1
The Promised Land
It was one of the most important and little-noticed events in American sports history.
It happened on a summer day in 1941 on a cramped clay tennis court at the Cosmopolitan Club in Harlem, a leader among a growing number of Negro tennis clubs in the country at the time whose members represented the elite echelons of Black society. At the far end of the court was a skinny thirteen-year-old girl wearing torn blue jeans and a formidable scowl. At the other end stood a one-armed tennis coach sporting his trademark green-visored cap. Watching from the stands were a couple of dozen men and women neatly turned out in pressed collared shirts and tailored floral dresses, who were taking a midday break to watch what they had been told was one of the most promising young players to come on the tennis scene. If she was as good as they said she was, the Cosmopolitan Club might just consider sponsoring her for major competitions.
They did not like what they saw. That girl wore a shoddy T-shirt, and her tangled black hair was an unruly mess. She was not at all the type sought by the Cosmopolitan, whose members prided themselves on pursuing the aristocratic sport of tennis. The way she strode brazenly around the court was just flat-out alarming to those watching from the stands who had expected a far more genteel approach to the game. Truth be told, they couldn’t quite tell if she was a boy or a girl, the way she carried herself. Had they heard correctly that someone had actually called her Al? And was that really a used tennis racket in her hand, one well-heeled spectator perhaps sniffed to her neighbor.
They didn’t know the half of it. Althea Gibson—yes, they were looking at a girl—was one of the toughest streetfighters in upper Harlem, the leader of the unofficial 146th Street gang, and the queen of the “snitchers,” or petty thieves, known to ply their trade at the Bronx Terminal Market. Most days, she didn’t bother to go to school at all, choosing instead to while away the afternoons in the theaters, watching what she called “the flickers,” or roaming around the city. She’d learned her fighting skills from her father, Daniel, a stocky garage mechanic, who had taught her to box in brutal sessions that left her body badly bruised and her spirit sapped. Not surprisingly, Althea did her best to stay out of his way. Sometimes, when she didn’t bother to come home for days at a time, her father would beat her with his belt until red welts appeared on her back, just to remind her who was boss. More than once, when she couldn’t bear to go back to their cramped third-floor apartment and endure another one of his beatings, she passed the night dozing on a subway car, riding the train alone for the entire night, up and down the length of the city from Van Cortlandt Park to New Lots Avenue and then back again. For years, this pattern played out in a vicious circle that stained Althea’s childhood, one not unlike that unfolding in many other tenements.
Althea had a rough side, without question, but she was also an astonishing athlete with a burning desire to win. When Buddy Walker, a Harlem saxophonist at the time, who worked a second job helping city police monitor children playing on the streets, happened to notice her impressive speed and aggressive athleticism, he bought her a pair of restrung rackets for five dollars apiece.1 But when he and some of his friends urged her to try out tennis at the Cosmopolitan Club on 149th Street, Althea balked.
“What do I get out of it?” she asked.2
Althea wasn’t at all sure she wanted to play such a sissy sport as tennis. It was a high-falutin’ game played by the rich folks who cruised the streets in their fancy convertibles and sleek foreign roadsters. One boy she knew on the block actually hid his tennis racket in a suitcase so other kids wouldn’t make fun of him when he walked to the public courts. Besides, all those lily-white clothes and the equipment cost money of which her family could only dream. But Althea was never one to turn her back on a challenge. Just a couple of days after Walker made his suggestion, she found herself standing on the Cosmopolitan Club court across from its venerated coach, Fred Johnson. A draftsman for a ship design firm, Johnson had lost his left arm in an industrial accident as a child and had gone on to become one of the most successful coaches on the Black tennis scene.3 It took only a few minutes and half a dozen balls for the club members to make their decision. Never mind her unsettling demeanor, the girl was a formidable player with dazzling speed and an intimidating swing, precisely the sort of athlete they had been hoping for. They’d just presumed—well, hoped—that that athlete would be a boy.
