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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Full Bio is our book series when we take a deeply researched biography and discuss it fully over the course of a few days. Our February choice dovetails with our Black History Month focus on Black New Yorkers. We will be learning about the African American woman who smashed the color barrier in tennis and golf, Althea Gibson. She grew up in difficult circumstances in Harlem and defied the obs and myriad obstacles to become the first Black player to win Wimbledon, the French Open, and Forest Hills, which became the US Open. She also became the first Black member of the LPGA, the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Gibson's story is told in the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sally Jacobs.

Jacobs was an award-winning reporter for The Boston Globe. We began the conversation with her research process and the unlikely fact that she did not know about Althea Gibson before she began to write this book. Then we'll get into what Jacob's discovered about Gibson's family, all the way back to enslavement and how her South Carolina-based parents became part of the Great Migration. From 1920 to 1930, the Black population of New York increased 115%. According to Jacob's research, in 1930, almost 34,000 of those people were from South Carolina alone. That was the year the Gibsons came to Manhattan, ultimately settling on 140 3rd Street. Let's get into our Full Bio conversation with Sally Jacobs about Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson.

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Sally, you have about three pages in the back of the book listing the interviews you did for this book. Well over 100 people. Who were three people you knew you had to interview to write this biography?

Sally Jacobs: Yes. Okay. That's an easy one. I didn't know it right away, but as I began interviewing people, I began to learn who those people were. The first person I interviewed and probably one of the most important was Rosemary Darben. That was Althea's best friend during her tennis playing days with the ATA, the Black tennis community. She was from New Jersey. She, too, played there. They became really good friends. Althea met her husband because that was her brother. Rosemary's brother became her first husband.

The second person was Angela Buxton. That was a white woman, British, who became kind of her closest tennis friend in the white world. She had endured a lot of discrimination as a Jewish person, and they became incredibly bonded and very close, really until Althea's death.

The third person, let me think about that for a second. There was a fellow named Bob Ryland, who has since passed on. He was a Black tennis player and very prominent, and he knew Althea. He just had a very unique perspective on both her life in Harlem, on also in later years in the white tennis world. I interviewed him a couple of times and I felt like I learned a lot from him. Probably those three.

Alison Stewart: Will you share how you gained access to Althea Gibson's papers?

Sally Jacobs: Yes. By that, I think you mean her personal papers, personal letters.

Alison Stewart: I do, yes.

Sally Jacobs: I got to know Althea's cousin, Don Felder. He's a second cousin on her mother's side, a Washington family member. As I began to interview different people, I got closer to him and also a woman who had ended up with Althea's papers. Long story, probably not worth going into, but there had been a woman who was a friend of Althea's. Maybe not the best person in the world, but she slowly gathered Althea's things over her declining years. She lost a lot of them, put a lot of them in a storage unit on the New Jersey Turnpike in Newark. They sat there forever until I showed up talking to the daughter of that person and the cousin, Don Felder.

One day, the three of us headed out there, broke the padlock, got in, not broke, sorry, unlocked the padlock because they had the keys, and got in. It was just incredible. For someone, a reporter, an author like me, there were boxes and boxes that had not been opened for years. There were golf clubs, there were tennis rackets, hair curlers, you name it. That was when I began to really get to the heart of Althea's personal stuff or love letters. A lot of great stuff for an author.

Alison Stewart: What was your goal, Sally, when you first sat down to write this biography of Althea Gibson?

Sally Jacobs: As you know, when you first sit down, you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really know what your story is. You know what the topic is, but you don't know where it's going to take you. That was certainly true with Althea. I spent about four years on this. I knew very little. In fact, I barely knew who she was when I started.

I feel like I really came to understand her with each consecutive year. My goal, of course, was to tell the story of a championship athlete who broke the color barrier, not just in one sport, but two, which many people don't know. She also broke the color barrier in golf. To tell that story because many people, to this day, don't know who Althea was and don't know that she was the first Black woman to be the number one tennis player in the world.

Alison Stewart: When you say you didn't know her, you mean you didn't know her personally? You knew of her.

Sally Jacobs: [chuckles] I didn't.

