Gibson, who died in 2003, was born in South Carolina in 1927, but moved with her family to Harlem, New York, at a young age. There she showed an aptitude for sport, playing basketball and table tennis. The musician Buddy Walker noticed her skills and gave her a tennis racket; by the next year, she had won a local tournament sponsored by the American Tennis Association (ATA), an African-American organization.
It was during the ATA Nationals tournament in 1946 that Gibson was spotted by Hubert Eaton and Robert Johnson, two doctors who, as the Times explains, were “leaders in the ATA’s mission to find a player who could integrate the all-white U.S. Lawn Tennis Association competitions.” They worked with her to develop her skill, but Gibson’s applications to play in white tournaments were repeatedly turned down. Then, in 1950, the tennis champion Alice Marble, winner of 18 Grand Slam titles, wrote a scathing letter to the American Lawn Tennis magazine that condemned her sport for denying Gibson the chance to play.
“If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players,” Marble wrote, “it’s only fair that they should meet that challenge.”
The following month, Gibson was admitted to the U.S. national championships at Forest Hills. By 1952, she had claimed the number one spot on the women’s singles ranking, making her the first African-American player to achieve this milestone. But in spite of her skill, she was not always welcomed by the tennis community with open arms. She and Buxton, who is Jewish, became doubles partners in part because other players refused to pair with them.
“As I rose up the rankings, the girls on the circuit ignored me,” she told Sally Jones of the Telegraph last month. She remembers seeing Gibson sitting on the sidelines during the 1956 Wimbledon games. “I was thinking, ‘What the hell is she sitting there for?’” Buxton recalled. “One of the best players in the world and she wasn’t chosen.”
But Gibson was undeterred by the discrimination. She ultimately won 11 Grand Slam titles and, according to NPR’s Richard Gonzales, more than 50 singles and doubles championships. She tended to balk at the suggestion that she was a crusading representative of African-Americans—“I’m thinking of me and nobody else,” Gibson stated in 1957—perhaps because she was singularly focused on a specific goal. On the base of the new statue Gibson is quoted saying:
“I hope that I have accomplished just one thing: that I have been a credit to tennis and my country.”