The national championships
The US National Championships, the event that became the US Open, began for men in 1881 and added women’s singles in 1887. The first women’s champion is generally recorded as Ellen Hansell, though the early records are thinner than those of Wimbledon and it is wise not to lean on details beyond her name. Over the following decades the title was won by a succession of American players and became a fixture in the sport’s calendar.
In 1967, the last amateur year, Billie Jean King won the title, as well as Wimbledon. The following year, 1968, the tournament became the first US Open, open to professionals.
Newport to Forest Hills
The early championships were played at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island, a resort setting that fitted the sport’s upper-class origins. Over time the event moved. By the mid-1920s it was settled at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, in the New York borough of Queens, and it stayed there for most of the following five decades. The US Open moved from Forest Hills to its present home at Flushing Meadows in 1978.
For the period this site covers, then, Forest Hills was the setting. Its grass courts made the tournament similar in style to Wimbledon, and the stadium helped to make tennis a bigger spectator sport in the United States.
The great American champions
The United States dominated women’s tennis in the first half of the twentieth century. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, who also founded the international team competition that bore her name, won the national title several times. Helen Wills Moody won it seven times between 1923 and 1931. Alice Marble and Margaret Osborne duPont won in the 1930s and 1940s, and Maureen Connolly won the title in 1951, 1952 and 1953, the last as part of the first women’s calendar Grand Slam.
By the 1950s, though, one barrier remained. The national tennis establishment was largely segregated, and Black players had been confined to their own organisation, the American Tennis Association.
Althea Gibson
Althea Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1927 and grew up in Harlem in New York City, where she learned the game on a street closed to traffic for play. Local supporters helped her to enter the American Tennis Association circuit, and she won its national titles.
In 1950 she became the first Black player to compete in the national championships at Forest Hills. The path had been opened in part by a published appeal from the former champion Alice Marble, who argued that the best players should be allowed to compete regardless of race. It was a milestone connected to the wider civil rights movement, which was about to gather strength in the United States.
Gibson won the French Championships in 1956, which is usually given as the first Grand Slam singles title won by a Black player. In 1957 she won Wimbledon, receiving the trophy from Queen Elizabeth II, and then the US championships at Forest Hills. She repeated both victories in 1958. In those two years she was named Female Athlete of the Year in a major American poll.
She turned professional in 1959, since the amateur game offered no income, and later played professional golf. She died in 2003. In 1968, a decade after her second US title, Arthur Ashe became the first Black man to win the US Open.
Billie Jean King in 1967
King, from Long Beach, California, grew up playing on public courts and became the leading American player of her generation. In 1967 she won the US Championships at Forest Hills, along with the Wimbledon championships earlier in the summer, and she took several later US titles in the Open era, including some at Forest Hills and some after the move to Flushing Meadows.
Her wins in that year are an ending of sorts: the last amateur championships, played under rules that were about to change. Her later influence on equal pay and on the organisation of the women’s tour belongs to the Open era.
A note on firsts
Two different “firsts” are often mixed up. The first women’s champion of the US event was Hansell in 1887. The first Black champion of any Grand Slam singles was Gibson, in Paris in 1956, with her first US title coming a year later. Gibson’s French title came on Roland Garros clay, outside the United States, and her American wins followed in 1957 and 1958.