Thread by @PQL_official

#OnThisDay in 1950, Althea Gibson defeated Barbara Knapp in her debut USLTA tournament match. She was the first African-American woman to compete at what is now known as the US Open.

Did you know she was NYC's women's paddle tennis champion when she was barely 12?

THREAD

Althea Gibson was born into a family of sharecroppers. The Great Depression hit the family hard and in 1930, they moved to Harlem. The city had blocked off some streets to traffic. The area was barricaded so that neighbourhood children could play sports.

In the 20th century, with American cities getting overcrowded thanks to a wave of migration, paddle tennis quickly caught on. It was played on a court that was half the size of a regulation tennis court. During a summer, Althea Gibson learnt the game and quickly excelled at it.

During one such outing, her skills caught the attention of a musician named Buddy Walker. He thought this girl could go places, even in regular tennis. He bought her two second hand racquets and took her to Mount Morris Park. The rest, as the cliche rightly goes, is history!

The journey wasn't smooth though. She dropped out of high school. In those days, elevators weren't automatic. One had to tell the operator which floor they were going to and then she would drive the elevator to that floor. Althea Gibson ran an elevator at the Dixie Hotel.

Althea Gibson took up a host of other jobs as well, from being a counter girl at a restaurant to working as a messenger for a blueprint company to cleaning chickens in a butcher shop. She lost a job of sorting mail at a school after they caught her skip work to go to the movies.

In 1941, Althea Gibson won the ATA New York State Championship. This brought her to the attention of Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, a physician based out of Lynchburg, Virginia who worked tirelessly to improve diversity in the game. Dr. Johnson would later mentor Arthur Ashe as well.

The racial discrimination in US sports was extremely subtle. The USTA was against any sort of discrimination on paper. However, system was such that players qualified for Nationals by accumulating points at sanctioned tournaments, most of which were held at white-only clubs.

Interestingly, the necessary resistance to such a draconian practice came from a white player, Alice Marble, a retired champion with 18 Grand Slam titles. She published a scathing letter on July 1, 1950 in the magazine 'American Lawn Tennis'.

A month letter, history was made. The gates were opened as Althea Gibson became the first African-American player to receive an invitation to the Nationals, that too just three days after celebrating her 23rd birthday.

Althea Gibson went on to win five Grand Slam singles titles- the French Open (1956), Wimbledon (1957, 1958) and the US Open (1957, 1958).

She also became the first African-American player to compete on the Women's Professional Golf Tour, but that story is for some other time.

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