As someone who had spent his entire life in the shadowy world of Jim Crow, Charity could not have been surprised by the intransigence of Richmond’s white tennis establishment. He knew that tennis had always been among the whitest and most class-bound of games. Originally an indoor game played in stone cloisters by medieval monks, kings, and nobles, tennis evolved into the outdoor game of lawn tennis with little loss of status. Brought to the United States from Great Britain in 1874, late-Victorian lawn tennis was played almost exclusively at private clubs, where restrictive membership policies and stiff membership fees excluded all but the most privileged whites. By the end of the nineteenth century, the carefully manicured courts at Boston’s Longwood Cricket Club, the Philadelphia Cricket Club, and New York’s West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills had become important symbols of the Gilded Age elite’s increasingly decadent sporting life.
The nature of the game reinforced its exclusivity. With no equivalent to sandlot baseball or impromptu football matches on vacant fields, tennis required special equipment and a special venue. Even so, with the introduction of low-maintenance concrete courts at the turn of the century, the game soon spread to public parks, schools, and colleges. The expanding popularity of the game over the next twenty years brought a measure of democratization, but much of this expansion was limited to recreational tennis. With few exceptions, the world of competitive tennis remained a bastion of upper-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.3
Since the organization’s founding in 1881, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) had been the primary guarantor of exclusivity, especially at the upper levels of the game. The association’s board, which oversaw the rules for tournament play, maintained strict standards of etiquette, attire, and admission. Among these standards was a strict color bar. When they stipulated a “whites only” policy, they were talking about more than proper court attire. Technically, the leaders of the USLTA did not have the power to bar blacks from the nation’s public courts, except when USLTA-sponsored tournaments were involved. But they set an example of racial discrimination that often spilled over into the public sphere. In the early-twentieth-century South, blacks were legally barred from most public parks and shunted off to black-only facilities, very few of which had tennis courts. Even in the North, blacks often had difficulty finding places to play.4
Tennis had no mass appeal among African Americans during these years. Within the black middle class, however, there was a small but growing subculture of tennis enthusiasts. Mostly professionals and businessmen, the few blacks drawn to the game regarded tennis as more than an enjoyable pastime; it also had an alluring aura of elevated status and upward mobility. Playing the game that rich white folks played brought a certain satisfaction and a welcome opportunity to challenge the low expectations of black achievement. It would have been even more satisfying, no doubt, if black tennis players had been allowed to compete with whites and beat them at their own game.
Black players had no choice but to form their own parallel institutions. By the 1890s, private black tennis clubs had been established in several Northern cities, leading to an inaugural interstate tournament in Philadelphia in 1898. Other small tournaments followed, and in the decade prior to World War I the largest clubs began to contemplate the creation of a national organization to promote black tennis. During the week following Thanksgiving, on November 30, 1916, representatives from more than a dozen clubs met in Washington, D.C., to form the American Tennis Association (ATA). The association’s charter did not limit its memberships to blacks, but the clear intent was to hold an annual national tournament that would showcase the skills of the best black players in the nation, either at public parks in the North or at one of several historically black colleges.
