But for Richard Williams, tennis was always political, always a vehicle for change. The epigraph of his 2014 memoir, “Black and White: The Way I See It,” comes from the 1926 Langston Hughes poem “I, Too.”

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Richard grew up poor in Louisiana in the 1940s, the oldest of five children. To help feed his family, he writes, “I used to go out in the woods and hunt bullfrogs to eat, and fish, and shoot rabbits, and steal chickens.” He also writes that his best friend was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. After high school, he bounced around between Chicago and Shreveport. Then he moved to California, where he hustled odd jobs and started a security firm, because, he writes, “it was a natural for someone who knew as much about stealing as I did.” Then in 1978, he saw the Romanian tennis player Virginia Ruzici on TV receive $20,000 (Richard remembered this as $40,000) for winning the final of the French Open, and he decided not just to learn to play the game so that his daughters, who had not yet been born, could become rich but to learn to play the game so those daughters could expose the idea that if you think you’re the best in the world but that world is built on privilege and exclusion, you are lying to yourself.

Richard watched tennis videos. He look lessons from a man nicknamed Old Whiskey. He moved his family from Long Beach, Calif., to Compton so that, in addition to mastering ground strokes, etc., the girls could hone their mental game; he wanted them to learn to handle the stress and adversity that came from practicing in gang territory because they’d have to deal with the even worse stress and adversity when playing in front of white people.

Venus, born on June 17, 1980, 15 months before Serena, was taller, stronger and more tactical, and was thrust into the public eye first. She was profiled in this newspaper at age 10. She quit the junior circuit at age 12 after winning all 63 of the 63 matches she played. She turned pro at age 14. Serena clung to the hem of Venus’s tennis shorts in every conceivable way. “If she laughed, you laughed louder,” Oprah Winfrey said to Serena with a hint of sternness when the sisters appeared on her show in 2002. “If she cried, you cried harder. If she ordered food, you would order the same thing.”

Serena, 21, nodded and admitted that “only maybe two years ago” she stopped being Venus.

Oprah said, “You woke up at, what, 18 or 19 and said — ”

“I said: ‘I’m not Venus. I’m Serena!’ ”

Isha Price told me it is “absolutely more clear in hindsight” what a huge burden it was for Venus to be the first body on the baseline for Richard’s larger-than-tennis operation, the first Williams holding a racket on center court. But while it was happening, nobody in the family talked about the pressure. They were just living their lives. All parents circumscribe a world for their children. Richard and Oracene strictly defined theirs. “If they told us something, there was no other,” Isha said. “You don’t really have any friends. O.K. I believe that. The only people you have are your family. If people don’t know you, they’re not going to do anything to protect you, but you guys can protect each other. We really kind of had to be ride or die for one another, because as far as we were concerned there was no one else.”

Richard was there with Venus all the way. Yet in those first professional years, Venus was also alone. Isha remembers watching Venus’s matches on TV in college, and she’d see, even in U.S. tournaments, everyone rooting for a player “from Europe somewhere,” not for her sister. Venus also had to handle being treated as an interloper by the other players. “Only she knows what was going on in some of those early locker rooms, but it couldn’t have been easy,” Isha said. In 1997, in the U.S. Open semifinal, the Romanian Irina Spirlea shoulder-checked Venus during a changeover. “She thinks she’s the [expletive] Venus Williams,” Spirlea said, explaining her behavior in the aftermath, though not in the way she intended to.

Richard, when asked about the incident the next day on the phone by a reporter, called Spirlea “a big, tall, white turkey.”