made.

Alison: We're discussing the book Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is Sally Jacobs. It's our choice for full bio. Let's talk about the American Tennis Association, the ATA. You spent some good time getting into the history of Black tennis. What is the ATA? When was it founded? What was its goal?

Sally: The ATA is the American Tennis Association, founded in Druid Hill, Maryland, Baltimore in particular, in 1914. It was, as with many sports, the Black community's step to create a place they could play the sport and not have to compete or struggle to get on a court. It was their community, and it became the go-to place for Black tennis.

Alison: Bertram Baker was once described as the boss of Black Brooklyn. He was a big deal with the ATA. How would you describe his relationship with Althea Gibson?

Sally: Althea's relationship with the ATA and Bertram, in particular, was a complex one. They had chosen her. She was going to be the one they backed to break into white tennis, so they really wanted her on their team. They wanted her to focus on tennis, make that number one. Althea had two doctors who sponsored her, who really taught her a lot about tennis. They were both ATA members also, but they really cared about Althea, the whole person.

They wanted her to get an education because some day they knew she wouldn't be able to play tennis. They wanted her to be educated, to have a job, that kind of thing. It became a bit of a struggle about Althea. Was she going to be sacrificed to tennis, or was she going to be the well-rounded person? I think she's struggled with that herself.

It would get more complex when she started to play white tennis. When she started playing Black tennis, she was the front-runner, the community really rallied behind her, raised money for her, got her tickets to places. In the beginning, they were right behind her.

Alison: What was it about Althea Gibson and the way she played tennis that she became the chosen one, that the ATA thought this could be the person who puts Black tennis on the map and possibly integrates all of tennis?

Sally: Althea played in a way that not many women played at the time. She was aggressive. She was strong, and she rushed the net. She also was very powerful. There was another woman who she saw who really modeled tennis for her, and her name was Alice Marble. She was one of the greatest tennis players of the time. She was the number one woman player in 1939, and she took a fancy to Althea and vice versa.

Althea saw her play in 1944 at an exhibition match at the Cosmopolitan Club. It was very unusual to have a white woman, there were two white women actually, play tennis there, and Althea was mesmerized. She writes about it in her autobiography, and she says, "That's how I want to play," because Marble was also very aggressive. Unlike most women, she wore shorts, if you can imagine such a thing.

Alison: Oh, my. [laughs]

Sally: Althea wore shorts, shocking people. That was the style of game they played, just very aggressive. It was the beginning of a new era in women's tennis.

Alison: At this time in her game, what was Althea Gibson's weakness?

Sally: Early in her game, she was very erratic. She could play a very steady game, but then she'd get rattled if someone took a few points off of her. She'd start to miss shots, not do so well. Her backhand was not so great, and the other thing that just tortured her for a long time was her footing. She often had foot faults. In a tournament, she would have up to 20 foot faults, and that would rattle her even more. It really was nerves in a way that undermined her game in the early years.

Alison: What about her appearance? As you said, she wore shorts, she wore T-shirts. In reading the book, the way that people described her often as mannish. I was wondering, was this coded language for is Althea Gibson queer?

Sally: Yes is the short answer. There were many other women like her, but Althea, she didn't hesitate to be who she was. God bless her. She dressed the way she did. She played the aggressive game. People didn't really talk about it too much. In my reporting, Bob Ryland was one of the people that told me he went to find her at a tournament. He knocks on the dormitory door, and someone yells to come in, and there she is in bed with a woman.

There are a number of incidents like that. Myself, I feel that Althea was bisexual. She did marry twice, once for love, once for convenience. She had a lot of close female friends, a number of the young women at FAMU, Florida Agricultural Mechanics University, as it's now called, where she attended telling me about her pursuing women, coming on to them. At the time, nobody really talked about that kind of thing. These were small stories that I heard from people in later years.

[music]

Alison: Throughout Althea Gibson's career, you describe a series of adopted mothers and fathers sort of stand-ins. One example was Rhoda Smith. Who was Rhoda Smith, and how did she help scaffold Althea Gibson?

Sally: Rhoda Smith was a prominent ATA member in Harlem and also a social figure, a member of the Cosmopolitan Club. She kind of adopted Althea at the time. Althea's parents, as you can imagine, never cottoned to tennis. They didn't know tennis. I don't think they saw her play until 1956, when she wins her first grand slam, 15 years after she starts playing. Rhoda took her under her wing. She would play with her.

There were just a couple of stories in the newspaper where Althea, who of course was the stronger player, even as a young person, would try to help Rhoda play better. She'd say, "Oh, I'm so sorry I hit the ball so hard. I'm so sorry." Althea, who never would apologize, was just trying so hard to help support Rhoda, who helped her. Althea would stay at her house sometimes. Rhoda would go and buy her under clothes, get her a warm coat, really a step-in mom. Also, she would accompany her as Althea started to play on the ATA tournament as her chaperone in many cases.

Alison: Another big supporter, especially financially, was the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. How did Sugar Ray Robinson take an interest, and why did he take an interest in Althea Gibson?

Sally: They have quite a first meeting. They're both in a bowling alley. Sugar Ray loved to bowl. Althea, who also loved to bowl, and her girlfriends, gal pals, are bowling and they say, "Oh, there's Sugar Ray." What does Althea do? She goes up to him and she says, "Let's play. Let's do a bowling match. I think I can beat you." He's taken with that, and he comes to be very fond of her. He finds that she loves music.

