Tennis

tennis champion and professional golfer, was born in Silver, South Carolina, the first of five children of Daniel Gibson and Annie Gibson, who worked as sharecroppers. The family moved to New York City in 1930, and Gibson grew up in Harlem. As a youth Gibson rejected rules and authority; a frequent truant, she dropped out of high school after one year. She did, however, enjoy competition, playing basketball and paddleball, and shooting pool. After Gibson won a 1941 Police Athletic League paddleball championship, Buddy Walker, a tournament official, suggested that she try playing tennis. With Walker's assistance, she began tennis lessons at Harlem's Cosmopolitan Club.

The following summer, Gibson was ready for tournament play. She won the 1942 New York State Open in the girls division a victory that began her rise through the ranks of the American Tennis Association ATA the governing body of black ...

respectively, tennis players, were born in Washington, D.C. Margaret and Roumania, who were often referred to as “Pete” and “Repeat,” gained local distinction playing tennis on the clay courts at the Rose Park playground across the street from their homes in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. They played in an era when blacks were segregated from whites in both national and international competitions. In 1936 both sisters were invited to play in the ATA national championships in Wilberforce University in Ohio. The ATA had been founded in 1916 by a group of African American businessmen college professors and physicians who wanted to promote the game of tennis and provide a forum for competition at the national level The ATA provided the finest competition for blacks in the United States at the time Roumania played exceptionally well in her first national level tournament making it to the finals ...

educator, feminist, and tennis player, was born in Berryville, Virginia, a farming community in Clark County. Following the premature deaths of her parents, Henry Slowe and Fannie Potter, the owners of the only hotel in Berryville, young Lucy joined the home of Martha Slowe Price, her paternal aunt in Lexington, Virginia. A few years later she and the Price family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to improve their economic and educational opportunities. Looking back on her childhood, Lucy noted that her aunt had very pronounced ideas of dignity, morality, and religion, which she did not fail to impress upon Lucy and her cousin.

Always an excellent student, Lucy was salutatorian of her 1904 class at Baltimore Colored High School and the first female graduate of her high school to receive a college scholarship to Howard University At Howard University she was active in numerous literary ...

During the last half of the 1800s and the early 1900s, African Americans found their access to the sport of tennis limited. Tennis, like virtually every other sport in America at the time, was segregated. The majority of the courts in the country existed at white-owned country clubs and racquet clubs that refused memberships to African Americans. As colleges and schools began to form teams, these teams were also segregated, especially at southern schools. As a result, black tennis players sought alternative avenues for competition. One of the earliest opportunities for African Americans to compete in tennis occurred at historically black colleges and segregated high schools; the players at these schools played each other. The experiences of black tennis players followed the same racial patterns that occurred in other sports at the same time in America.

With the playground movement of the early 1900s public tennis courts allowed African Americans ...

tennis and basketball player, was born Ora Belle Washington in Caroline County, Virginia, the daughter of John Thomas Washington, a farmer and house plasterer, and Laura Young. Ora, the fifth of nine children, attended the File School in Caroline County and the Chicago Presbyterian Training School. She lived on the family farm until she was in her teens, when she and an older sister moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where one of her aunts had settled and where many of her relatives would later go to live. The 1920 census recorded that Washington lived as a domestic worker in a Philadelphia home.

Although Washington did not travel to Philadelphia with dreams of athletic stardom she arrived at an opportune time for gifted African American athletes The prosperity of the 1920s sparked a boom in many sports and because African Americans were barred from many mainstream sporting endeavors they ...

tennis player and doctor, was born in New York City, the son of Felix Fowler Weir, a concert violinist and member of the Negro String Quartet, and Ethel (Storum) Weir, daughter of noted Washington, D.C., educator James Storum. Weir first encountered the sport of tennis at the age of ten at nearby Mount Zion Baptist Church. Slender and quick, he readily learned the game and received his first formal instruction at Harlem's main courts on 138th Street from Edgar G. Brown one of the first great black American tennis players Weir entered the world of integrated tennis during his senior year at DeWitt Clinton High School He became the first African American to compete for the school s varsity team in that year but he also soon experienced the sport s racial inequities For example during summer breaks Weir s white teammates honed their games on ...