“You only had to see her hit one ball to forget the blue jeans she first wore to the court,” one club member told Ted Poston, a reporter for the New York Post.4
Impressed, the movers and shakers of the Cosmopolitan Club took up a collection to buy Althea a junior membership to the club that would provide her both regular lessons with Johnson and access to a Black society she had never before encountered. At the time, Black communities were known to put up funds to sponsor a member of their group who showed promise, just as an earlier generation in the days following slavery had pooled their very limited resources to secure education for the most able among them. After one member put up five dollars so the girl could get a new racket, Johnson contributed ten dollars from his own pocket and bought Althea a Dreadnought Driver tennis racket from Harry C. Lee & Company, famous for the enormous tennis racket suspended above its storefront down on Warren Street. Later that evening, the slender coach dropped in on Althea’s parents in order to get approval to teach her tennis. The Gibson family had struggled for more than a decade since abandoning sharecropping in South Carolina to come up to Harlem, and it hadn’t been easy putting food on the table for their five children. When Johnson showed up at the door and proposed his plan, Althea’s mother had only one thing on her mind.
“How much money is there in it?” Annie Bell Gibson asked.5
Money was not the aim of the members of the Cosmopolitan Club. These prominent doctors, political figures, and professionals composed a leadership class dubbed “The Talented Tenth” by W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, historian, and one of the self-described Negro intellectual leaders at the forefront of the new thinking about race that had sparked the cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. As part of that movement, club members were far more interested in the integration of their sport, which had proven infuriatingly resistant to Negro players. By the 1940s, though, fissures were beginning to appear in the monolith of the white American sports world. This was not to say that anything remotely resembling actual integration was occurring on the lush tennis courts that hosted the nation’s highest-ranking tournaments. Tennis would remain one of the sporting world’s most stubbornly unyielding holdouts to competitors of color until the late 1940s, when halfback Kenny Washington became the first Black player in the modern era to sign a contract with the National Football League in 1946, and Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball the following year when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In tennis, a handful of players of color were quietly allowed to compete in national tournaments during the decade, joined here and there by a celebrated white player or two who occasionally ventured onto a court populated by Black players.
Just one year before tomboy Althea showed up, the Cosmopolitan Club hosted an unprecedented interracial exhibition match between Jimmie McDaniel, a Xavier College junior and the reigning singles champion of the Negro American Tennis Association (ATA), and white tennis superstar Don Budge, who had become the first player to achieve a Grand Slam, winning Wimbledon and the national championships in Australia, France, and New York in 1938. The landmark and much-publicized event in 1940 drew an ebullient crowd of more than two thousand spectators who packed the Harlem courts, while others perched on the fire escapes and rooftops of adjacent buildings, hoping for a glimpse of the action. Although the redheaded Budge trounced McDaniel in straight sets, he graciously declared afterward that McDaniel was “a very good player,” adding, “I’d say he’d rank with the first ten of our white players.”6 More important, the racial barrier in tennis had been at least symbolically cracked, which many hoped would lead to future interracial tournaments. Seen as a critical milestone, the event was largely regarded, as the New York Amsterdam News put it, as “the most important sports and social event to hit Harlem in many years.”7
For the ATA, the goal on the horizon was that Black players would eventually play in the exclusive white tournaments of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA.) The message was clear. Although the USLTA did not officially comment on the event, its executive committee “privately squirmed uneasily,” according to Warren F. Kimball, a former member of the board of directors of what came to be called the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and author of a history of the organization, called The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game.8
Althea Gibson, the brawling teenager in rumpled dungarees, was a far cry from the charming and mannered college man McDaniel. Taming the tempestuous young woman and molding her into a model representative of the Black tennis establishment was going to take some serious doing. The rangy young player knew little about the court etiquette of the elite, British-born sport of lawn tennis, and what she did know of it she often ignored. When tennis balls from other courts happened to come within her reach, she would belt them away randomly into the air. When Coach Johnson urged her to tone down her arrogant attitude or tried to teach her some court strategy, she generally turned a deaf ear. Although she grudgingly agreed to wear the prim white clothing often required to play the game, she could barely suppress her desire to leap across the net and assault her opponent. That’s what she had done on the streets, after all.
