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Along with Martin Luther King and others, and way before the Williams sisters, Althea Gibson made history.

She was my patient. I was her nephrologist. We could not save her. She wanted to die. She told me so on Friday night.

After a late dinner with friends, I went to care for her at East Orange General Hospital, she was in the Intensive Care Unit. Exhausted, I worked at her bedside from 12:30 a.m until almost 2:00 a.m, trying to save a life that was holding by a hair.

I was able to ressuscitate her from a circulatory collapse caused by a blood/urine infection. But she ended up with a hole in the lung (pneunothorax). I visited her on Saturday. She was getting better. She was hungry. I started her on a diet.

She died this morning. I feel sorrow and helplessness. The following is the story printed by the Miami Herald as released by the Associated Press.

(OdlerRobert Jeanlouie, Sunday, September 28, 2003.)

............................................

(Deepti Hajela, Associated Press)

Althea Gibson, a sports pioneer who broke the color barrier in tennis in the 1950s as the first black to win Wimbledon and the U.S. national title, died Sunday. She was 76.

Gibson, seriously ill for several years, died of respiratory failure at a hospital in East Orange, N.J., after spending two days in the intensive care ward, said Fran Gray, a longtime friend who co-founded the Althea Gibson Foundation.

"Her contribution to the civil rights movement was done with her tennis racket," Gray said.

Gibson was the first black to compete in the U.S. championships, in 1950, and at Wimbledon, in 1951. She won both Wimbledon and the U.S. championships in 1957 and 1958, the French Open in 1956, and three doubles titles at Wimbledon (1956-58).

"Who could have imagined? Who could have thought?" Gibson said in 1988 as she presented her Wimbledon trophies to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

"Here stands before you a Negro woman, raised in Harlem, who went on to become a tennis player ... and finally wind up being a world champion, in fact, the first black woman champion of this world," she said.

The eldest of five children, Gibson was a self-described "born athlete" who broke racial barriers, not only in tennis but also in pro golf.

No other black woman won the U.S. national tennis title until Serena Williams in 1999 or won Wimbledon until Venus Williams in 2000.

When Venus won her first Wimbledon title, she reflected on Gibson's achievements.

"It had to be hard because people were unable to see past color," Williams said. "Still, these days it's hardly any different because you have to realize it has only been 40 years. How can you change years and centuries of being biased in 40 years? So realistically, not too much has changed."

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