She plays the saxophone. She loves to sing. It's he who puts up, I think it's $125 for her saxophone, a used saxophone, which is bought in Harlem and she keeps with her for the rest of her life. He and his wife, again, take her on. She travels with them. They go to one of his training sites. She's allowed to drive his car, even though she doesn't have a license. It was that kind of relationship. She always looked up to him.

When she goes to Wimbledon for the first time in 1951, he's there in a boxing match. When he arrives, she's there to meet him, and the press goes crazy. He just was a shining star in her life as a young woman. I think she really looked up to both of them.

Alison: Two men who took up the cause of Althea, you call them the doctors, Dr. Hubert Eaton and Dr. Robert Johnson. Dr. Johnson became known as the godfather of Black tennis. Dr. Eaton went on to have a career as a civil rights leader. What did they see in Althea, this high school dropout?

Sally: They both have been watching her a little bit. They were regulars at every single ATA tournament, and Althea was starting to play in quite a few of them in the early '40s. Eaton actually says to one of the Black newspapers that, as he would watch her, he really didn't know if she was a girl or a boy. She was so masculine-looking but he moved on. He just didn't quite get it.

As time went on and he realizes she's winning tournaments, he starts to pay more attention. He realizes she's a woman, girl. They come to a tournament in 1946. The two of them are sitting in the stands. There's an ATA tournament at Wilberforce, and they're watching her. She's not playing her best. She's playing against the great player, Romania Peters.

She's falling into her usual habit of that day, where she's getting flustered, and she misses a couple of shots. She gets teed off, and she rams the ball off the court out of the playing area. You don't do that in tennis, but she does. Anyway, she loses the match. They are so impressed by how she plays, by her form, by her force that they have decided, as they're watching her, they are going to take her on as not just a student, but as a young person, they're going to help get through school.

She was a dropout at the time. Most ATA people did not know that because, if they had, they probably wouldn't have taken her on. They go to her that day. She's sitting in the bottom of the stairs. A lot of ATA people walk by just so annoyed with her for losing. They barely even look at her. She's crying. Tears are going down her face. I think it's Eaton that goes up to her, and he says, "I'd like to help you get to the US National Tournament." She's like, "What? Are you kidding?" Well, he means it. That's exactly what those two doctors do.

Johnson lives in Lynchburg, Virginia. Eaton is in Wilmington, North Carolina. Eaton takes her on for-- she lives with him during the school year. Then she goes to Johnson during the summers. Eaton trains her. Each of those doctors has a tennis court in their backyard which was beyond unusual, as you probably can imagine. They were prominent. They had a little bit of money, and this was the field, the sport that they were going to help integrate.

They take her on. They take her to various tournaments, mostly during the summer in the South with Johnson. He had a beautiful car that he would drive around with four and five players in the car, and they would go from one tournament to the next. Of course, they weren't allowed to sleep in any hotels, eat in any restaurants so life really happened in that car.

Alison: Here's Althea Gibson thanking the doctors shortly after one of her big wins at Wimbledon.

Althea: I'd like also to thank the two people who have done, I believe, the most for me in my tennis career, and I'm speaking of one who is present here today, Dr. R. W. Johnson.

[applause]

Althea: It was through Dr. Johnson's unselfish contributions, which made it possible for me to travel around the USA at that particular time to get the needed experience that I so needed to attain this victory. Dr. H. A. Eaton, who is not present here today, in whose home I receive love, encouragement, and a great deal more while attending, or shall I say, finishing high school when at the time I did not care to finish. He has done a great deal for me and for that, I thank Dr. Eaton and Dr. Johnson.

[applause]

Alison: Sally, you note Dr. Eaton realized that Althea was, as you put it, at the convergence of his two great passions, civil rights and tennis. What were his hopes for Black tennis at this time?

Sally: Well, the color barrier had begun to shake a little bit at this point. Football had been integrated, and I think tennis was really the next sport that people, the Black community, hope to break into. There had been a lot of talks between the ATA and the USLTA, as it was called at the time, the United States Law and Tennis Association. Today, it's USTA, of course. They weren't really getting very far. The USLTA kept putting them off.

They would come to them and say, "Look, Althea is so great, let her play." They'd say, "Well, she's got to play in a few other tournaments. We really can't let her do that. She's got to show her stuff." The task before Eaton, Johnson, and the others was to get her wins at some of these other tournaments, more local tournaments, not the big Grand Slams. That's exactly what they did.

Alison: You described their offer to mentor her as a bit of a leap of faith on their part initially. Why would that be the case if she were this talented?

Sally: Well, first because she was a woman. That was surprising to everybody, I think. Most people at the time would have thought it would have been a man that they would have taken to the gates of the USLTA. Althea was so good at what she did. Women's tennis was coming into its own. There had been a real golden period of women's tennis the past decade, and I think really the chemistry of who she was, not that she was an easy person because she wasn't altogether. I think the chemistry was right between her and the doctors, and this was the gamble they decided to take.

Alison: My guest is Sally Jacobs. The name of her book is Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson is our choice for full bio. When they began to work with her on her game, how did she respond to coaching?

Sally: Well, Althea struggled with that, of course, because for her, it was hard to have someone tell her what to do. Eaton would write in his own book about how, when she wasn't playing so well, she would get very, very quiet. Sometimes she would go inside, and he worried about that. He began to realize also that this was her determination to be great. That when she wasn't being great, when she wasn't playing well, she really got low.

This was something that he had to work with and did. He really helped her overcome some of her anxiety and some of the poor playing that she would resort to when she became anxious.

Alison: What about the coaching off the court? The manners around tennis? The way one behaves, the way one presents oneself?