“I remember thinking to myself that it was kind of like a matador going into the bull ring, beautifully dressed, bowing in all directions, following the fancy rules to the letter, and all the time having nothing in mind except sticking that sword into the bull’s guts and killing him as dead as hell,” she later wrote. “I probably picked up that notion from some movie I saw.”9
Fortunately, the matador had the game to match her killer instinct. One year after she made her debut in front of the sophisticated Cosmopolitan crowd, Althea was entered in her first tournament, the ATA-sponsored New York State Open Championships, held at the same club. Not only did she win the girls’ singles, but she beat a white girl, Nina Irwin, in the finals. As it turned out, Althea was not only as good as Irwin, she thought smugly to herself; she was even better.10 Althea also knew full well that many in the predominantly Black audience had been cheering not for her but for her more likable opponent. But it was she who was the winner, and so, a few weeks later, the club took up a collection to send Althea to the ATA National Girls’ Championships at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, one of the first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the nation. Even before she got onto the court, Althea was strutting about and challenging her opponent, Nana Davis, to make herself known so that the opponents could take stock of each other. As Davis later recalled it, “Althea was a very crude creature.” When Davis defeated her in the girls’ semifinals, Althea was furious and abruptly ran into the stands without saying a word, much less shaking hands. “Some kid had been laughing at her and she was going to throw him out,” Davis said.11 Tennis be damned, the matador was going to teach someone a lesson.
Integrating tennis, clearly, was going to be difficult. If Althea was already being criticized in Black tennis circles—and, indeed, a number of young players and Cosmo veterans were taken aback by her seemingly cocksure and aggressive style—it appeared nearly impossible that she could penetrate the well-barricaded doors to the white tennis kingdom. Althea, however, came from a people who knew hardship all too well. Generations of her family had confronted the most brutal and exacting conditions known to humankind. Now it was Althea’s turn. To prepare herself, she might have looked back on four generations of her family line in order to find guidance. There, she would have found a certain enslaved African woman named Tiller, who just happened to be her great-great-grandmother.
* * *
Tiller’s name was at the bottom of the 1849 handwritten list. It followed a dozen other items deemed more important by the estate accountants—like the mule, the one hundred bushels of corn, and the three head of cattle. They were all the estate property of the recently deceased Benjamin Walker, a prominent white businessman in the hardscrabble Sumter County, South Carolina, of the mid-nineteenth century and had been carefully catalogued by the accountants. But Althea Gibson’s great-great-grandmother didn’t come cheap, even if she was the last item on the estate accounting list.
Tiller was sold for $378, a pretty steep price for a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl just a few steps out of Africa. The accountants speculated that her relatively high price was because she was likely carrying the child of the man who had put the bid on her, Walker’s son-in-law. After all, the other young people on the list cost around of $200, and one old woman had a price tag of just $13.12.12 The young women were always getting pregnant by someone or other, as the bean counters saw it, and they didn’t care one way or another, as long as the price was right. Walker had owned a vast amount of property, and his agents had plenty of work to do to wrap up his estate. If Benjamin Reese Gibson wanted to buy the teenager and take her back to his home in the sweeping cotton fields of Clarendon County, he was free to do so.
At some point before or after the sale, Tiller gave birth to Gibson’s child, a boy she named January apparently because of the month in which he was born.13 January entered the world fifteen years, give or take, before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation that marked the first step toward bringing an end to slavery in the opening days of 1863. Although the act was limited in what it accomplished, and especially in the South, it eventually eliminated some barriers that might have kept a clever and enterprising Black man such as January from making something of himself.
