This week in Black history

Althea Gibson, athlete, became the first Black to win the Wimbledon Tennis Championship in England on this day. The oldest of five children, Gibson was born in Silver, SC, on April 25,1927. She was reared in Harlem, NY, and earned her bachelor's degree from Florida A&M College in 1953. Her love for paddleball at an early age grew into a passion for tennis. At 5-foot-11, Gibson used an attacking serve-and-volley style to dominate women's tennis from 1956-1958, winning 11 Grand Slam titles: five in singles, five in doubles, one in mixed doubles. Gibson retired from tennis in 1965 to explore golf and became the first Black to join the Ladies Professional Golfers Association (LPGA) tour in 1963. In 1975, Gibson went on to become state commissioner of athletics in New Jersey. She then served on the state athletics control board until 1988, and the governor's council on physical fitness until 1992. Gibson died at East Orange General Hospital in New Jersey on September 28, 2003, at the age of 76.

July 9, 1893--

Daniel Hale Williams, surgeon and innovator, performed the first successful open-heart surgery in Chicago at Provident Hospital on this day. Dr. Williams decided to perform the risky surgery on a patient with a knife wound in an artery that was very close to his heart. Williams, assisted by his medical team, made an incision in the patient's chest and navigated through a network of cartilage, nerves and blood vessels to operate successfully on the wounded artery and the punctured pericardium, a membrane that surrounds the heart. Born in Hollidaysburg, PA, in 1856, Williams followed his love for medicine and earned his medical degree from Chicago Medical College in 1883. Williams, who founded Provident Hospital and Training School, the nation's first school for Black nurses and interns, also established a nursing school for Blacks at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., and a surgical clinic at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. He died August 4, 1931, in Idlewild, MI.