Jim Crow Tennis

Negroes are not permitted to play major-league baseball, are not tolerated in bigtime tournaments of the U. S. Golf Association or the U. S. Lawn Tennis Association.† They have their own American League and National League, their own All-Star baseball game. They have their own national golf association, which puts on championship matches. But at no sport are they more firmly organized than at tennis. For 23 years U. S. Negroes have banded together in the American Tennis Association, which not only serves as the governing body of 150 Negro clubs and 25,000 players but also gives upper-crust Negro doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers a chance to shine socially.

At Virginia's venerable Negro Hampton Institute, famed for its fine tennis courts as well as its fine faculty, 210 of the country's top-flight Negro tennists met last week for their 23rd annual national championships, climax of the A. T. A.'s 35 sectional and State tournaments. To watch them came Negro tennis fans from nearly every State in the union. The tony ones stayed at cozy Holly Tree Inn. But most of the spectators as well as the players bunked in the barrack-like dormitories on the campus. For five days they watched the tennis and for five nights they fraternized: a get-together reception, a watermelon feast, a moonlight sail, moving pictures and a climactic Grand Ball.

What they saw on the tennis courts was equal to what has been seen in top-notch white-folks' tournaments this summer. Through the efforts of the A. T. A. directors, who are eager to show the snooty U. S. L. T. A. that Negroes can be developed into high-grade tennists, the colored race—especially its intelligentsia—has become extraordinarily tennis-conscious. In Negro colleges tennis is a major sport, exceeded in popularity only by football (50% of the students play tennis). Wealthy Negroes like Chicago's "Mother" Seames, a 70-year-old, 200-lb. tennis enthusiast, have built public courts for colored players. A. T. A. bigwigs have sent picked teams on barnstorming exhibition tours of U. S. cities. Result: a vastly improved crop of colored tennists.

In the final of last week's Men's Singles, aggressive, lefthanded, 22-year-old Jimmy McDaniel and fleet-footed, keen-minded, ay-year-old Reginald Weir put on the best tennis performance that has been seen in Jim Crow tournaments since Negroes first learned to play the game in the 18903. Finalist McDaniel, a pug-nosed, shy Californian, is the Bobby Riggs of Negro tennis. Freshman at Xavier (Negro) University, he has just reached top rank this year. Today his admirers think he can beat Bobby Riggs, but once, when they were both students at Los Angeles high schools, Jimmy was beaten by Bobby (7-5) 13-11) in an interscholastic tournament.

Finalist Weir, son of a Washington, D. C. violin teacher, is the Bill Tilden of his race. Onetime captain of the College of the City of New York tennis team (a rarity for a Negro ), he has been the most outstanding colored U. S. tennist of the past decade: national champion in 1931-32-33 and—after a three-year retirement while attending medical college—again in 1937.

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