During his eighty-five years, January Gibson lived on the fertile fields that unfurled to the west of the meandering Sammy Swamp, just a little over a daylong wagon ride from where the first shot of the Civil War was fired. He lived a somewhat remarkable life for the child of a slave. He started with empty pockets in his one pair of pants, a single pair of shoes, and a shirt. Every Saturday night, he would give his clothes to his wife, who would then wash them, along with his underwear, and dry them in front of the fire. Early the next morning, she’d iron the clothing, and the two of them would head to church. Afterward, January would set off to work in the fields.14
By the time he died in 1928, January Gibson had accumulated more than three hundred acres of property worth $6,000 and possessed a life insurance policy worth roughly $2,250, payable upon his death, as well as several hundred dollars in cash. All this was meticulously detailed in his 1928 will, complete with typed notations of outstanding debts and loans as well as an itemized accounting of who among his relatives should get precisely what. January, who apparently could neither read nor write, signed the documents with an X, under which someone routinely scribbled the words “his mark,” presumably at his verbal request.15 When January’s body was lowered into his grave at the Mount Zero Missionary Baptist Church in Clarendon County, a church at which he had long served as a deacon, he could not have known that one of his greatest legacies lay gurgling on a blanket on the floor of his eldest son’s nearby home. In time, that sturdy baby girl, his great-granddaughter, was going to help change America.
The social heart of January’s universe was a tiny hamlet called Silver, not so much an actual town as a rural community punctuated by brooding swamps and waterways turned nearly black by the drip of tannic acid from the cypress and tupelo gum trees overhead. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else, and many of them were related in one way or another. Devastated by the turmoil of the Civil War, the county grappled with poverty and political chaos for more than a decade after the South’s surrender. Toward the end of the century, however, the local economy was beginning to hum with lumberyards, gristmills, and cotton gins. Linking them all was a network of expanding train lines, one of which was the Charleston, Sumter and Northern Railroad, cofounded by John S. Silver, for whom the community was named. By 1890, Silver had a sawmill, a cotton gin, and its very own post office, which was located on the main street, just a short way down from one of the busiest stores in town. That store, the first of three to open in Silver, was owned by Althea’s maternal grandfather, Charlie Washington.16
Washington was The Man. A stern individual of strong opinion, Uncle Charlie, as he was called by almost everyone, kept a close eye on the doings in his store, which had an impressive array of offerings. There were stylish secondhand dresses and shoes shipped by train down from Manhattan, beef butchered on-site, and an abundance of local vegetables and livestock. On Fridays, the train from Charleston pulled up in front of the store and delivered wooden boxes of freshwater fish packed in ice. Every morning, a pair of Washington’s granddaughters lit the fireplace in the early morning and got to work frying the fish for sandwiches to be served to customers at a couple of tables at the rear of the store.
