The American Tennis Association (ATA) is based in Largo, Maryland, and is the oldest African-American sports organization in the United States. The core of the ATA's modern mission continues to be promoting tennis as a sport for black people and developing junior tennis players, but the ATA welcomes people of all backgrounds.
The ATA was founded in Washington, D.C. on November 30, 1916 by a group of African-American businessmen, college professors and physicians as the black equivalent to the whites-only United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), later renamed the United States Tennis Association (USTA).
The American Tennis Association continued to be the primary governing body for African-American tennis in the United States until the desegregation of the USLTA in the 1950s, after Althea Gibson became the first African-American player to compete in the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills, NY.
The first ATA National Championships, which consisted of men's and women's singles and men's doubles, were held at Baltimore's Druid Hill Park in August 1917. Every year in August, several thousand players now compete in more than 50 different events in various locations.
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translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
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the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
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—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)
“Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)