As for her education, Gibson was even more tenacious. Considered a hopeless case when she started Wilmington Industrial High School at the age of 19, she finished school in three years, graduating 10th in her class, and promptly enrolled as a scholarship student at Florida A&M, where she received a degree when she was 25.

She also flourished on the court, winning the first of her 10 consecutive A.T.A. national championships in 1947.

Gibson won so handily in A.T.A. tournaments at the beginning of her career that in 1949, a year after Dr. Benjamin Weir had become the first black to play in a U.S.L.T.A. title event, the 1948 National Indoor Championships, Gibson was able to take her own first, tentative steps across the color barrier, making it to the semifinals of the Eastern Indoor Championships and then to the semifinals of the nationals.

The next step proved harder. Even after she had won the 1950 Eastern Indoor Championship and a clamor had begun to let her play in the National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor of the United States Open, the powers of tennis seemed to close ranks to keep her out.

To qualify for an invitation to the 1950 nationals, the tennis association said, Gibson would first have to make a name for herself at one of the major preliminary grass-court events — all invitational tournaments over which the organization had no control.

No invitations were forthcoming.

But the former champion Alice Marble rallied support for Gibson and for the cause of racial justice. "If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen," she wrote in a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine, "it's time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites."

Finally, Gibson received a grudging invitation to the Eastern grass court championships at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, N.J. She made it only as far as the second round, but that was enough to win a bid to Forest Hills.

On Aug. 28, 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball, that Althea Gibson became the first black player to compete in the national tennis championship. Taking her place on a remote court at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, she dispatched Barbara Knapp of England, 6-2, 6-2.

The next day, she faced the Wimbledon champion, Louise Brough. After losing the first set, 6-1, Gibson took the second, 6-3, then fell behind, 3-0, in the third before beginning a surge that brought repeated roars from 2,000 hardy spectators, who ignored the first peals of thunder and flashes of lightning of a gathering storm. Gibson repeatedly rallied to bring the score to 7-6 and the verge of a victory over her visibly spent opponent.

Then the rains came, the match was suspended. when it resumed the next day, Brough won three straight games to win the match.

Her first appearance at Forest Hills brought the 5-foot-10 1/2-inch Gibson and what was inevitably described as her mannish game to the attention of the tennis public. A powerful if inconsistent player, the lean and muscular young woman had a dominating serve, and her long, graceful reach often stunned opponents.

Over the next half dozen years, Gibson became a fixture on the tennis circuit, playing Wimbledon for the first time in 1951, and earning a ranking as high as No. 7 in the United States, but she was never able to win consistently.

Gibson, who spent two years as a physical education instructor at Lincoln University in Jefferson, Mo., became so disenchanted with her failure to break through to the top ranks that she considered abandoning tennis and entering the Army.

Then in the fall of 1955 the State Department selected her for a good-will tennis tour of Asia and the Far East, and the experience seemed to renew her spirit and inspire her game. In 1956 she won 16 of her first 18 tournaments, including the French Open, her first title at a Grand Slam event. But once again victory in the singles championships eluded her at Wimbledon and Forest Hills although she had been favored to win both. Gibson did team with Angela Buxton to win the Wimbledon doubles championship in 1956.

Buxton became Gibson's doubles partner in an "odd way," as she remembered it in 1996. "Since Althea was black, she was having a difficult time getting a doubles partner in America," she said, "and since I was Jewish, I was having a similar problem in England. So we just hooked up. And won!"

Gibson was determined that her 1957 singles performances would be different, and after losing the final of the Australian Open, she did not lose another match all year. Passing up the clay court distraction of the French Open to concentrate on tuning up on grass courts in England, she again entered the tournament as the favorite, but this time she did not falter, defeating Darlene Hard in the final. "At last," she said, "at last," as she accepted the trophy from the Queen of England.

She later wrote in her book: "Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, N.C."

Having won the most coveted title in tennis, Gibson continued her winning ways in the United States, rolling through the national championship at Forest Hills and settling an old score in the final, defeating Brough, who had eliminated her in her first national seven years before.

After being named the outstanding woman athlete of the year in a poll of Associated Press sports editors, Gibson repeated her victories in 1958, then, under pressure from her family to make some money from her talent, she announced her retirement from amateur tennis.

After making a record album, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show and making a movie, "Horse Soldiers," with John Wayne, she decided to try her hand at professional golf.

With her powerful swing, Gibson in 1963 became the first black player to compete on the women's golf tour. But she had come to the game too late to be effective. Although she continued to play on the tour off and on for years, she never won a tournament.

There was a brief marriage to an old friend and she served two years in the part-time post as New Jersey athletic commissioner, but she resigned in 1977 to make an abortive run for the state senate.

When another black woman, Zina Garrison, made it as far as the Wimbledon final in 1990 before losing to Martina Navratilova, Gibson was there to cheer her on, but she soon receded from the limelight once again, beset, it turned out, by health and financial problems.