First black queen of tennis passes
Althea Gibson, a sports pioneer who broke the color barrier in tennis in the 1950s as the first black woman to win Wimbledon and U.S. national titles, died Sunday. She was 76.Gibson, seriously ill for several years, died of respiratory failure at a hospital in East Orange, N.J., after spending two days in the intensive care ward. Gibson was the first black to compete in the U.S. championships in 1950 and at Wimbledon, in 1951. However, it wasn't until several years later that she began to win major tournaments, including the Wimbledon and U.S. championships in 1957 and 1958, the French Open, and three doubles titles at Wimbledon (1956-58).
Born to sharecroppers on a cotton farm in South Carolina on August 25, 1927, and raised in Harlem, Gibson was a self-described "born athlete" who broke racial barriers not only in tennis but in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. She even toured with the Harlem Globetrotters after retiring from tennis in the late 1950s.
In 1953, she graduated from Florida A&M on a tennis and basketball scholarship, and took a job as an athletic instructor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo. Gibson won ten straight (1947-56) American Tennis Association (ATA) championships, the national circuit for black players, while she and others successfully fought the battle to end the racist practices that ruled the tennis world.
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