Brown, Ashley. Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. 616. $29.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Bill Pruden
Before there was the Williams sisters, there was Althea Gibson. In the late 1950s, her efforts cracked open the formerly-closed door to the historically all-white, upper-class world of tennis to the nation’s Black community. It had not been an easy journey, but when the South Carolina-born Gibson won both Wimbledon and Forest Hills in 1957, and then successfully defended both crowns in 1958, she was undoubtedly the nation’s most celebrated Black woman athlete, if not Black woman in the country, while also being hailed, to her chagrin, as a pioneer and model for her race.
It was a role she never sought and was, in fact, one she fought, being determined instead to live a life devoted to, as historian Ashley Brown’s aptly titled biography states, “serving herself.” And yet, given her accomplishments and the tumultuous times in which she achieved them, it was a role, however burdensome, that she could not avoid. Indeed, for all her protestations, as University of Wisconsin professor Brown skillfully and comprehensively shows, Althea Gibson was an important, if too-little recognized and appreciated, figure in the athletic, racial, and social landscapes of the United States during that period, an individual whose legacy continues to resonate with all of those worlds today. But like the person she was, the story of how Althea Gibson achieved that stature is complicated. Nevertheless, it is one that says much about how we as a nation got to where we are today.
Indeed, Brown uses Gibson to also tell the story of the evolving America in which she grew up and lived, and against which she often fought. A woman ahead of her time in many ways––itself a reality that made her both a victim, a pioneer, and an example of the better life to which the nation’s African American population could aspire––her life was an ongoing effort to respond to the challenges rooted in her race, her gender and her seemingly ambiguous sexuality that she faced. Brown’s life of Gibson is a study in how she responded––often very successfully––to those challenges.
Independent achievement was what Althea Gibson sought. How it was done and what it represented in the eyes of the media-fed public was of no concern to her. For the most part, it simply did not matter to her what other people thought. She focused on the achievements which, in themselves, left no doubt. Indeed, nothing reflected the conflict more than her victories at Wimbledon and Forest Hills in 1957 and 1958. For Gibson, the victories were all the statement she felt she needed to make, and she was no less adamant in her belief that they were not victories achieved by an African American woman but rather by Althea Gibson.
Brown offers a comprehensive look at Gibson’s life in this cradle-to-grave biographical effort. Born in segregated South Carolina in 1927, Althea Gibson did not have an easy life. She was in some ways, literally, a child of the streets. Growing up in the streets of Harlem, where the family had settled before she had reached the age of five, she frequently skipped school as a young teen, and she would often stay out all night not wanting to return to a home where she would regularly be subjected to physical discipline and whippings from her father. Indeed, she would sometimes ride the subway all night rather than go home and face the expected abuse. At various points, she would seek refuge at the local police station, saying she was afraid to return home where she anticipated another beating. It was a difficult life.
She did find one outlet, one refuge. And that was sports. She was a quintessential tomboy of the era, wanting to play any game she could and inevitably excelling in whatever she chose, even if it meant skipping school to play. Ironically, this was one place that she and her father were able to forge some form of connection. Recognizing the challenges of growing up in the city, her father taught her to box, both to be able to protect herself but also with an eye to her possibly being a professional boxer, something that was starting to gain traction in Althea’s youth. While that never happened, the training contributed to the toughness that was manifested in many ways and was a part of who she was throughout her life. It also helped her carve a distinctive place in the street community. From efforts to earn street cred in Harlem, she developed an aggressive approach to all her athletic endeavors, while ultimately developing an aggressive attacking style on the tennis courts that inevitably drew comparisons to male players. It also embodied who she was––aggressive, tough, competitive, and independent. All of this Brown details in a way that gives readers important insight into the development of Gibson’s character and subsequent public persona.
Gibson’s climb to the top of the tennis world started with a paddle tennis program sponsored by Harlem’s Police Athletic League (PAL). Her obvious athleticism and potential were immediately clear to PAL staffers, who, ever on the lookout for young Black talent, helped facilitate her joining the Cosmopolitan Club, New York’s premier Black tennis establishment. There she received her first formal tennis instruction under the guidance of Fred Johnson, who, despite having lost an arm in a childhood accident, was a respected tennis instructor and someone who would be critical to starting Althea on the path to greatness.
With that as a beginning, Brown moves on to offer a detailed and enlightening account of Gibson’s development as a tennis player, moving beyond the Cosmopolitan Club to the life altering way in which she was taken under the wings of Dr. Hubert A. Eaton, Jr. and Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, both of whom were dedicated to expanding opportunities for Black youth in tennis. They were also on the look out for a player who they hoped ultimately could do in tennis something akin to what Jackie Robinson had done in baseball––and in Althea, the doctors believed that they had found just that player. Yet from the beginning, while she was willing, in fits and starts, to adjust to their demands and direction, recognizing the opportunity it represented for her, she bristled at any comparisons with Robinson to her dying day.
It was an interesting relationship. In fact, there is more than a little of the “My Fair Lady” story in Althea’s early years under the doctors, as their tutelage extended well beyond tennis and included getting Gibson back to school and ensuring that she graduated from college, while also teaching her the necessary social graces required to ultimately break into the predominantly white world of tennis. Although, she was, to put it mildly, a reluctant Eliza Doolittle.