Sally: Right. Both doctors specialized in that. Eaton had Althea at the family dinner table, of course, and would always be coaching her. His wife was a beautiful woman, very socially engaged. She would help Althea with her clothing, try to get her to dress a little better. Got her to go to the prom, which was a big leap. It was really Dr. Johnson, Dr. J, as they called him, who did the nitty gritty.

He would have a whole bunch of students at his house, probably four or five living in the house for the summer. Every meal, they would sit around the table and he would show them how to use the right spoon, right fork. You absolutely, you must fold-- cross your legs. The men must pull out the chair for the women, and don't forget that napkin must go in your lap. That kind of a thing, some things that Althea had never heard of before, perhaps many of them had never heard of. Boy, did they learn a lot there.

One of his major lessons for them was, if the ball goes out, or you think the referee has a bad call, you keep your mouth shut. You don't say, "Oh, no, no, that was in." You just keep right on going and stay quiet. That's what they did.

Alison: All that stuff around the dinner table, that's what the old folks used to call home training.

Sally: Right. Exactly.

Alison: "Does that child having any home training?" The doctors wanted her to complete her education and enroll in college. They wanted to complete high school. That was one of the stipulations for them working with her. Why did they want her to go to college rather than get her out there on the circuit ASAP while she's young and strong?

Sally: Right. Well, as I mentioned, they were concerned with the whole person here. They didn't want to just have a winner to make the money, to make the ATA happy, to to serve the Black community altogether. They wanted Althea to be a full person with an education, so that when the day came that she couldn't play tennis, which of course, wasn't that far off, professional sports, this was amateur tennis, of course. You get to a point where you really can't compete anymore and they wanted her to be able to get a job, to make some money.

You could not make any money in tennis in the amateur era. It was not until 1968, the open era, you could begin to make prize money. They really were thinking of the whole person in a way with the ATA. They wanted to pull her out of college this month, take her here that month, which became a real struggle between the two doctors and the larger leadership of the ATA.

Alison: Althea Gibson goes to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. She was called the Gibb in college. She stuck out as compared to her peers, but not just because of her talent. What made her an unusual student at FAMC?

Sally: Althea got special treatment in many, many ways. One of them is in a pool hall. Althea would go over to the men's dorm, no girl would ever do that. She would just sashay in there, go down to the basement, and start shooting pool at which she was very good. Not only did she shoot pool, she won pool. I found several guys who just told me the stories of their astonishment when Althea would not only show up but beat them at their own game.

When she would go into the dining hall, for better or worse, she could go to the head of the line and she often did. Some people resented it, sure. For Althea, it also was a little bit complicated because she did have to leave campus. She often had to go play tournaments in the middle of a week, say, and that made school hard for her. It also kept her out of the loop. She would come back as one of the students was saying, and she'd say, "Okay, fill me in. What's going on? Who's doing what?" I think life wasn't totally easy for her, although she was a star there. It was a little complicated.

[music]

Alison: Althea Gibson begins her list of firsts. In 1949, she became the first Black woman to participate in the Indoor Eastern Championships. What issues did she face as a first?

Sally: Well, as you can imagine, being the first Black woman, she faced a lot of racism. A lot of people would call names. Some places she wasn't allowed to use the bathroom, certainly couldn't use a restaurant. There's a lot of race tinged into that. I think there were some Black men who resented her coming in and becoming a first. Again, it was complicated.

Alison: When she began to compete, what was her edge?

Sally: Well, it was the style that we talked about a little bit earlier, which was that Althea was incredibly aggressive in a way that very few women were. She would rush the net almost to a fault. Her game really needed to develop a little bit. She had a lot of foot faults, which were a problem. Her success was that she was such an aggressive player. She had an incredibly strong overhand. Yes, she was daunting to play against.

Alison: In the 1940s, who were other African American tennis players in her peer group?

Sally: Yes, one of the main people was Reginald Weir, who was a doctor, who was right before Althea. He had played in the Indoors the year before a number of tournaments. He was a bit of an anomaly because he was allowed to play in a number of white tournaments, not Grand Slams yet, but he was well-liked. He was a doctor, so the white community allowed him in, including USLTA was aware of this.

He, in some ways, led the way for her. He would probably be one of the main names. There were the Peters sisters who were very talented tennis players. They were the ones that Althea needed to defeat in order to move ahead, which she ultimately did. They had beaten her quite a number of times early on.

Alison: You point out that Althea Gibson had to overcome race, gender, and class. We've talked a little bit about each. I would love for you to give me, there's so many examples in the book, just for our listeners, one example in her career at this point, in this 1940s to 1950s range where she had to deal with an issue of race, an issue of gender, and an issue of class.

Sally: Well, the race one is easy. One of the things that happened to Athea, when she was playing with Dr. Johnson and the carload I described of folks traveling around the South, they would go to different tournaments. They would need to leave the towns they were in often by the time darkness fell because they were what were known as sundown towns. This happened once in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1948, I believe it is.

Dr. J is there with, I think it's two carloads, probably six students, six players. They have all won their tournaments including Althea. They're over the top. They're celebrating, they're partying, they all have their trophies so much so that they have committed a cardinal sin, which is they have not filled up the gas tank. Small detail, you just go fill it up. Well, not if you're Black and not if you're in the South, because they won't fill you up in the South because you're supposed to be gone.