In August 1917, thirty-nine players from thirty-three different clubs gathered at Druid Hill Park in Baltimore for the first ATA tournament. Both men and women competed, with Tally Holmes winning the men’s singles championship, and Lucy Slowe the women’s title. Holmes, who repeated as champion in 1918 when the tournament was held in New York City, went on to win two more ATA singles championships, in 1921 and 1924. White America took no notice of their skills or accomplishments, but as the ATA became an established entity, the black press reported every match, treating Holmes and other black champions as celebrities.5
Over time the ATA national tournaments became more than mere sporting events. By the 1930s they had become recognizable symbols of community and racial pride. As the players and their families turned the annual gatherings into major social events, incorporating everything from banquets to fashion shows into the mix of activities, black colleges vied for the right to host the tournament. Normally held in the North, the tournament moved to the South for the first time in 1927, to the Hampton Institute in Virginia. By 1940, the ATA represented 145 black tennis clubs.6
The leaders of the ATA had a lot to be proud of after twenty-five years of effort. Working within the limits of racial exclusion, the organization had created a structure that heightened the profile of tennis in a number of black communities across the country. Unfortunately, it had done so almost entirely within the narrow boundaries of the black middle class. Black tennis had acquired all of the trappings of the black bourgeoisie but no means of reaching out to the broader African American community. Even more disturbing to some, the organization had made relatively little headway in raising the overall caliber of play among its members. By the late 1930s Joe Louis had conquered the world of heavyweight boxing, Jesse Owens had won four gold medals in track and field at the Berlin Olympics, and Satchel Paige and his barnstorming Negro League all-stars had proven, at least to some, that they deserved to be on the same field with the best Major League ballplayers. There was no comparable evidence of progress or achievement in black tennis.7
While the ATA had established a small beachhead on the outer fringe of the tennis world, it had yet to penetrate the competitive core of the sport—or to advance the likelihood that black players would ever reach the upper echelons of the game. In tennis, far more than in baseball, the problem of restricted access was compounded by a chronic lack of readiness. Many black tennis players had superior athletic ability, mental toughness, and a love for the game. But success at the highest levels of tennis also required good coaching, attention to fundamentals, years of practice, and sustained competition against top-flight players on a variety of surfaces—all of which were in short supply in the world of black tennis. One of the biggest problems among black players was their delayed entry into the sport. Prior to the 1950s, there were no junior development programs for young black tennis players. By the time they became serious about tennis, most of their white counterparts had been playing for a decade or more.
There was little chance of overcoming these problems without first dismantling the rigid system of racial segregation that dominated both the game of tennis and American society at large. Regrettably, such a dismantling would not become a realistic goal until the maturation of a national civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Accordingly, ATA leaders rarely challenged the strictures of Jim Crow during the organization’s early decades, though some of the most talented members yearned to test their skills against players of all races.8
Very few, of course, were able to do so. Prior to World War II, other than occasional casual matches on public courts in the North, integrated competitive tennis was limited to a few college campuses. The number of black players involved in mainstream intercollegiate tennis could probably be counted on one hand. Dick Hudlin, later one of Arthur Ashe’s coaches, played for the University of Chicago in the mid-1920s, and Reginald Weir, the winner of five ATA national singles titles, played at the City College of New York in the 1930s. During the late 1940s, Weir competed in the previously all-white USLTA National Indoor Championships, and Bob Ryland of Wayne State University became the first black from an integrated college or university to participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) te
nnis championships. Their experiences were certainly noteworthy, and Hudlin was even selected as captain of the University of Chicago team in 1924. But in general there was very little progress in opening NCAA tennis competition to black players prior to the 1960s.
For the vast majority of black collegians, the only option was to compete in the all-black Colored (later changed to Central) Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA). Founded in 1912, the CIAA organized competition among several dozen historically black colleges and universities, including Richmond’s Virginia Union. While institutions such as Fisk and Howard had fielded intercollegiate tennis teams since the beginning of the twentieth century, tennis had always been a minor sport on black campuses. Underfunded and underappreciated, black intercollegiate tennis did not offer much in the way of coaching or financial aid. The on-campus tennis facilities at CIAA schools ranged from poor to nonexistent, and many teams were forced to play in public parks such as Brook Field. The level of competition suffered accordingly, but for many young black players, including Ron Charity, college tennis was literally the only game in town.9
The segregated world of black tennis that Charity entered in the mid-1940s offered limited opportunities for improvement or advancement. But there were hopeful signs of change as the nation approached mid-century. Nothing in the tennis world was as dramatic as the signing of the black football stars Woody Strode and Kenny Washington by the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, or Jackie Robinson’s sudden ascent to the Brooklyn Dodgers a year later. But there were clearly cracks in the Jim Crow mold that had consigned generations of black tennis players to second-class status and exclusion.
