Elsie Conick: A Biography in Fragments

A portrait of Mrs. James Conick appears on the cover of the October 1918 edition of a Harlem-based magazine called The Crusader. A single caption inside the issue describes her simply as “New York state tennis champion.” There is no companion article, and no reference to her using any other name than her husband’s.

I came upon The Crusader cover in the New York Public Library’s digital collections in March. Mostly to distract myself from the news, I had assigned myself a quarantine project to research stories of athletes who rose to prominence during New York’s outbreak of Spanish flu. When Mrs. James Conick’s image caught my attention, I Googled her and found fewer than ten (ten!) search results.

The thoroughness of her obscurity felt like a taunt. It seemed immediately evident that hers was a story that had been obscured because of her race, her gender, and the time period in which she played.

So, who was she?

In the image, Mrs. James Conick wears a bright white blouse, and her midsection fades into an equally creamy-bright background. The pre-Instagram tilt-shift combines with a dollop of hazy light around her face to give her an angelic glow—as if she’s emerging directly from heaven’s perpetually fluffy cumulous clouds. To ensure the seraphic point has been driven all the way home, she also wears what appears to be a cross necklace. Yet the flinty intensity of her eyes cuts right through the softening stage effects. With her hair swept away from her face, and the wry set of her jaw, she has the unmistakable confidence of an athlete in her prime. Around the image, The Crusader’s slogans—Onward for Democracy and Upward with the Race—announce the publication’s aims, while also lending its cover’s subject a heroic frame.

Mrs. James Conick, I would learn, was almost undoubtedly the first Black woman tennis player to appear on the cover of any magazine in the United States—real estate that has been noteworthy when occupied by Black women tennis players ever since. It would take nearly four more decades for Althea Gibson to take a spot on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the run up to the 1957 US Open. She would win that tournament as a follow-up to her victory at Wimbledon. That cover is almost a mirror image of The Crusader: Gibson wears a white shirt, and the collar seems buttoned around her neck, giving the illusion of an accessory. She emerges from a blurred background. And though her hair is curly, it appears to be about the same length as Mrs. Conick’s. Gibson smiles