Like many prominent men of the day, Washington was a stalwart of the church. Although he didn’t claim a specific house of worship as his own, he served as a visiting preacher at several churches throughout the county. Every Sunday found him clad in his best suit and a well-pressed tie, his pretty young wife on his arm. A man of many hats, Washington also leased a swath of former plantation lands from one of the dominant white landowners, land Althea’s father would sweat over for several years.17
One of Washington’s granddaughters, Agnes Washington James, whom he had raised since her infancy after her parents died, helped out with everything, from serving food to arranging store items. James well remembers unpacking the clothing as a child when it arrived neatly folded in boxes from New York. “They wasn’t new,” she recalls, “but they was nice.” Her far more vivid memories are of sweltering days harvesting crops on her grandfather’s land along with her sister, cousins, and a host of elders. In time, many of the next generation came down from the northern cities where they had been born to help out in the summers, including her own son. “My grandfather used to have trucks come down to the farm, and he would sell the stuff to them,” James recalled. “They’d drive those trucks down—I think they’d come from New York—and we’d fill them up with vegetables. Oh, we used to work. Sun up and sun down.… Cotton, corn, you name it. Peas, beans, every kind of vegetable you can think of, Papa had.”18
Washington’s leased lands bordered on the hundreds of acres that January Gibson had accumulated over the past two decades, and the two men were well acquainted. Although roughly two decades apart in age, Washington and January Gibson had much in common. Gibson had served for forty-five years as the deacon of the Mount Zero Missionary Baptist Church, north of town. The seeds of that church were planted under the bush arbor near the murky waters of Mill Pond, on the James Tindal plantation, where slaves had regularly gathered before the Civil War. In the years afterward, Tindal gave the land to the group and donated a church building.19 Like many other enterprising Black men of the day, the two neighbors were ardent believers in the importance of education for their community, whose residents, for more than one hundred years, had been prohibited under state law from writing down words. For generations of enslaved people and some poor whites, schooling had been sporadic, if available at all. At best, it was limited to a few months during the off-season. In the years following Reconstruction, it became apparent that not only did many of the impediments to Black progress remain firmly in place, but also a good number of whites actively opposed expanding education for Black people, especially in the South. Why kindle their ambitions and empower them to seize opportunities better left for others? Or, so the thinking went. And so it was that not a single Black person in South Carolina received a high school diploma until 1930, and even then, only 104 out of 5,646 diplomas awarded went to Black people.20 In communities such as Clarendon County, where more than 35 percent of the Black citizens were illiterate when Althea was born, Black people began to work determinedly to initiate schools for their children.21
January Gibson was at the head of the pack. Education was just as important to him as the personal fortune he was carefully cultivating and perhaps more so. Like many other illiterate children of enslaved people, he recognized that literacy was not only crucial to the progress of Black people, but also one of the very few means available to escape the lingering yoke of slavery. Having sired eleven children and fifty-four grandchildren, January launched a personal crusade in his later years to establish proper schools for them and all the other Black children in the area.22 That he apparently did not take steps to learn to read and write himself is an irony that some family members puzzle over to this day. At the end of 1906, January and several other Black men from county churches organized the Ministers, Deacons, and Laymen’s Union for the specific purpose of building schools and churches for local Black residents. The local paper, The Manning Times, described the effort in a headline as “The Colored People of Clarendon at Work.”23 The organization was instrumental in opening several rural schools, and by the time Althea was born, in 1927, the residents of Silver had started negotiations to purchase the local Silver School, formerly used by whites, for $750. When the school eventually opened its door for Black students the following fall, it was able to remain open for a whopping seven months of the year.24
Charlie Washington’s life also intersected, albeit indirectly, with what turned out to be one of the most critical developments in educational reform, not just locally but on a sweeping national scale. For a period of two years, Washington provided lodging in his home to a bold young pastor named Joseph Armstrong DeLaine and his wife. A slender man customarily clad in a worn black suit and vest, DeLaine had returned to the damp clay soil of his youth in the 1930s to serve as principal of the Silver School, where he remained for close to a decade. Deeply frustrated by the inequities in the segregated schooling of Black and white children made possible by the “separate but equal” doctrine sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court decades earlier, he led a petition drive of local Black people seeking educational services equal to those received by whites. In 1949, that petition culminated in the unthinkable: the group challenged the segregated system and brought a lawsuit against the Summerton School Board. Reprisal came fast and furious. DeLaine, his wife, and his nieces lost their jobs; his mailbox was jammed with threatening letters signed by the Ku Klux Klan; and his house was burned to the ground while the fire department stood by and watched the flames. Other petition signers, including at least one of Althea’s cousins, were denied credit and barred from purchasing goods ranging from food to farm equipment. In the end, however, the Black petitioners prevailed in the case. Their lawsuit rose to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was merged with several other legal actions to become the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka court case that culminated in the landmark 1954 decision that brought an end to segregation in America, at least on paper.25
Copyright © 2023 by Sally H. Jacobs