Grand Slam: history of blacks in tennis - Special Section: 1994 Black Enterprise/Pepsi-Cola Golf and Tennis Challenge

Black Enterprise, Sept, 1994

Before Arthur Ashe passed away, People magazine sent a reporter to his office to do a story about how the former tennis star was coping with AIDs. As she was leaving, the reporter, a white woman, sympathetically supposed that Ashe's disease was surely the heaviest burden he'd ever had to bear.

"No it isn't," Ashe, recalling the incident in his memoir, Day of Grace, corrected her.

With his usual candor, Ashe surprised the woman: "Race has always been my biggest burden," he told her. "Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me."

Coming from such a heroically successful figure, the admission speaks volumes for the African-American struggle for mainstream participation. Even at the highest levels of accomplishment, Ashe was reminded of his color, especially when set against the white sea of the sport he chose. His career is symbolic, not just for what he achieved, but for the way he did it and what that meant for so many.

But the history of African-American tennis does not begin with Arthur Ashe, any more that it ends with his untimely death. His life just kind of neatly bisects it.

As Ashe himself chronicled so well in A Hard Road to Glory, blacks were taking to the courts with the crude (if expensive) wooden racquets of the day over one hundred years ago. Tuskegee Institute records indicate tournaments as early as 1895.

Shortly after the turn of the century, intercity competitions started up among newly-formed black tennis social clubs--a tradition that remains a part of African-American tennis today. The stark reality of the game's history is that this "genteel" pastime was heavily segregated back then and, but for a few exceptions, would remain so for another fifty years.

One of the earliest such groups was the Chicago Prairie Tennis Club, which is still active today. The club was chartered in 1912 by a small group of black players that included the legendary Mrs. C.O. "Mother" Seames, a woman who had been teaching the game on dirt and clay courts since 1906. In 1920, Mrs. Seames built four courts on Chicago's South Side that would essentially become the country's first private black tennis club.

An upscale descendant of that same spirit is the Martha's Vineyard Racquet & Fitness Club, opened by former NAACP president Jack E. Robinson in 1989. "The purpose of this place," said Robinson, "is to create an atmosphere for black vacationers and professionals to get together in healthy recreational and social activities." The club is host to an annual island-wide open tournament during the week before Labor Day.

Of paramount importance in the annals of all tennis was the 1916 formation of the American Tennis Association, the nation's oldest African-American sports organization. Founded to help more blacks play and enjoy the game, the ATA has to this day fostered and nurtured the tennis club scene in urban communities. In 1917, the ATA held its first national tournament in Baltimore with players from 23 separate clubs attending. Talley Homes and Lucy Diggs Slowe were the inaugural champions, followed over the years by a long list of ATA legends including Ashe, Althea Gibson and Zina Garrison.

One of the first black players to draw national attention to the ATA was Ora Washington, who dominated the women's division with eight titles in the 1930s. Her unique style was marked by blazing speed, along with a little half-swing with the racquet held high up on the grip. Washington's acclaim was accompanied by the Roosevelt-era construction of hundreds of public courts for future urban recreational use.

Of the many unrealized tennis talents, uncoached African-Americans from the pre-World War II era, the best may have been Jimmy McDaniel. With an aggressive serve-and-volley game honed on the cement courts of Los Angeles, McDaniels's reputation and ATA dominance earned him a landmark 1940 crossover match at the Cosmopolitan Club in Harlem with 1938 Grand Slam winner Don Budge. Although McDaniels was overmatched that day 6-1, 6-2, the exhibition nonetheless foresaw a not-too-distant future when the color barrier in tennis would drop.

That barrier had initially been challenged in 1929 when two ATA standouts, Reginald Weir and Gerald Norman Jr., were denied entry to a United States Lawn Tennis Association (now the USTA) tournament. Eighteen more years of segregated competitive tennis ensured, followed by the historic appearance of ATA junior champ Oscar Johnson at USLTA's national indoor juniors in 1947. Johnson, too was stopped at the door, but when he threatened to take legal action, the USLTA capitulated.

Like McDaniels, Johnson was from the West Coast and self-taught (he liked to practice his swing before a mirror). He was bounced by Tony Trabert in the quarter-finals that year, but with his relentless attacking style, he came back to win the same event in 1948.

Around that same time, Harlem's Althea Gibson was volleying her way through the rankings, serving notice on the tennis world that African-American talent could no longer be held down, regardless of the USLTA's intentions. Prodded by the efforts of two black physicians who had coached and sponsored her for three years, the sport's staid ruling body bowed to public opinion and invited Gibson to Forest Hills for their 1950 National (U.S. Open). She lost in the second round but her very appearance was a symbolic leap for minority sport.