At the U.S. Open on Opening Night, Althea Gibson was inducted into the Court of Champions. Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in tennis in 1950 and went on to capture 5 Grand Slam titles including back-to-back championships at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals (later the U.S. Open) in 1957 and 1958. She also won the title at Roland Garros and 11 Grand Slam titles in all including doubles championships. As Gibson said, "In sports, you simply aren't considered a real champion until you have defended your title successfully. Winning it once can be a fluke; winning it twice proves you are the best." Gibson is finally receiving well-deserved recognition
for her achievements and role in inspiring so many others who followed her such as Zina Garrison and
Serena Williams and
Venus Williams.
As Althea said,
"I always wanted to be somebody. If I made it, it's half because I was game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way and half because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help me." Althea Gibson, who was the first African American woman to be named Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year, quietly achieved many “firsts” as a female African American athlete playing the sport of tennis. At the 2007 U.S. Open, her remarkable achievements were duly honored in a ceremony which celebrated the “firsts by other African American women” including: Dr. Mae Jemison, first Astronaut in space; Ella Bully-Cummings, the first police chief of Detroit; Vonetta Flowers, first Gold Medalist at a Winter Olympics; Zina Garrison, first ITF World Junior Champion and Olympic tennis medalist; Lynette Woodard, first female member of the Harlem Globetrotters; Phylicia Rashad, first to win a Tony Award for Leading Actress in a Play; Sharon Pratt, Mayor of Washington, DC; Traci Green, first head tennis coach at Harvard.
