Aug 30, 2025 · Alice Marble, a four-time champion at the U.S. Open (then called the U.S. Championships in the years before they admitted professionals), wrote a scathing letter in the …

Aug 29, 2025 · Even in the pristine courts of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows at the US Open, racism reared its ugly head and targeted Taylor Townsend and her apologetic Blackness.

Aug 23, 2019 · "Both were civil rights organisers and they had a plan to create the first black tennis champion. Althea was their charge."

After Alice Marble and others spoke out against the unfair rules, Althea was allowed to compete in the biggest tennis tournament in the U.S. in 1950—the first Black person to do so.

Jun 4, 2025 · On August 28, 1950, a 23-year-old Althea Gibson set foot on one of the outer courts of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, home of the U.S. National Championships.

Naomi Osaka defended Taylor Townsend after Jelena Ostapenko called her “uneducated” at the U.S. Open, calling it “one of the worst things you can say to a Black player in a majority-white sport.”

Althea Gibson is front and center at the U.S. Open this year on the 75th anniversary of her breaking the color barrier in tennis.