Dr. Johnson realizes this, and they are [unintelligible 00:41:27] the two cars they have with all the players in them to the gas station, nervous. As one might imagine, as they pull up in the darkness, the owner comes barreling out of the front door with a gun in his hands, puts it at Althea's head. She's sitting in the passenger seat and he says, "N-word, get the hell out of here." They have no gas, what are they going to do? They pull over to the side of the road, I think it's around eleven o'clock now, at night, they pull over and they wait thinking they're going to have to wait till sunrise to get the gas and get out.

Fortunately, some young people come along that know the gas-- some Black young people that happen to know the gas attendant, they explain the situation, the tennis, and they're allowed to get some gas and leave, but you can imagine the lesson that Dr. Johnson learned that night, which was he would never again forget to fill up the gas tank.

Alison: When was a time when her gender really was an obstacle?

Sally: Well, Althea's gender is a complicated story because she did appear so male. I'm trying to think of a case where it was a barrier to her. It was a barrier in so many cases in any tennis tournament. I think I'm going to tell you the brief story about her gender and what it stems from, which is a complicated story, but Althea had a problem on her birth certificate. When she was born in 1927 on her birth certificate, she was born in a family home, the birth certificate that was subsequently filled out described her as a male.

It gave her the name, not of Althea, but of Alger, A-L-G-E-R, and it gave her father, not the name of Daniel, which he was, but he was called Duas, D-U-A-S. These errors go unnoticed for decades until Althea in 1954 decides to apply to the US Army, the Women's Army. I could not get the full story, but from the pieces I could get, which were several documents from the Women's Army to Althea, she apparently had a medical exam in 1954, and they were not happy with it. Now, was it a problem with her gender?

Something was wrong because shortly after she has that medical exam, her father goes to the courthouse in South Carolina in Clarinet County and has her gender changed. It gets changed to female. Her name is corrected. His name is corrected. Now, how did that happen? What did it mean? I don't have the final answer for that. I do know that the Women's Army was not happy with it, and they write her a letter in 1955 and say, "You need to come back. You need to have some more medical tests, some more exams."

I think there was a problem there and Althea decided not to confront it. She stopped applying. She dropped her application, end of story. I never really knew what came of that, but needless to say, gender was a complicated factor in her life, and that in itself right there was one of the most complicated chapters of it.

Alison: In terms of class, which is something people don't like to talk about.

Sally: Class was an issue that hounded Althea throughout her life. Even when she-- post tennis years, she struggled a lot. A poignant story that always haunts me about Athea when she, it's kind of a race thing, but it's partly class, when she wins Wimbledon, she does the ballroom, the classic ballroom dance with a white man named Lew Hoad, who was number one tennis player also, of course.

She moves on, she travels away that night, but the next morning Lew Hoad and his wife get a bag of hate mail raging at him for dancing with a Black woman, raging against Althea having a prominent position that she did. "What are you doing dancing with that N person?" Part of this was also class. This was Wimbledon. This was the elegant society event, one of them in London society, and there was just a lot of rage against her for breaking these barriers. I don't think she ever knew about all those letters but certainly Hoad and his wife did, and they were shocked and horrified.

[music]

Alison: I want to talk a little bit about, before we talk about Forest Hills and Wimbledon, I want to talk about the press a little bit. The press and Althea Gibson. When did the press first pick up on her that she would be a good news story?

Sally: Oh, I think from day one. As soon as Althea starts playing in the ATA, the Black press starts following her. She's the champion. She's the one who's going to go break down that door to the USLTA so they're on it immediately. Now, in some ways, they too had a complicated relationship with Althea. She did not love talking to the press. She had a number of really bad exchanges with them, fights, over different incidents.

In the beginning, the Black press was behind her. There were a number of Black papers, Chicago, Amsterdam News. Fortunately, you can't have access to all of them. It was really easy to see how the Black community viewed her. Many, many editorials. They were with her all together, but that didn't last. By 1953, when she's at college, she graduates in '53, her playing is not so good because she's been in school, because she's graduated now, she's not playing so much and they turn on her a little bit.

They don't really like her attitude. Jet Magazine, in 1953, one of the most prominent Black magazines dubs her the biggest flop, and the rest of the press crowds around. "She's got a bad attitude. She's not appreciative." So that takes a while to correct, but it does. By the time she starts winning, the time, 1956, she wins her first Grand Slam, they're back on board. There would be more struggles in later years.

In 1957, it's her year, she wins Wimbledon, she wins the US National Championship, as it's called, but the press is still having a struggle with her because after she wins Wimbledon, she heads to a tournament in Chicago where she is brutally stopped at Oak Park outside of downtown Chicago. She cannot go to a hotel. This is Althea Gibson who just won Wimbledon. She can't stay there. She can't have lunch at the hotel where she's booked it. She has to go to a hotel 12 miles away.

A reporter for Time Magazine had heard about this and writes about it, but Althea would not say boo. Would she open her mouth and say, " God damn it." Nothing. She knew that if she started complaining that it was going to create a whole nother chapter of complications for her, and she didn't want to do it. Althea was very single-focused for better or worse, and the Black community, the Black press did not like it.

Alison: Reading about the Black press going back and forth and how personal some of the articles got, it reminded me of Twitter in many ways.

[laughter]

Sally: That was a bad episode for sure.

Alison: Let's talk about the white press. Some of the headlines were astonishing to read. They were of the time, she was called Nigress, the colored one, but there was one Life Magazine piece titled The New Tennis Threat. What was the tone of that piece, given that provocative title?

Sally: If I'm recalling correctly, this is 1950 right before the US Open. Ginger Rogers, sorry, the US National Championship, as it was called then, Ginger Rogers was going to be appearing there also. She wasn't a fabulous tennis player, Ginger Rogers, but she was a great star, she was a wonderful dancer. They paired the two of them off because Althea and Ginger Rogers were going to show up at the West Side Tennis Club.