Alison Stewart: You didn't. How did you come to the subject?

Sally Jacobs: Every time someone asks that question, I always wish I had a better answer, a more original answer. Unfortunately, I'm just going to give you the truth. The truth is I was looking for another book topic. I had written a biography of Barack Obama's father. I was looking around and my boyfriend said, "Well, why don't you write something about Althea Gibson? Nothing's really been written on her." I said, "Who the hell is Althea Gibson?" I didn't know who she was.

Lucky for me, there really had not been a great deal written about her. She had written her own autobiography. There were a couple of books, one authorized biography of her and a couple of books in which she was half of the story. There was a lot of uncovered ground as a book writer. It was just a really great topic to walk into.

Alison Stewart: This is Full Bio. We are discussing the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is author Sally Jacobs. Most people associate Althea Gibson with Harlem, but she was born to a sharecropping family in South Carolina on August 25th, 1927. You found the sales record for Gibson's great-great-grandmother named Tiller. She was sold for $378 to Benjamin Reese Gibson.

Sally Jacobs: Yes. We started in South Carolina, Clarendon County. I had an excellent research assistant who knows the records. We just started going through a lot of documents, unfolding old envelopes, getting the clerks to help us. We did find that bill of sale, traced tiller to her son, who was an amazing person, who was a very intelligent guy. He had not had an education, but really believed in education. January Gibson was his name. A really standout guy. He broke a lot of ground in Clarendon County for other folks and helped people get education at a time when that was very, very rare. That was her background.

Alison Stewart: On the other side, the maternal side of the family, Althea Gibson's grandfather, Charlie Washington, you describe him as the man. He had a little bit of status. How did he rise to prominence?

Sally Jacobs: Charlie was a merchant. He ran a store. It was one of three stores in the tiny, tiny town of Silver, South Carolina. He rose because he was smart. A lot of the goods that he sold were secondhand. I mentioned the cousin, Don Felder. His mother worked in the store, and she would describe for me when the train would come into town with the boxes of goods, the secondhand clothes they would lay out, the fresh fish they would bring down. It was a really very popular store. It had a little cafe in it. Charlie really was the man. He was a minister, didn't have his own church, but he really was the go-to guy there. That was part of her background in this small town.

Alison Stewart: There's an interesting fact about Charlie Washington that he is tied to the landmark Brown versus Board of Education school desegregation case. How so, and why was this a detail you wanted to include in this biography of Althea Gibson?

Sally Jacobs: It was relevant to me. He was a young man who was teaching in the school system for a while, who was linked to the Brown versus Board of Education case. It was such a critical case that being able to link Althea to it, although she never knew this fellow whose name I'm spacing on right now. I just wanted to put that as a perspective for where she was, how this tiny town, in a way, played a really significant role. There was a petition signed to get the local school system to be part of the case that ultimately turned into Brown. There were a couple of Gibsons. I could never make the link directly to Althea. I did find one cousin. I had hoped to find a more direct link. Clearly, the community, and that one connected cousin, not a first cousin, really tied her to a major civil rights landmark case. That was my aim in mentioning it.

Alison Stewart: The two family lines come together in the '20s when Annie Bell Washington and Daniel Gibson Mary, Althea's born, the first of five children. What was life like for the Gibsons before they moved to New York City?

Sally Jacobs: In a word, as you can imagine, in the South, in the late '20s and early '30s, was as hard as possible. Sharecropping was, in many ways, a thinly veiled form of slavery. You only could make a part of the money you actually earned. You had to pay a lot of it to the white man. I think in one year, her dad made $10. It clearly was not going to be a viable place to make a living. There had been a lot of bad weather, a lot of rain. It was not great.

As everybody knows, the Great Migration was coming. It was in the offing after the depression, so in the early 1930s, the writing was on the wall. One of Annie's sisters, Sally, comes down to Silver for a funeral and she sees the situation, sees little Althea, and says, "I'll take her back with me to New York." She was only one of, I think, two children at the time who had been born, but it was taking a little bit of the burden off the parents, and within a year, Annie goes up, and then her father comes up to Harlem. They gradually migrate up there by the early '30s

Alison Stewart: There's a story about, that's a little bit of a harbinger for how things are going to go for Daniel Gibson. He gets ripped off when he arrives in New York.

