Beschreibung:

MITCHELL, Harold “Schoolboy”, ed. Challengers Tennis Club Welcomes You to the 18th Annual Pacific Coast Championships and to the Golden Gate International Exposition. Berkeley, California: Tilghman Press, 1939. Folio (191 x 256 mm). Original illustrated wrappers. A program for the 18th Annual Pacific Coast Tennis Championship which features the signatures of dozens of players and others involved in the tournament, many of them women. Many signed by their picture printed in the program and an extra page dedicated to autographs includes over 30 autographs. It includes the histories of several California African American tennis clubs. The most notable signature is Jimmie McDaniels, the undisputed black champion of tennis of the era. He had won 38 of the 43 ATA tournaments he played in between 1939 and 1941. On July 29, 1940, McDaniels would break the color barrier and play the number one ranked, white Don Budge at the Harlem Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. Budge, who was the first to win a Grand Slam in a single year in 1938 and who would reign as number one for five years, would win the match. The significance of the match, however, cannot be understated in an era when McDaniels was not allowed entry on the international stage. As the editorial in this program opines, “There is no Shangra-la for him like there is for his white brother who has lived on the same street with him; there is no junior Davis Cup team for which he can try.” Condition: Minor corrosion to binding staples, and very slight tears on one page at staples, else very finer