The magazine ran this article with the two of them back to back on either side of the magazine. When you open it up, Ginger's on the right side, dressed in black, Althea's on the left side, dressed in white. They were really drawing a contrast between these two people. Althea was the threat to the white sport, barging into the west side, the elite tennis club. What was going to happen? They were loving it and hating it all at once, as I saw it.

Alison: The word threat is so loaded in so many ways.

Sally: Right.

Alison: Althea didn't seem to understand the power of the press. Her friends and advisors would suggest she should be more friendly, and we would call it media savvy today. If you could share with the audience what was something she said that really caused her trouble and maybe trouble that could have been avoided if she just were media savvy? Things might have gone a little more smoothly.

Sally: She would just tell him to just say, "Go away, I don't want to-- I'm not going to talk to you now, buzz off." Rosemary Darbin, who I mentioned early on, one of her closest friends in the AT circuit would say, "Althea, you can't do that. You've got to be nice to them." She'd be like, "Ah, I don't want to, I don't care." That went on until she matured and was probably in, I don't know, her late 20s, early 30s. She just told him to eff off, basically.

Alison: My guess is, Sally Jacobs, we are discussing her book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. It's our choice for Full Bio. Since its inception, no one Black person had played at Wimbledon until June 26th, 1951. When did Althea Gibson begin to attempt to play at Wimbledon? What would she need to do to play at Wimbledon that was difficult for her to get there?

Sally: There had been one other person of color, a Jamaican who played in the '20s. She was the first Black woman, Black person to play there. I was overwhelmed by the press coverage of her when she gets there. The British papers were just shrieking at this. There was one story when they had about six different words for the color of her skin. She was Black, she was colored, she was Negro, she was this, and it went over and over and over. That's all you knew was that she was Black, Black, Black, colored, colored, colored. Didn't matter that she played tennis, her story was about Wimbledon [laughs] about the tennis tournament. The press coverage was just astonishing, even more so over the top than it was in the United States.

Alison: Help me understand, was there any written rule or official rule that a Black person could not play at Wimbledon?

Sally: No, it just said it had never happened before.

Alison: In 1951, objectively, was Althea Gibson ready for Wimbledon to play? She doesn't win, we should say even the first time, was she ready to play physically, mentally?

Sally: Oh, remember she wins the first round, so it's not nothing. No, she wasn't really ready, she's defeated by Beverly Baker, the famous [laughs] ambidextrous tennis player who would flip her racket from right to left, right hand to left hand, never had a backhand, always forehands from different sides of her body. A very good player. Althea wasn't really ready for it yet. Again, the traits that I've described, like her eroticism, her footfalls, her nervousness, there was a lot of yelling there, N word this, people were not kind to her. It was overwhelming. Even if her play had been better and more controlled it still would've been an overwhelming experience.

Alison: She does hit a milestone becoming the first African American player to win a Grand Slam when she took the French Open playing on Red Clay. The way you describe the audience, [chuckles] could you describe the crowd she faced?

Sally: [laughs] They were even more emotional, more overwrought, they were legendary for that, for being emotional, name-calling, all of it. It was a very complicated match for her. She's playing against Angela Buxton. I mentioned her early on as the British woman who was a very close friend. The two of them are competing, and a odd thing happened, which was that Althea's bra straps snaps during the match. Normally that player would go into the locker room, fix the problem, come back. Angela was her friend. Angela went with her, the crowd went crazy, like, "What's going on here? Why are these two players disappearing?" Angela could have stood her own, stayed out there called the game said she didn't want to help her kind of a thing. They go on, they continue to play and Althea recovers and wins. It was really a wild scene of emotion and name calling but it also marked Althea's first Grand Slam victory.

Alison: In 1957 she plays at Wimbledon, she triumphs at Wimbledon. Was it an exciting final match?

Sally: It was probably one of the worst matches in tennis history as some tennis players said. She played Darlene Hard, otherwise known as the California Waitress, as the press called her, and not too pleasantly that they didn't mean to be, it just was what her background was. She was a very pleasant person, a very good player, they had played many times together.

It was a dull match, it was not a very high-profile tennis. There's a videotape of that match, and there's even a couple times when Darlene just watches the ball sail by and starts to clap her hands, so you get the drift. I think she was overwhelmed by Althea. Althea was overwhelmed herself a little bit, but it really wasn't a great match.

Alison: Is this the match where Althea Gibson is presented her award by the Queen?

Sally: Yes.

Alison: Wow.

Sally: 1957. The Queen comes down and is standing under a little roof. She's got the trophy and both the players, Darlene and Althea had been trained because people thought this moment was going to happen. How they had to curtsy, not make eye contact right away, the whole procedure. Althea says something like, "Oh, I hope it wasn't too hot for you up there." She says, "No, no, at least I had a--" The Queen says, "No, no, I had a roof overhead. I hope it wasn't too hot for you." [laughs] That was the end of that.

[music]

Alison: Racism was the main reason that Althea Gibson was kept out of playing Forest Hills which now we describes the US Open. Did the USLTA, did the officials, was it that blatant? Was it that clear, you can't play here because you're Black?

Sally: No. Like many acts of overt racism in those years, nobody would call it what it was. What they would say was, "Oh, she can't play here until she wins some lesser tournaments. She needs to go rack up some wins elsewhere to win, to earn the right to play here." Was that true? Not really. No. Reggie Weir played all over the place. They wanted her to do that. They wanted to require her to do that so that they could keep her out, basically.