Sally Jacobs: Exactly. Right. There's a fellow there, a fellow on the train, a conductor who says that he's going to tell him about Harlem, tell him how to get up there. They take the train up there, he charges him $5. In fact, the price of the train ride is about ¢5, and they get off the train and the conductor says to him, "Welcome to Harlem." He's just gotten ripped off. The rest is, is it coming at him fast?

Alison Stewart: There are very two very different kinds of Harlem, and you get into this in the book, there's the Harlem of the New Negro, of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and then there's the Harlem of working folks trying to get by, which is more of the Gibson family story. For the average working family at this time, early '30s, mid '30s in Harlem, what were the issues?

Sally Jacobs: The issues were trying to make a living and stay alive, basically. There was, as you say, this very Harlem, a lot of people think of as a vibrant dancing, beautiful Black people flourishing, endless nightclubs, that kind of a thing, but the truth was, as many social workers knew but had trouble getting attention to, was that many, many people were struggling to get food on the table. It was hard to get work. Many people were boxed into Harlem. Wages were low.

I found that Althea's own block was known as the lung block because of the high rate of lung disease, all different kinds of diseases, but that she survived on the lung block, which, of course, I doubt she even knew, it probably wasn't even made public till years later, was really a reflection of how hard life was then. There were five of them, children, two parents. They lived in a, I think it was four-bedroom apartment at one point. Her father worked as a garage mechanic and her mom stayed home and cooked and took care of the children.

Alison Stewart: That was up on 143rd Street.

Sally Jacobs: 143rd Street. You got it. Between 7th and Lenox.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is Sally Jacobs. It's our choice for Full Bio. Althea Gibson was, as they used to say in the day, a kid who was running in the streets. How did she entertain herself pre-tennis? We'll get there.

Sally Jacobs: Althea, better known as Big Al in those days, as her father nicknamed her, had a lot of fun. [chuckle] She broke the rules. She did what she wanted. She was a pickpocket. She dropped out of school after junior high. She loved to sing. She went to the famous Apollo Theater and would sing with other people. She competed. She was out on the streets a lot. She was a really tough girl, and frankly, she looked the part, which would come to matter in subsequent years. She had very short hair. She wore blue jeans, which was not very common, and she wore T-shirts, which, for a girl of that era, was very unusual.

One of the things that defined her era, her days then, was boxing. Women's boxing was a quite flourishing sport. Women can make money, and her dad, who needed money, as did the whole family, decided that his tough Big Al was going to learn how to box, so he took her up onto the roof of their tenement and started to box with her, and he knocked her down, and he knocked her down again. Now, this went on for a while. Althea was still growing. She would grow to be 5'10.5″, and slowly, she began to be able to knock him down.

The two of them would go up there and fight and fight. Her brother would be watching. He would later tell the stories of this, which is why we know some detail, but pretty soon, Althea could knock her dad out. Now, that was a real milestone for her, but it didn't really solve what was her larger problem, which was that her dad would beat her up. He would hit her. He had a whip rope sometimes he hit her with. We know about this because Althea wrote about it in her own autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.

She describes, in some detail, the fear she had of her father who frankly loved her very much, but I think he was a deeply frustrated man in Harlem, and this was one of the ways he vented that. Long story short, Althea tried to stop him. She would go to the police department. She would, as she wrote, "Pull her blouse off her shoulder and show the police the welts and the bruises on her back," and what did they do? They called up Mr. Gibson, and they go, "Daniel, come on down here and get you girl," and back she would go to the house.

She went to the SPCA, the Children's Welfare Organization, and they did help her. They did call him initially, but in time, they gave her a room and gave her support, which really was a grace period for her. Most important, the way Althea tried to cope with that violence and the pain of her childhood was she would ride the train at night, the train that would go up and down the length of Manhattan. As she describes it in her autobiography, it starts when she's age 12, that she does this. All through the night, a 12-year-old girl riding the train by herself.

