August 21, 1950: Althea Gibson Breaks Tennis's Color Line

Today in 1950 · Monday, August 21, 1950

Tennis champion Althea Gibson, 1956

Tennis champion Althea Gibson, 1956 · Fred Palumbo, New York World-Telegram & Sun collection, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, the United States Lawn Tennis Association accepted Althea Gibson's entry into the US National Championships at Forest Hills — making the 23-year-old from Harlem the first African-American player ever admitted to the tournament.

The door had been pushed open a month earlier by an unlikely ally. Alice Marble, a white four-time national champion, had published a blistering letter in American Lawn Tennis magazine attacking the sport's exclusion of Gibson: 'it's only fair,' she wrote, 'that they meet this challenge on the courts.' After Marble's editorial, Gibson was invited to a New Jersey qualifying event, earned her results, and the USLTA accepted her entry.

A week later she would win her first-round match at Forest Hills 6-2, 6-2, then push three-time Wimbledon champion Louise Brough to the brink — leading in the third set when a storm suspended play — before falling the next day. The championships came later: the French title in 1956, Wimbledon and the US Nationals in both 1957 and 1958. But the wall came down today.

Also on this day

  • In Korea, both sides regrouped along the Naktong River line after the failed August offensives against the Pusan Perimeter.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — its 13 straight weeks at No. 1 was the longest run of the 1950s. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: Billy Wilder's “Sunset Boulevard” had just opened at Radio City Music Hall — 51-year-old silent star Gloria Swanson beginning her legendary comeback as Norma Desmond.
⚾ In sports: The Yankees struck the first blow of the AL stretch drive, taking two of three from first-place Detroit at Yankee Stadium — a 13-6 rout and a 7-5 win trimming the Tigers' lead to 1.5 games.

Sources: History.com: This day — Althea Gibson · Smithsonian Magazine: Althea Gibson's 1950 breakthrough · Wikipedia: August 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from August 2026

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