There were some minutes of a meeting of the USLTA where they really had the blunt discussion where they're saying Chinese people want to play just on the basis that they're Chinese people and they don't allow them in. It was a subterfuge to keep her out saying she didn't have enough experience, but that wasn't true.

Alison: Enter superstar, Alice Marble, number one in the world during her career. She comes out and she is a super ally. She calls for Althea being allowed to play. Sally, would you read part of the letter?

Sally: Alice Marble was one of the best women players as we discussed. She was Number 1 in 39, and she was a real believer in tennis and women would being able to play whatever color they were. She decided that she was going to take a stand on this hypocrisy of the USLTA, and she wrote a letter to what was a prominent tennis magazine in American lawn tennis in 1950.

Here's what she says. "I think it's time we faced a few facts. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentle people and less like sanctimonious hypocrites. If there's anything left in the name of sportsmanship, it's more than time to display what it means to us. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet the challenge on the courts where tennis has played.

The entrance of Negroes International Tennis is as inevitable as it has proven to be in baseball and football or in boxing. There is no denying so much talent. The committee at Forest Hills has the power to stifle the efforts of one Althea Gibson, who may or may not be the stuff of which champions are made, but eventually she will be succeeded by others of her race, who have equal or superior ability. They will knock at the door as she has done."

Alison: What was the impact of that letter?

Sally: Stupendous, it got them. They really couldn't say no to this. Alice goes on in her way and points out that sometimes in the summer she gets a dark skin from the sun. Another player gets freckles. Are they blocked from playing in the USLTA? Of course not, so what's the difference? The USLTA doesn't do anything right away, but it got people talking. Their number had been called within, I think it's about three or four weeks, Althea is allowed in to play in the US National Championship. The New York Times headline, as I recall, is something like Negro Girl Allowed To Play In Tournament. No name, just Negro girl.

Alison: She had, we've discussed the Black power brokers that she's had behind her. Over the course of reading your book, it became clear that she had women tennis players who were her allies, who rallied to help her. There was a well-known Jewish player who became her really good friend having been excluded herself. How were they able to exert power so that Althea would get a fair shot? Honestly, from your research, why were they interested in helping a competitor?

Sally: Well, I'm not sure that they altogether were, to be honest with you. There were some, yes. Alice Marble was one of them. Beverly Baker was a supporter. There were a few that supported Althea, but to be honest with you, a lot of them didn't. Althea endured a lot of bad treatment, cold shoulders. When they traveled these women on the road, which they often did, a lot of them had a partner, someone who they probably played doubles with or who was their best friend. They would get hotel rooms together, not Althea. There was a list of people in the locker room, and there would be jokes or little nicknames everybody had, not Althea.

She was not part of the crowd. That's where Angela comes in. Angela Buxton and the British woman that you mentioned who had endured a lot of really bad discrimination in South Africa as a Jewish woman. She knew what it was like. I think in 1948 or 1949, I think it is, she as a young woman, had heard about Althea and goes to watch her and is astonished by how she plays and gets her eyes set on her. They meet later on in India when Althea is overseas. They became really good friends, and they were the two that were the buddies on the road.

Now, the group didn't particularly like them. They didn't really like Angela either. They thought she was too full of herself, too this, too that. Really Angela and Althea were off on their own. It wasn't until much later really when Althea started playing golf that she became part of the girl's inner circle.

Alison: Once Althea can play at Forest Hills, there's this argument that bubbles up. Was she a trailblazer or was she being used as a pawn in some way? What was the argument for each side?

Sally: Well, the argument was by the Black community. Althea's this great player, she's broken through the barrier, but a lot of Black male, actually many men in the Black press were not so happy about it because what it meant was Althea's going to get to go, but what about everybody else? Was this really for Black people or was it just for Althea? That was a reasonable question because she really was someone who had been supported and championed. Other black players, yes, there were a couple here and there, but by and large, they still were not advancing in the sport.

Now, this part of the whole race picture in America wasn't just because they weren't being let in, but they didn't get the opportunities that they needed to be able to play. They weren't getting the training. They couldn't afford to play the sport. They couldn't afford the whole thing. They couldn't travel. It was a larger issue than what was just Althea.

Alison: Even after winning Wimbledon twice, and the US Open twice, Althea was never rich. She was often broke sometimes because of bad business decisions, mostly because women didn't get paid well. How did her financial situation impact her career choices and then her choices in tennis?

Sally: It impacted her tennis career in the sense that she stopped it early in 1958, which was her-- she had won again, Wimbledon and the US Open. She announces that she's leaving to people's astonishment. Althea could have played on definitely, but there was no money in tennis. It's hard to imagine today with these enormous purses, millions of dollars. The Williams sisters are enormously wealthy.

There was no money. Not only was there no money, you got punished if you did make a little money. Now, players made it under the table and on the side, but if you got caught making a little money, there was a big problem. You'd get booted out. By 1958, she decides that she is going to go do something else. She embarks on a series of mixed enterprises, a handful of which are modestly successful, but none of them really is. She ends up later in life in chronic poverty.

[music]

Alison: I want to spend the last part of our conversation talking about Althea the person, Althea's role in history, how Althea felt about her role in history. There was one period in her life when the US government decides to send athletes around the world as ambassadors of goodwill to show the ability to prosper in the States. The Harlem Globe Trotters, Jesse Owens. It was a global ambassador position. Why would Althea accept this position?

