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While she got a polishing from her Southern foster parents, Althea continued to give a pasting to all her tournament opponents. After her first defeat in the A.T.A. women's singles, she came back and won the title, has won it every year since. On the strength of her formidable tennis, Althea won a scholarship to Florida A. & M. (for Negroes) in Tallahassee.
College was a great experience. She played on the tennis team, starred on the girls' basketball team and joined the oldest Negro college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She also made $40 a month cleaning up the equipment rooms in the gym. Most important of all, she found more time to study tennis. And in the winter of 1949 she felt ready to take her first tentative step across big-time tennis' color line. She entered the U.S.L.T.A.'s Eastern Indoor championships* and got to the semifinals. (Next year she won the title.) In the National Indoor championships that same winter, she went out in the quarterfinals. When she got back to college, the band, the faculty and the student body turned out to greet her. "It was my first touch of fame," says she, "and it was wonderful."
On to Grass. There were few Negroes who were good enough to get into white tournaments, fewer still who had the inclination to enter. But Althea was good enough—and she had the inclination. Without consulting Althea, friends suggested her for Forest Hills. The answer from U.S.L.T.A.: "We can't very well invite the girl until she makes a name for herself on grass—at Orange and East Hampton and Essex. And those tournaments are all invitational. We can't tell them who should be invited."
"Miss Gibson." wrote Tennis Great Alice Marble angrily in American Lawn Tennis, "is over a cunningly wrought barrel, and I can only hope to loosen a few of its staves with one lone opinion. I think it's time we faced a few facts. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites."
Unmoved, New Jersey's Maplewood Country Club refused to let Althea on its courts during the New Jersey State championship. But the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, NJ. unbent and invited Althea to the 1950 Eastern Grass Court championships. She went, and got whipped in the second round. But she had earned her bid to Forest Hills.
Off to Asia. So Althea went out to the West Side Tennis Club in the summer of 1950 and made history by almost upsetting Louise Brough. She went home a loser, and spent the next few summers as an unspectacular but familiar figure at assorted tournaments around the U.S. and Europe. In 1953 she graduated from Florida A. & M. and got a job teaching health and physical education at Lincoln University (then restricted to Negroes) in Jefferson City, Mo. She coached the men's tennis team but had little chance to play. She was bored and restless, and in one year her ranking fell so far that she was no longer listed among the country's top ten players. Althea was ready to quit. She all but decided to join the WAC and use a lieutenant's salary to help her family.