Reel Sisters Women’s History Month Screening of ALTHEA

Events, Past Events

By: African Voices Magazine

Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival & Lecture Series will present a screening of ALTHEA, a documentary on Althea Gibson, the first African-American tennis player to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in the 1950s. In honor of Women’s History Month, Reel Sisters is celebrating this courageous woman who overcame many obstacles to pave the way for many other tennis athletes such as Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King (an executive producer for the film), Venus and Serena Williams.

Clairesa Clay, a founding member of Reel Sisters and first curator, will host a conversation on the film with Dante Brown, Executive Director of the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program.

Althea-poster-2014VENUE: @ 1199SEIU Bread & Roses Auditorium, 310 W. 43 St. (8 & 9 Aves).

DATE & TIME: THURS., MARCH 24, 6 PM-8:30 PM

ABOUT THE FILM:

ALTHEA

Director/Producer: Rex Miller    Exec. Producers: Billie Jean King, John Amos and William A. Ackman

Documentary, 83 minutes

Althea Gibson was the first African-American tennis player to cross the color line. Althea Gibson’s life and achievements transcend sports. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Althea emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. Her roots as a sharecropper’s daughter, her family’s migration north to Harlem in the 1930s, mentoring from Sugar Ray Robinson, David Dinkins and others, and fame that thrust her unwillingly into the glare of the early Civil Rights movement, all bring her story into a much broader realm of the American story.