Serena's example: Tennis icon's impact felt in Black America

NEW YORK (AP) — In 2016, responding to the fatal police shootings of two Black men just a day apart, Serena Williams joined a small chorus of top Black athletes in speaking out. “I won’t be silent!” she vowed.

“Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives?” Williams asked in a Facebook post in the wake of the back-to-back killings of Philando Castile just outside St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“I realized we must stride on — for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go,” she wrote.

That wasn't the only time Williams would wade into the politically thorny topic. It’s an outspokenness for which other Black athletes, from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, have paid a steep professional price.

After nearly three decades in the public eye, few can match Williams' array of accomplishments, medals and awards. Through it all, the 23-time Grand Slam title winner hasn’t let the public forget that she’s a Black American woman who embraces her responsibility as a beacon for her people.

From the outset of her professional career, Williams was othered because of her unconventional rise in the predominantly white sport — a Black girl who honed her formidable skills on the public tennis courts of Compton, California, far from the privileged private clubs that nurtured most U.S. players. Even as a teenager, her response to the racism, hostility and undermining by the establishment made her a role model for Black Americans.

Now that Williams, 40, has indicated she is getting ready to hang up her tennis racket for good, perhaps even right after the U.S. Open, which starts Monday, sports analysts will take stock of her reign as one of the greatest athletes of all time. But no matter...