One of the first hints of change came in 1939, when Bob Ryland won the Illinois state high school singles title, defeating Jimmy Evert, the future father of tennis great Chris Evert, in the finals. The product of an interracial marriage—his father was an Irish American—the light-skinned Ryland was a Chicago native who moved to Mobile, Alabama, as a small child. Returning to Chicago at the age of twelve, he soon became one of the city’s best young players. His victory in the state tournament, the first ever for an African American, was a cause for celebration among his black peers. The timing of his unprecedented triumph was perfect, coming just a few weeks after Marian Anderson’s groundbreaking concert at the Lincoln Memorial. While Ryland’s achievement received much less attention than the black Philadelphian’s symbolic triumph over the white supremacists of the Daughters of the American Revolution who turned her away from Washington’s Constitution Hall, it was welcome news in the black tennis world.10
A second hopeful development occurred a year later, in July 1940, when the ATA-affiliated Cosmopolitan Club of Harlem hosted an interracial exhibition match between the reigning ATA singles champion, Jimmie McDaniel, and Don Budge, the nation’s top professional player. Two years earlier, while still an amateur, Budge had become the first player to capture the Grand Slam, winning Wimbledon and the national championships of France, Australia, and the United States in the same year. One of tennis’s first superstars, he had signed a lucrative endorsement contract with Wilson Sporting Goods Company, which sponsored the match against McDaniel. Fortunately, as a professional, Budge did not need permission from the racially conservative USLTA.
With an overflow crowd of more than two thousand in attendance, the match was a commercial success and a convincing triumph for Budge, who defeated the seemingly overmatched McDaniel in straight sets 6–1, 6–2. Budge was gracious in victory, assuring the crowd after the match that “Jimmy is a very good player. I’d say he’d rank with the first 10 of our white players. And with some more practice against players like me, maybe he could some day beat all of them.” Predictably, some white observers interpreted the results as confirmation that even the best black players were not up to white standards. But others pointed out that the Cosmopolitan Club’s clay court put McDaniel, a Californian accustomed to fast hard surfaces, at a distinct disadvantage. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, veteran sportswriter Al Laney insisted, “it is not quite fair to McDaniel or to Negro tennis in general to judge by this one match. It must be remembered that he was playing before his own people as their champion against a man nobody in the world can beat.”11
The Cosmopolitan Club event also featured a doubles match pitting Budge and former ATA champion Reginald Weir against McDaniel and Richard Cohen, the ATA’s top-ranked doubles team. The spirited match reinforced the precedent of interracial play, setting the stage for a second exhibition match at the 1941 ATA national tournament in Tuskegee, Alabama, bringing organized interracial play to the Deep South for the first time.12
The idea of enlisting professional players to desegregate American tennis resurfaced three years later when the Cosmopolitan Club hosted a provocative exhibition featuring two of the world’s best white female professionals, Alice Marble of California and Mary Hardwick of Great Britain. Each of the women was paired with a male ATA player, Hardwick with Weir, and Marble with Ryland. Since winning the Illinois high school title, Ryland had joined the Army, which issued him a special leave to participate in the exhibition. “I was the No. 1 seed in the ATA then, and the army thought it would be good publicity to send me to New York for the match,” Ryland recalled. “It was two black men and two white women, but we were in Harlem, so the army didn’t worry about anyone getting upset. We couldn’t have done that in the South, though.” He might have added that in 1944 playing mixed doubles across racial lines would have been frowned upon almost everywhere in the United States, and the fact that Marble was a beautiful blonde widely regarded as professional tennis’s most alluring female increased the potential for controversy.13
This daring social experiment would not be repeated for several years. But the immediate postwar era brought other signs of progress. In 1945, the recently discharged Ryland enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and promptly helped the university’s tennis squad to qualify for the NCAA tournament. Advancing to the quarterfinals before losing, he returned to the tournament in 1946 but lost in the third round to future Wimbledon champion Bob Falkenburg of the University of Southern California (USC). Two years later, George Stewart of South Carolina State, the reigning ATA singles champion, became the second black player to participate in college tennis’s most important tournament.14
The NCAA had no formal policy banning black athletes, just a long tradition that reinforced demographic norms on overwhelmingly white campuses. ATA officials were confident that black tennis players would eventually gain greater acceptance and visibility in the upper echelons of intercollegiate tennis, but they were less sanguine, however, about eliminating the color bar in the much larger world of USLTA events. Even so, they found some encouragement in the postwar years from a selective relaxing of the USLTA’s whites-only policy in some Northern and Western communities. In New York and California a few blacks began to play in tournaments held in public parks, and in March 1948 Weir became the first ATA member to participate in a national USLTA tournament.