Sally: Because she was smart. That's a simplistic answer, but the truth was, Althea realized that this was going to give her an opportunity. She didn't know how great an opportunity, but she saw, I think that this could help her. She was not doing so well at this point. It's 1955, she's still in a bit of a slump. What happens is that Emmett Till tragically is murdered and the Russian government takes advantage of all the racism deep in American culture. They start making fun of America, criticizing them. The state department snaps to as they had already by sending Blacks overseas.

Within, I think it's, gosh, a couple of weeks after Emmett Till's death, they go to Althea and they say, "How would you like to go on a goodwill tour overseas?"

Okay, you could say she's being used, exploited, yes, she was a little bit, but Althea was smart too. If she was going to get ahead and succeed, then she was going to go on that trip. She goes with three other white people, one of whom Hamilton Richardson, is a great guy, a great player, and he really helps her, really helps her with her game. All three of them do the other white players. They'd become a team, the foursome, they do various exhibits all over India, Selan, Pakistan.

Althea is the hero of the group because she is the same color as other people that are watching and they love talking to her. She wins almost every-- all but two 16 out of 18 tournaments. It just was a deal breaker for her. Was she wrong to do it? This is a question that plagues Althea's position on race, I think. Was she right to be self-absorbed as self-focused or was she smart because Althea broke the barrier? Could she have done it if she didn't focus on herself?

I want to tell you one little thing I stumbled upon in my research that I thought really summed it up as you try to understand Althea's position because she didn't speak out on the Black cause and she took a lot of heat for it. She did break the barrier. On December 1st, 1955, two things happened on the same day. Rosa Parks sits down on the bus, the seat in the bus for Blacks only, and refuses to get off to make way for a white citizen. Thus we begin the year-long boycott of the buses there. On the same day I did the math, Althea sits down on a plane in Rangoon, heading out on the goodwill journey, goodwill tour, sorry.

She is not a champion for the Black cause. She never really speaks out about it. Looking at those two people, you could say Althea was the timid self-absorbed one, Rosa was the heroin. I don't really think that's true. Althea did what Althea could do. She fought with every fiber of her being, and she encountered racism at every step of the way on the court, in the locker room, you name it. She couldn't do both things. She couldn't be a race champion and a tennis champion. I began to appreciate that as I learned more and more about her. I don't think if she'd been a race champion, she could have broken the barrier.

Alison: Why not?

Sally: Because it would've taken too much energy. It would've taken too much harassment. I don't think psychologically Althea, an abuse victim as a child, who'd struggled so much against so many odds could have done both. She said, "I am not a racially conscious person. I don't want to be. I see myself as just an individual. I can't help or change my color in any way. Why should I make a big deal out of it? I'm a tennis player, not a Negro tennis player. I have never set myself up as a champion of the Negro race." This is from her autobiography I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.

Alison: Why is that a quote that's important for listeners to consider?

Sally: Because I think it helps you understand why Althea did what she did and why she didn't do what she didn't. What I was trying to explain earlier that Althea did the best that she could do for her being a champion of the Black race, was being the best tennis player she could, because that way she would break the barrier, she would be a symbol, she would be someone who could be the best. If that's not doing something for the Black race, I don't know what is. It wasn't what everybody was clamoring for, but Althea, as usual, had to do it her own way, so she did.

Alison: Ebony wrote that no Negro athlete could outrun all the bad news coming from the United States. Some people were much crueler and called her behavior Uncle Tom-ish. What did she come home to in the Black press?

Sally: Well, again, they felt like she was being used and that she wasn't fighting the good fight, which again, it depends on how you look at it. No, she wasn't on a day-by-day basis, but the Black press will turn again. She becomes their heroine again when she starts winning in '57. That's Althea's year. She wins everything. Here is a Black athlete who is number one in the world and the Black press surrounds her.

Now, I want to point out one other thing of the many, many incidents of racism this is another one that always just really moves me. In 1958, Althea Gibson is the number one women's tennis player in the world. She's won everything, and she's going to go down to Miami to play in something called the Good Neighbor Tournament. It was one of the first tournaments she played in as a Black player in '51. 1958, she's driving down the interstate feeling pretty darn good about things. She got a lot of friends playing in the tournament.

She takes a left to go over the bridge into Miami, and there's a toll gate there. As she's about to go through the gate, the guard comes out, puts his hand up, and says, "No, you can't come in here. No Black people can come in here." There've been a long history of Black people not being allowed onto the beach there without permits and she's astonished. She tells them who she is, "I'm Althea Gibson, it's XYZ." Doesn't believe a word of it. Even when she shows her license.

At the end of this terrible encounter, she has to call the tournament directors to tell the gatekeeper to let her in, that she's playing in a tournament. At the end of the day, Althea Gibson is another Black girl who can't come through the gate. Yes, she gets in, but she has to work hard to be able to do it. It so upset her, it enraged her, that by the time she gets on the court, I talked to a number of other women who played that tournament, she just is a wreck. She loses the first match. She's so upset by it and it didn't really leave her for a while. She realizes everybody's talking about it, and it's humiliating to her.

Alison: We're discussing the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is Sally Jacobs. It's our choice for Full Bio. Althea Gibson takes up competitive golf and once again breaks the color barrier and becomes the first Black golfer in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Why golf?

Sally: Yes, that's a great question. Golf, because she could. Golf because more Black people were playing in golf. A number of athletes had started to play, so it seemed like a somewhat welcoming community to her, not standing the larger hostility of the white community. Black people were beginning to play the sport, so she decided to play.

