After Althea and Ashe

Tennis is an individual sport, with today's top players surrounded by family, friends, employees and hangers-on off the court, then standing on their own on court. But this solitude can't insulate the sport and its players from broader social forces, Cecil Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBose demonstrate in Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters. For the first half of this century, the white tennis world was largely successful in keeping blacks out, leading to the creation of the venerable American Tennis Association, which welcomed all comers. In recent decades, tennis has accepted, though not always welcomed, black players including champions such as Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters, and dozens more who have traveled around the world in relative obscurity.