The historic breakthrough came at the National Indoor Championships, held at the Seventh Avenue Armory in midtown Manhattan. “Heretofore entries from players of the Negro race have never been accepted for a national tennis championship,” The New York Times reported, carefully quoting Alrick H. Man Jr., the obviously nervous chair of the tournament committee. “We thought, in view of his showing in the Eastern championship,” Man explained, “that he should be permitted to play. This does not mean that we are speaking officially for the U.S.L.T.A. or that we are establishing a precedent to be followed necessarily in other tournaments. It is simply a decision of this group.” With the national USLTA board looking the other way, Weir played two matches without incident, losing to the top-seeded Tony Trabert in the second round.15
Five months later, in August 1948, American tennis reached a second milestone when eighteen-year-old Oscar Johnson became the first black player to win a national USLTA-sanctioned title. Two years earlier, at the age of sixteen, Johnson ha
d won the Pacific Coast Junior title in both singles and doubles and had gone on to repeat the feat twice. He also led his Los Angeles high school team to the Southern California interscholastic title. So it was no surprise when he breezed his way to the top of the field at the National Junior Public Parks tournament held in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park.
Johnson’s unprecedented victory in Los Angeles was encouraging, but he and other black players soon discovered that the apparent liberalization of USLTA policy did not prevent local tournament officials from upholding the color bar. When Johnson arrived at the National Junior Indoor tournament in St. Louis in December 1948, the tournament director summarily overruled the USLTA’s acceptance of his application. After finding Johnson’s name on the list of players, the director exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. But you won’t play here boy.” Fortunately, Dick Hudlin and a local black attorney were on hand to help, and a timely call to USLTA headquarters cleared the way for Johnson to play. Angered and a bit shaken by the controversy, the young Californian battled his way into the quarterfinals before losing to Trabert.16
The experiences of Weir, Ryland, Stewart, and Johnson were significant and visible advances in the desegregation of American tennis. But the greatest influence on the world of black tennis was emerging behind the scenes during the mid- and late 1940s. The innovation that would eventually take the desegregation of tennis beyond the stage of tokenism, that would propel black players into the competitive mainstream, and that would alter the lives of Arthur Ashe and scores of others, was the creation of a rigorous junior development program connected to the ATA.
Providing serious instruction for promising young African American tennis players was the consuming passion of one individual, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson Sr., the man known to Ashe and many others as “Dr. J.” A native of Norfolk who migrated to the Appalachian foothills town of Lynchburg after graduating from Meharry Medical School in 1932, Johnson was an unlikely choice to become “the Godfather of Black Tennis.” As an undergraduate at Lincoln University in the 1920s, he was a star running back, earning the nickname “Whirlwind” with his exploits on the gridiron. Prior to beginning medical school, he spent several years coaching football, baseball, and basketball at a series of black colleges in Virginia, Texas, and Georgia. But he did not take up competitive tennis until he was in his early thirties. Essentially a self-taught player, he became a fixture of the ATA in the mid-1930s, especially after building a tennis court in his backyard in 1936. The court allowed him to become a full-fledged member of an informal circle of black doctors and professionals, each of whom had a private court that enabled the group to rotate the site of periodic weekend tennis gatherings. Stretching from Lynchburg to Wilmington, North Carolina, the circuit became the defining element of Johnson’s social life. In the process, he sharpened his tennis skills, but mostly he became a close student of the game and “an astute judge of athletic talent,” as his biographer later put it.
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