Biography | Althea Gibson — She Taught the Grip in This Brooklyn School Gymnasium, December 1957

In December 1957 the best woman tennis player in the world spent an afternoon in a Brooklyn high school gymnasium, showing five hundred teenagers how to hold a racket.

Althea Gibson had won Wimbledon on 6 July that year and the US National Championships at Forest Hills on 8 September. New York had given her a ticker-tape parade up Broadway on 11 July.

Five months later she was at Midwood High School on Bedford Avenue, running a clinic for the varsity coach, Murray Eisenstadt.

The photograph on this memory is that afternoon. It was taken by Ed Ford for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and the caption filed with it counted the audience at about five hundred students.

Look at what she is actually doing in it. She is crouched almost to the floor, a ball in her left hand and her right hand closed on the handle, turning the grip so the girls nearest her can see the angle of the palm.

Nobody is watching a champion. They are watching a demonstration.

The setting matters too. This is a gymnasium in December, not a court, with a brick wall and a mesh-covered window behind the group and a wooden floor scuffed with court lines.

The girls in the picture are Black and white, seated and standing together, in the cardigans and plaid skirts of the year.

Seven years earlier the tournament Gibson had just won for the second time would not have had her. She entered the US National Championships for the first time in August 1950, the first Black player to do so, and only after the entry system that governed it had been publicly challenged.

She was born in Silver, Clarendon County, South Carolina, on 25 August 1927, and grew up in Harlem. She learned the game on the courts of the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in Sugar Hill, where neighbours paid for her junior membership in 1940, and she won ten consecutive American Tennis Association women's national titles between 1947 and 1956.

Midwood High School opened on 3 February 1941 and still stands at 2839 Bedford Avenue, across from Brooklyn College.

Coordinate: 40.632833, -73.951917, precision radius 150 m. Wikidata's coordinate for the school building and the US Census Bureau TIGER geocode of 2839 Bedford Avenue, which is a separately maintained record, fall about 102 m apart; the pin is the building.

Which room inside it held the clinic is not recorded, and a school gymnasium is not identifiable from the photograph.

Cover: Althea Gibson at the Midwood High School tennis clinic, December 1957. Photograph by Ed Ford for the New York World-Telegram and Sun; New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, no known copyright restriction.

The print carries a retoucher's block at the lower edge and trimmed borders, as press prints of the period generally do.