Arthur Ashe: A Racket in a Segregated Park
Near Richmond, Virginia
Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond on July tenth, nineteen forty-three. His father was a handyman and caretaker for the city's recreation department, and the family lived in a cottage on the grounds of Brookfield Park, the largest Blacks-only public playground in Richmond. It had basketball courts, a pool, three baseball diamonds, and four tennis courts.
Ashe began playing tennis at seven years old on those courts. A Virginia Union University student named Ron Charity, who was the best Black tennis player in Richmond, saw the boy hitting balls and started teaching him. Charity later brought Ashe to the attention of a Lynchburg physician named Robert Walter Johnson, who had also coached Althea Gibson and ran a summer tennis program for young Black players.
Johnson mentored Ashe from nineteen fifty-three, when Ashe was ten, through nineteen sixty. In nineteen sixty, Ashe was barred from competing against white players in Richmond during the school year and could not use the city's indoor courts, which were closed to Black players. He accepted an offer to finish high school in Saint Louis, where the courts were integrated.
The move cost him his Richmond community but opened the path to the University of California Los Angeles and eventually to the professional tour. He won the United States Open in nineteen sixty-eight, becoming the first Black man to win that title. He won Wimbledon in nineteen seventy-five.
He won the Australian Open in nineteen seventy. He remains the only Black man to have won all three of those Grand Slam singles titles. He contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in nineteen eighty-three, disclosed his illness publicly in April nineteen ninety-two, and died of AIDS-related pneumonia on February sixth, nineteen ninety-three, at age forty-nine.
President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in June of that year. A statue of Arthur Ashe stands on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the only figure remaining after the Confederate monuments were removed.