I mentioned it to you only because, to me, this was really a critical developmental point for her. As she describes it, as she's on the train, she's thinking, "I'm by myself. I am the only person who is going to take care of me." In a way, that really came to be true throughout her life. Althea was on her own a great deal, and she became a quite defended person, and that would color much about her tennis career.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sally Jacobs. For Full Bio, we're discussing her book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. After a break, we'll learn how Althea first picked up a racket and who noticed.

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This is All Of It from WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Our Full Bio choice this month is Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Sally Jacobs. Before Gibson broke the color barrier in tennis in the 1950s, becoming the first Black woman to play at Forest Hills and Wimbledon, she was a New York City kid with an unstable home life. Here she is on The Ed Sullivan Show shortly after winning Wimbledon the first time in 1957, describing her unusual start.

Althea Gibson: I would never thought that coming from the streets of New York playing paddle tennis, that I would be one who would have the opportunity to shake the hand of Queen Elizabeth. To me, that is a great honor, but it all started back in the play streets, Ed, where the kids coming up trying to make something of themselves and trying to keep out of trouble, and I felt that I have accomplished a great deal in that respect.

I have so many people to be thankful for, Ed, to be in this position that I'm in now. Of course, I'm very happy and elated over the situation that being the Wimbledon champion, but it wasn't all my doings, Ed, it was a lot of people's encouragement and a lot of people's good wishes that accompanied me over there, and helped me to go along and to win this title, and of course, with God's help also, I did that.

Alison Stewart: This is where we pick up our conversation with Sally Jacobs.

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Althea Gibson was an all-around athlete, boxing, basketball, and you write in your book when 10-year-old Althea Gibson walked out of her building one morning in 1937 to find 143rd Street shut off with wooden barricades and a paddle tennis court awaiting her. She was beside herself. Sally, what was going on that day on 143rd Street?

Sally Jacobs: It was a Sunday, and something called the PAL, which stood for the Police Athletic League, had set that court up. The reason they did was because it was so darn dangerous in Harlem. There was very little playgrounds to speak of. Not many places a kid could go. There were statistics about the number of children who were hit by cars playing in the street, literally, some of them killed. It was a very dangerous place.

The Police Athletic League started putting up these paddle tennis courts, and bingo, one of them is right on Althea's Block. Althea strides out there in her inimitable way and starts to play, and she plays hard and she wins, and she wins the next block, and the next block. She starts to play in larger community paddle tennis games, and she starts to win there also. This is a great sport for her.

Alison Stewart: How long after that day did it become clear that she had a gift for racket sports?

Sally Jacobs: It certainly became clear there. As you know from the book, a band leader named Buddy Walker comes along in 1941 and says, "Wow, that girl can play." He takes her to a tennis court. He has a couple of his friends play against her and confirms that this girl, this young woman, is very, very good. He takes her over to 149th Street to something called the Cosmopolitan Club. That was the Black tennis club where all the creme de la creme of the Harlem Society played tennis.

Alison Stewart: When Althea Gibson won Wimbledon, Buddy Walker was one of the first people she thanked in a press conference in New York City. Let's listen.

Althea Gibson: I like to thank, first of all, Buddy Walker for being the first person to hand me a tennis racket, for being the first person to reach over a handful of youngsters playing paddle tennis in 143rd Street and saying to me, "I think you can make a good tennis player."

Alison Stewart: How did Althea Gibson fit in at the Cosmopolitan Club?

Sally Jacobs: Not is the first word that comes to mind. She really didn't fit in those early months. It was very tough. They looked at her and thought, "Who the hell is this?" I've told you what she looked like. Blue jeans, short hair. This was not what the folks at the Cosmopolitan Club wanted. They would wear fine dresses, tailored white outfits, it was a very kind of well-dressed, showy community. To look at Althea, it was like, the waif had walked in off the street, but then they saw her play and watched how she hit and saw her incredible athleticism, and that was that. Althea would never really get along well with that kind of community. It was a struggle for her. She was who she was, but they knew sheer talent when they saw it, and the compromise was made.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book, Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson. My guest is Sally Jacobs. It's our choice for Full Bio. Let's talk about the American Tennis Association, the ATA. You spent some good time getting into the history of Black tennis. What is the ATA? When was it founded? What was its goal?

