She won the French Open in 1956, becoming the first person of color to win a Grand Slam title. She won Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958. She won the U.S. National Championships in both of those years as well. She was ranked the number one player in the world. The Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year twice. These are the facts, and they are extraordinary, but they do not capture what it cost to produce them. The tennis world of the 1950s was not simply unwelcoming to a Black woman from Harlem. It was structurally designed to exclude her. Private clubs, segregated tournaments, a pathway to the top that required the sponsorship of people who had never been asked to sponsor someone like her. She navigated all of it with a bearing that her contemporaries described as regal and that she herself might have described as necessary. She could not afford to flinch, and she did not.

What came after her playing career complicated the picture in ways that make her story richer and harder. She did not accumulate wealth from her tennis career. She turned to golf, becoming the first Black woman to earn a card on what is now the LPGA Tour, because she needed to earn a living and tennis offered her no professional path. She struggled financially for years, a fact that sits uncomfortably alongside the magnitude of what she achieved. Late in her life she received the recognition the sport had long owed her, but the gap between her contribution and her reward is part of her story too. "I am honored to have followed in such great footsteps," Venus Williams wrote. "Her accomplishments set the stage for my success, and through players like myself and Serena and many others to come, her legacy will live on."