For the rest of the month of February, Coppinstatesports.com will be highlighting several African-American athletes that have impacted U.S. history. In this piece we will take a look at a pair of athletes that made a difference in the world of tennis.
Lucy Diggs SloweTennisLucy Diggs Slowe was influential to the world as an educator and also an athlete. Slowe created the first junior high school in the Washington D.C. school system, was a 17-time tennis champion, and became the first African-American woman to win a major sports title in 1917.
Slowe won the national tournament title of the American Tennis Association in Baltimore, MD in 1917, crowning her the first African-American woman to win a major sports title. She was one of the nine original founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporate and served as the chapter's first president.
Arthur Ashe
Tennis
Arthur Ashe is the first African American to win the men's singles at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and the first black American to be ranked No.1 in the world. A native of Richmond, VA and born on July 10, 1943, Ashe went on to become the first African American to be recruited by the US Davis Cup team in 1963. He trained for several years and finally in 1968 he captured his first title.
The 1968 U.S. Open title was an upset victory for Ashe as he was still competing as an amateur. He became the first, and still the only, African-American male player to win. In 1975, he became the first African-American male player to win Wimbledon and in that same year became the first African-American tennis player to be ranked No. 1 in the world. Ten years later, in 1985, he would become the first black U.S. citizen to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
