TennisWorthy: Dr. Robert Johnson, Breaking Color Barriers from His Backyard
Walking past 1422 Pierce Street in Lynchburg, Virginia, it is easy to miss history. The property features a modest home with a modest yard in a modest neighborhood.
But to those in town – and to those around the world – who know the story of Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, 1422 Pierce Street is an iconic address. It is where Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe trained to break color barriers. It is where African-American youths learned the values of the civil rights movement. It is where Duke Ellington and Jackie Robinson served as guests.
And it all revolved around a tennis court and the way people carried themselves on it.
“I can tell you what he used to tell us: ‘If you can’t play tennis, you can’t do anything in your life,’” recalled Johnson’s granddaughter Eileen J. Williams. “That was his belief system. If you can’t do tennis, you cannot succeed in any way in life."
Johnson’s story starts with his own growth. In 1918, while playing football at Shaw University in Raleigh, he was expelled for disciplinary reasons. He transferred to Union College, where he played another year of football and left for similar reasons. Johnson found his place at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he played two years and earned All-American recognition for HBCUs.
After college, Johnson briefly coached football before turning his focus toward education, enrolling at Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
Johnson practiced medicine in Lynchburg and broke barriers for African-Americans in his city. He became the first African-American doctor to earn staff privileges at Lynchburg General Hospital and he was the first black physician to deliver a baby in the building.
Inside the hospital, Johnson saved and began lives, but outside, he built them, taking an interest in youth tennis players. In 1946, Johnson and friend Dr. Hubert Eaton caught a glimpse of a teenager named Althea Gibson. Johnson and Eaton almost immediately invested their own finances into Gibson’s career, helping improve her talents and travel for competition.
In 1950, she became the first person of color to compete at the U.S. National Championships (today’s US Open) on her 23rd birthday.
“I owe the doctors a great deal. If I ever amount to anything, it will be because of them,” Gibson said.
Gibson became the first African American to win a Grand Slam tournament, doing so at the French Championships in 1956. She became the first to win in the U.S. National Championships in 1957, the same year she became World No. 1.
Johnson’s reputation grew among the black community. In 1951, he opened the American Tennis Association’s Junior Development Program in his backyard (founded in 1916, the ATA focuses on promoting black tennis in America). Each summer, around a dozen kids from across the country – handpicked by Johnson – would descend upon Lynchburg. Monday to Thursday, the students trained on the court from dawn to dusk. On Friday, they would load into cars for weekend tournaments.
In 1953, one of those pupils was a nine-year-old going on 10 from nearby Richmond. His name was Arthur Ashe and he would spend his summers through 1960 learning at 1422 Pierce. In 1968, Ashe became a US Open champion. He is still the only black man to win the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon.
“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward,” Ashe once said. “I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racket and my tennis racket was me. It was my rod and my staff."
That was a theme of Johnson’s teachings. Being talented wasn’t enough. Students had to grow character. Johnson’s camps took place during the heart of the civil rights movement and he made sure to prepare the children for the outside world.
"These kids were playing integrated tournaments when they started breaking the barriers,” said Johnson’s grandson, Lange. “And if the ball was two inches out, they would call it in because they didn’t want to create any tension. Everything was about being a model citizen, a model student and making sure you didn’t draw any attention to yourself."
For Johnson, tennis was a vehicle for personal growth. If players could succeed on the statsheet, great. But if his players could succeed in life, even better.
“I grew up in a time in the ’60s when as a person of color and female, you were told you had to be twice as good in order to be accepted,” said Leslie Allen, a Johnson pupil from Cleveland, born in 1957. “You had to work twice as hard in order to be accepted in whatever you wanted to do, whatever career it would be. This fell right in line.
“Essentially, as I look back on Dr. Johnson, he was preparing us for a world that didn’t want us. If we could survive what he threw at us, we could survive anywhere. And that’s happened to all the athletes who were there. They’ve all been successful in whatever their chosen career path was.”
Allen, herself, reached a ranking of No. 17 in the world in 1981. She also graduated magna cum laude from the University of Southern California and was elected to the WTA Board of Directors in retirement.
Johnson passed away in 1971, but his legacy will last forever. His grooming of Ashe, Gibson, Allen and others would inspire a future generation of African-American stars. Johnson was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame posthumously in 2009 with Lange making his acceptance speech in Newport.
Back in Lynchburg, there is still work to be done. Lange and remaining family members have set up the Whirlwind Johnson Foundation to restore the Dr. Robert Walter Johnson House and Tennis Court, a project Lange says will take roughly $500,000. The USTA got things started by restoring the court in 2017, celebrating the 60th anniversary of Gibson’s US Open title. The court is now being used by Lynchburg Parks and Recreation for free youth tennis programming.
“This court represents a significant part of American history and civil rights,” said Robert Walter Johnson III, another grandson to Dr. Johnson. “This is the court where the color line in tennis was changed forever.”
That call is in. For sure.
On May 25, 2018, former players and tennis officials gather to help dedicate the newly-renovated tennis court at the home of pioneer Dr. Robert "Whirlwind" Johnson at 1422 Pierce Street.
Jeff Eisenband is a journalist based in New York City who previously served as senior editor of ThePostGame and has contributed to the NBA 2K League, NBA Twitch, DraftKings, Cheddar, Golfweek and the Big Ten Network. He can be found on Twitter at @JeffEisenband.
