Serving Herself by Ashley Brown

Author:Ashley Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The timing could not have been worse. That fall, questions about Gibson’s loyalty to and self-identification with African Americans rose in the Black media. Her book was to blame.

Harper and Row published I Always Wanted to Be Somebody in November and printed abridged excerpts in the December issue of Reader’s Digest, putting Gibson’s candor with Ed Fitzgerald out in the open at last. Three passages rubbed some Black reviewers the wrong way. In one, Gibson described her disinterest in social justice efforts. “I have never regarded myself as a crusader,” she said. “I’m always glad when something I do turns out to be helpful and important to all Negroes—or for that matter, to all Americans, or maybe only to all tennis players. But I don’t consciously beat the drums for any special cause, not even the cause of the Negro in the United States, because I feel that our best chance to advance is to prove ourselves as individuals.” She continued, “That way, when you are accepted, you are accepted voluntarily, because people appreciate you and respect you and want you, not because you have been shoved down their throats.” Gibson was clear that she was not “opposed to the fight for integration of the schools or other movements like that.” She was just as clear, though, that she did not feel a responsibility to get involved. “It simply means that in my own career I try to steer clear of political involvements and make my way as Althea Gibson, private individual. I feel that if I am a worthy person, and if I have something worth while to contribute, I will be accepted on my own merits, and that is the way I want it.”19 Gibson’s definition of politics was decidedly limited; she omitted that her tours for the State Department were politically and racially motivated.

A second passage showed Gibson appearing unmoved by the segregation that Black southerners faced. She felt “no feeling of exclusion any more” in her own life, she said. Ensconced in New York and welcomed in prestigious spaces around the world, Gibson was not troubled by her inability to “stay overnight at a good hotel in Columbia, South Carolina,” or to play tennis against a White player in Louisiana because of the state’s Jim Crow laws. “There is, I have found, a whole lot of world outside Louisiana—and that goes for South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and all the other places where they haven’t got the message yet.” Applying her training from the State Department, Gibson concluded that “there has been a lot of good will shown on both sides lately” and that “we’re making progress.”20 She did not address the violence and trauma, physical and emotional, that Black southerners encountered daily.

Gibson’s most provocative statements concerned Jackie Robinson and the Black press. For years, she had told reporters that she disliked being compared with Robinson. In the book, she explained the differences between herself and the man who she admitted had “paved the way” for her career.

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