Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters
Despite what many might assume, the Williams sisters were not the first high-profile African American tennis players. Before Venus and Serena there was Arthur Ashe, who in 1975 became the first black player to win Wimbledon, and before him there was Althea Gibson, who won a string of major titles in the 1950s. And those are just the two biggest names on a list that stretches back nearly 100 years. Veteran sports journalist Harris and tennis player Kyle-DeBose chart the course of black tennis through the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Prejudice played a big part in the story, of course, as did politics and economics. Even so, as with baseball's color line, it was only a matter of time before African American tennis players proved that they could compete with—and defeat—white players. Although the basics of this story have been told before, in other contexts, this volume takes a more comprehensive approach to the subject and, as such, carves a deserving place for itself in tennis literature. Pitt, David