Alison: She was not a champion in the way she was in tennis. From your research and from reading her files, was this a happy time in her life, this time when she was a golfer?

Sally: I would say it was a mixed time. Althea had a job. She was a community representative for something called Tip Top Bread, so she had a bit of an income. Not a lot, but enough you could make money in golf, Althea never was great at golf. She did okay. It took a while. I think she made the most of something, I don't know, I think it was $15,000 in one year but she was part of the group.

The white female players really embraced her, but she felt very supported there. I think she drove in a long line of cars. Each car had the female golf player, so in that respect, I think she felt a community support that she'd never had. That her performance was not better, I think was a real disappointment for her. She only played, I think it was the mid-'70s, '76, '77 I think she stopped.

Alison: In a different world, Althea Gibson might have been a singer. She loved music so much. She was at the Apollo as a kid. She, I think, placed second place, you write, and she was the Apollo.

Sally: Exactly.

Alison: I know she made a couple of records. Was she ever really serious about being a singer?

Sally: Oh, she was serious, yes. She had a singing coach for two years who helped her a lot, but she was not a really great singer. She releases an album called Althea Gibson Sings by Dot Records in '58, and it really didn't sell. That was the end of that. She sang on and off, but never in any official way, in any professional way.

Alison: Let's hear a little bit about Althea Gibson's singing.

[MUSIC - Althea Gibson: Althea Gibson Sings]

I can't give you anything but love, baby

That's the only thing I have plenty of, baby

Dream a while, scheme a while

We're sure to find happiness and I get all those things you've always pined for

Gee, I like to see you looking swell, baby

Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn't sell, baby

Still that lucky day. You know, don well, baby

I can't give you anything but love

Alison: Althea Gibson married twice, divorced twice, no children. Was family life, traditional family life ever a priority for her?

Sally: Yes. Well, when you say family life, she didn't have children. She learned early on that she couldn't have children. I don't know the reason why, but in 1984, the San Francisco Chronicle did a story reporting on this that she had learned early on. I think that affected her view of marriage and family if she wasn't going to have children. Will Darben was a great guy who adored her and courted her for years. They were really good friends.

The joke in the family was that he was the feminine one, she was the masculine one, whatever, it worked. They do get divorced, but even after they get divorced, they come back in later years. They get together and go to their favorite sandwich shop and watch sports together. It was really a real relationship. In that sense, I think it was very important to her. She loved Will Darben.

She used to drive, gosh, in her last year, she would drive back to their home where Will Darben had grown up with Rosemary and where Althea lived for a while in Montclair, New Jersey. She would sit in her car, parked outside with the engine off, big hat on her head, and a guy inside who I talked to would come out and say, "Ms. Gibson, do you want to come inside?" She said, "Oh, no. Those days are over. I'm just remembering the good times." This was a very important thing to her.

Alison: I was reading the book and reading the book being WNYC, there's a lot of New York, there's a lot of Montclair, there's a lot of the oranges in the book. Later in her life, for a time, she had a leadership position that she took in New Jersey. Would you share what she did when she worked in New Jersey?

Sally: Yes. She had a string of positions, none of which lasted too, too long. She was a director of the Valley View Racket Club for a while. Her biggest job, really, was New Jersey State Athletic Commissioner, first female to get that job. She got it in 1976 because the governor was someone she played tennis with and they were very good friends, but she didn't really like it.

She felt she didn't have enough authority to do what she wanted to do so she stepped down the following year, in '77. She ran for state senate, a very credible run, but didn't win. Then she was on the governor's council for physical fitness for a number of years in the '80s. She had a bit of a face in the community there. She was in the media quite a bit, but slowly began to fade as years went on.

Alison: Like many older Black pioneers who didn't make a lot of money and didn't get these huge endorsement deals like now, she was financially strapped in her old age, so much so that fundraisers were held to help pay for her medical care. There may have been some malfeasance on part of her caretakers. It's not a happy way to remember her so I do want to ask you, how would you want her to be remembered?

Sally: Just to point out one thing about that. It was Angela Buxton who really-- Althea calls up Angela and says, "I'm going to go away." Angela says, "Oh, where are you going to go?" She says, "Well, I'm going to kill myself. I'm done." Angela rockets into action, as is her habit, and starts to raise money and after a couple of hiccups, does raise a little over a $1 million.

Althea did have some money in her final years. Not a lot, but enough. I think Althea should be remembered as an athletic champion who broke the color barrier, not just one, but two sports, and never to this day, has really gotten the recognition that she deserves. She was a model for Arthur Ashe in a big way for the Williams sisters. Serena wrote a paper about Althea when she was in high school, and yet many, many people don't know who she is.

I don't know if you saw the movie King Richard about the Williams sisters. There's a photograph of Althea Gibson on the refrigerator during one of the times when Richard's fighting with his wife. Just a little picture, little black and white picture of Althea. No comment. No nothing. I saw it and I thought, "Oh, my gosh, it must be Serena who put that photo up there. Or maybe it was Venus or Richard who admired her." I decided I was going to find out.

Long story short, I spent weeks trying to find out who put that photo on the refrigerator. I called this person, that person, the Williams sister's agents. I finally get the set designer for the studio that made the film, and I said to her, "Oh, so that film, that picture of Althea, how did that end up getting up there?" She said, "Well, I put it up there and I had no idea who it was. It was the only Black woman in Tennis that I could find, so I figured that the William sisters knew her." It was Althea.

Alison: The name of the book is Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest has been Sally Jacobs. Sally, thank you for giving us so much time.

Sally: Sure. Thank you so much.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.