Why Alice Coachman and Althea Gibson?

It may seem pretty clear that studying black women athletes is a good subject for looking at issues of race and gender, but why choose Alice Coachman and Althea Gibson? After all, other black women athletes were also headlining the sports page during the 1940s and 1950s. There are two main reasons for choosing these two athletes.

First, these two athletes competed in different sports during two different decades. These differences allow us to examine how the two sports compare to one another and to assess change over time.

For example, during Coachman's career, track and field was strictly a masculine sport.  Women first began competing in track and field during the 1920s, and American society initially accepted them. Soon, however, physical education leaders began criticizing female participation in the sport. Their concerns were two-fold. First, educators thought that the jarring movements required by track events put too much strain on the female body, thereby injuring women's reproductive organs. Second, experts also thought that the "masculinizing effects" of the sport would make women unfit for their feminine role of motherhood.

As a result of this thinking, participation by white women declined. Although some white women continued to flock to the sport in the 1930s and 1940s--althetes like Babe Didrickson and Alice Coachman's rival, Stella Walsh--their working class backgrounds and “mannish” apperances did not help the sport to regain acceptability within American society. Upsetting the middle-class sensibilities of physical education instructors, women's track and field was pushed even further to the margins of white society.¹

However, track and field did not carry with it the same set of unattractive qualitities for black women that it did for most whites. On the contrary, the elements of survival and victory in the face of struggle and adversity fit nicely into the ways in which African American women viewed themselves. Because they had not had the luxury of being full-time mothers, African American femininity was not thought of in strict opposition to masculinity. Rather, ideas of “black womanhood” included positive qualities of strength, morality, and family and community commitment attained through difficult circumstances. As such, many talented African American athletes emerged to fill the void.²

The prowess of African American women in track and field during the 1930s and 1940s could be a double edged sword, however. Most of the athletes enjoyed personal opportunities beyond what others of their race and gender experienced, such as the excitement of competition and educational and travel opportunities. Furthermore, their achievements served as a symbol of pride for their African American community. But the success also came at a price. White Americans often neglected them, or perhaps worse, perpetuated the negative stereotype of the black mannish woman, naturally suited to the role of the athlete.³

While Coachman excelled in a sport that was considered unladylike and inappropriate for women, Gibson's story was altogether different. Tennis, a sport more associated with feminine qualities, had long accepted women. More inclusive of women than track and field, it was not, however, more inclusive of race. Not until 1948 did the first African American play in a major United States Lawn Tennis Assoication tournament. Moreover, the class issues associated with tennis were perhaps more rigid than that of track and field. Developed as a sport for the elite, tennis did not openly welcome working class participants.⁴

Second the choice of Coachman and Gibson also introduces the contrast of individuals raised in different regions of the country. Coachman was born and educated in the Jim Crow society of the deep south. For this Albany, Georgia, native, “separate but equal” was an entrenched way of life. Gibson, on the other hand, spent her formative years in Harlem. New York of the 1930s and 1940s certainly wasn't immune to racism. Gibson noted the the difference as she journeyed south at the age of nineteen. Confronting the “White in front, Colored in rear” sign on her first bus ride in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, she remembered:

It disgusted me, and it made me feel ashamed in a way I'd never been ashamed back in New York.⁵

The sports they competed in, the regions of the country in which they lived, and the decades in which they forged their athletic careers — these things mark important differences in Coachman's and Gibson's lives. For these reasons, these althetes provide a window into studying race and gender during the mid-twentieth century. It will be interesting to see how their contemporary sports journalists wrote about their athletic accomplishments.

¹ Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994), 114-17.

² Ibid., 117-18. For more on the influence of work on the identity of African American women, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

³ Cahn, Coming on Strong, 121, 125-28.

⁴ Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 55, 58. Dr. Reginald Weir was the first African American to play in a USLTA tournament, the National Indoor Championships in New York. Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in 1950 at the famed Forest Hills, then known as the National Outdoor Championships, but later to become the U. S. Tennis Open. Althea Gibson, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 55.

⁵ Gibson, Wanted to Be Somebody, 46.