Sally Jacobs: Right. The ATA is the American Tennis Association, founded in Druid Hill, Maryland, Baltimore per se, in particular, in 1914. It was, as with many sports, the Black community's step to create a place they could play the sport and not have to compete or struggle to get on a court. It was their community. It became the go-to place for Black tennis.

Alison Stewart: Bertram Baker was once described as the boss of Black Brooklyn. He was a big deal with the ATA. How would you describe his relationship with Althea Gibson?

Sally Jacobs: Yes. Althea's relationship with the ATA and Bertram, in particular, was a complex one. They had chosen her. She was going to be the one they backed to break into white tennis. They really wanted her on their team. They wanted her to focus on tennis, make that number one. Althea had two doctors who sponsored her, who really taught her a lot about tennis. They were both ATA members also, but they really cared about Althea, the whole person. They wanted her to get an education because someday, they knew she wouldn't be able to play tennis, and they wanted her to be educated, to have a job, that kind of thing.

It became a bit of a struggle about Althea. Was she going to be sacrificed to tennis or was she going to be the well-rounded person? I think she struggled with that herself. It would get more complex when she started to play white tennis. When she started playing Black tennis, she was the front-runner. The community really rally behind her, raised money for her, got her tickets to places. In the beginning, they were right behind her.

Alison Stewart: What was it about Althea Gibson and the way she played tennis that she became the chosen one, that the ATA thought this could be the person who puts Black tennis on the map and possibly integrates all of tennis?

Sally Jacobs: Althea played in a way that not many women played at the time. She was aggressive, she was strong, and she rushed the net. She also was very powerful. There was another woman who she saw who really kind of modeled tennis for her. Her name was Alice Marble. She was one of the greatest tennis players at the time. She was the number one woman player in 1939. She took a fancy to Althea and vice versa. Althea saw her play in 1944 in exhibition match at the Cosmopolitan Club. It's very unusual to have a white woman. There was two white women actually play tennis there, and Althea was mesmerized. She writes about it in her autobiography and she says, "That's how I want to play," because Marble was also very aggressive. Unlike most women, she wore shorts, if you could imagine-

Alison Stewart: Oh, my.

Sally Jacobs: -such a thing. Yes. Althea wore shorts, shocking people. That was the style of game they played. Just very aggressive. It was the beginning of a new era in women's tennis.

Alison Stewart: At this time in her game, what was Althea Gibson's weakness?

Sally Jacobs: Early in her game, she was very erratic. She could play a very steady game, but then she'd get rattled if someone took a few points off of her and she'd start to miss shots, not do so well. Her backhand was not so great. The other thing that just tortured her, although for a long time, was her footing. She often had foot faults. Some games, she would have 20 foot fault, not games, sorry, in a tournament, she would have up to 20 foot faults, and that would rattle her even more. It really was nerves in a way that undermined her game in the early years.

Alison Stewart: What about her appearance? As you said, she wore shorts, she wore T-shirts. In reading the book, the way that people described her often is man-ish. I was wondering, it was this coded language for, "Is Althea Gibson queer"?

Sally Jacobs: Yes, [laughs] is the short answer. There were many other women like her, but Althea, she didn't hesitate to be who she was. God bless her. She dressed the way she did, she played the aggressive game. People didn't really talk about it too much. In my reporting, Bob Ryland was one of the people that told me he went to find her at a tournament. He knocks on the dormitory door, and someone yells to come in, and there she is in bed with a woman. There are a number of incidents like that. Myself, I feel that Althea was bisexual. She did marry twice, once for love, once for convenience.

She had a lot of close female friends, a number of the young women at Florida, FAMU, Florida Agricultural Mechanics University, as it's now called, where she attended, tell me about her pursuing women, kind of coming on to them, but at the time, nobody really talked about that kind of thing. These were small stories that I heard from people in later years.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow's Full Bio, we'll talk about Althea Gibson's support systems, surrogate parents, and mentors who saw an opportunity to integrate tennis with this young woman who had a lot of talent but also a lot to learn.

 

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