The Athletes & Their Sports

If you ask most Americans if they’ve ever heard of Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, or Muhammed Ali, they’ll say yes. But say the names Alice Coachman or Althea Gibson, and most people haven’t got a clue. The purpose of this section, then, is to introduce you to these two athletes and their sports—women’s track and field during the 1940s and women’s tennis during the 1950s. In the process, we’ll also explain why using these particular two to examine mid-twentieth century race and gender makes sense.

The Athletes

Alice Coachman was a track and field athlete who competed from 1939–1948, first for Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, then for Albany State College in Georgia. She became known as “the Tuskegee Flash” for her sprinting prowess, but at heart, she was a high-jumper. She held the national championship in the women’s high jump every year she competed. Between the sprints and high jump, she amassed 25 national championships. Her real distinction, however, lies in being the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Two Olympic Games were cancelled because of World War II, and the one cancelled in 1944 would have been during the height of her career. However, she continued to train and ended up competing in the 1948 Olympics in London, capturing the gold for the high jump on the last day of track and field competition.

The same summer that Coachman won Olympic gold, Althea Gibson was in the second year of her eleven-year career as an amateur tennis player. By 1950, she had won the national championship in the American Tennis Association (ATA) for four straight years. The ATA was an African American tennis association that grew up alongside a United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) that barred African American players. With the help of former tennis great Alice Marble Gibson did break into the USLTA in 1950, and into Wimbledon the following year, paving the way for the likes of Arthur Ashe and Serena and Venus Williams. Her real distinction came six years later, however, when she came away with back-to-back titles at Wimbledon and the U. S. national tennis title at Forest Hills (forerunner to the U. S. tennis open) in 1957 and 1958. By doing so, she proved that African Americans could take their place at the top of the largely white tennis world.