Brown covers all this as she traces Gibson’s climb through the ranks of Black tennis, where her dominance encouraged her sponsors to undertake the effort to have her break the color line. She eventually did, debuting at Wimbledon in 1951, a year after her debut at the US championships at Forest Hills. Each of those firsts added to the pressure to be a symbol and representative of her race. When her career seemed to stall amidst competing pressure to play on the Black circuit while seeking to improve enough to truly compete at Wimbledon and Forest Hills––all while also wrapping up her college education, earning her bachelor’s degree from Florida A & M College in 1953––she found herself adrift, a state that did not improve through an unsatisfying two years as a tennis coach and physical education instructor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. She did not play at Wimbledon and her lackluster performances at Forest Hill reflected her lack of progress. After a romantic interlude with the head of Lincoln’s ROTC program, Gibson explored the idea of joining the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), even submitting an application in 1954. While she waited, she looked ahead to the end of her tennis career, envisioning that the 1955 US Nationals at Forest Hills would be her swan song.
Ironically, for all her efforts to separate herself from the race-based controversies that hung over the era in which she lived, it was one of the central events that helped ignite the civil rights movement––the murder of Emmett Till––that, if only indirectly, served to revive Gibson’s career at the point when she had all but decided to retire. In the aftermath of the Till murder, the United States State Department, which had long struggled to reconcile its portrayal of the United States as a beacon of democracy and freedom to the world community while Black Americans were clearly not being treated that way at home, tapped Gibson to help address the problem, one that, even before the Till murder, had taken on new urgency as the decolonization movement in Africa began to accelerate. In the aftermath of the Till murder, the State Department selected Gibson to be part of a group, along with Ham Richardson, Bob Perry, and Karol Fageros, that embarked on a goodwill tennis tour of Southeast Asia in the fall of 1955. Over the course of six weeks, the quartet played in tournaments and staged exhibitions in Burma, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, and Thailand. For Gibson, it was an exhilarating, educational, and eye-opening experience. While she was not asked about race relations to the degree she anticipated, the ever-independent Gibson proved more of a diplomat than anyone might have expected, downplaying (as, in fact, she usually did) any race-based obstacles she faced as a tennis player in the United States.
The experience was life altering. Not only did it further expand the world view of the one-time New York City street kid, but it revived her tennis game. Exposed on a consistent basis to a higher level of competition that helped further develop her game, it also reinvigorated her passion for the sport. Indeed, after her official duties were completed, Gibson remained overseas, playing in tournaments across Europe, getting the kind of competition that was unavailable on the Black circuit in the United States and which she could only get sporadically in the limited number of white tournaments that would extend her invitations. The impact of all of this was apparent in her performances in 1956, highlighted by her first Grand Slam singles title at the French Championship. It was a forerunner for her triumphant 1957 and 1958 campaigns, where she won the world’s top two tournaments and then repeated as champion of both the following year, establishing herself as the world’s top women’s tennis player.
Those triumphs were the pinnacle of her career and forever stamped her as the pioneering Black woman of the tennis world, if not the whole world of women’s sports, for her effort did not predate the onset of second-wave feminism by much. And yet, Gibson wanted none of it. Her achievements secure, she wanted a life where she would be recognized on her merits and could live independently, unbothered by concerns about her race or marital status. But that was not easy for female athletes, much less Black ones. Much of the rest of Brown’s book details the trials, tribulations, and frustrations of this singular woman, who was in many ways ahead of her time and thus was unable to reap the benefits of changes in sports and society that, however much she resisted the labeling, she had helped foster. Years later, after her similar, if less successful pioneering efforts in golf had come to an end, Gibson could only take pride in knowing that, despite her unwillingness to be a conscious model for her race, tennis players like Leslie Allen and Zina Garrison and later the Williams sisters would benefit from her example and, sometimes, even her hands-on help and support as they achieved financial success the likes of which she could never have imagined as a player, and could only envy as an adult.
In many ways Gibson’s athletic journey, as well as her life, paralleled the changing status of Black Americans, women, and Black women both in society and in the athletic world. She was a person who, on many levels, was a model of independence whose efforts were both lauded and loathed. Brown’s depiction of Gibson’s final years is a heart-rending tale of a woman’s struggle to make her way in society in which she had never comfortably fit, fighting at every turn efforts by others to make her someone she was not or did not want to be. Indeed, Gibson forever refused to be seen as a pioneer. While she would finally acknowledge some of the race-based challenges she had encountered during her careers, they were at most obstacles and never excuses.
In the end, Brown does an impressive job of placing Gibson’s life against the backdrop of the developing civil rights movements, the emerging feminist movement, and, given the curiosity and ambiguity surrounding her sexual orientation, the emerging gay rights movement. But she makes it clear that none of that really mattered to Gibson. She abhorred any efforts to label her the Jackie Robinson of tennis and while she was willing, at her more accommodating moments, to acknowledge that her efforts might reflect well on her race, she bristled at being labeled a Black tennis player. She was consistent and insistent in her avowals that she was Althea Gibson, tennis player, an individual who played for herself and no one else.
Ultimately, independent achievement was what Althea Gibson aspired to. Yet whether she liked it or not, she was a pioneer, one who led and inspired by example, a type of leadership more recognized and appreciated in her time than now when social media has everyone posting and proclaiming their latest accomplishments. Through her treatment of Gibson, Brown also offers readers an enlightening history of the development of women’s tennis in the US, as well as women’s golf and the LPGA. But while that context helps make Serving Herself a book that should appeal to those with an interest in sports, civil rights, or women’s history, in the end the book’s greatest strength is the way it offers a thought-provoking portrait of a woman who led an extraordinary life.
Bill Pruden is a College Counselor and Director of Civic Engagement at Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, NC.
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