Ashe, Arthur

July 10, 1943
February 6, 1993

Born in Richmond, Virginia, tennis player and political activist Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. traced his lineage back ten generations on his father's side to a woman who in 1735 was brought from West Africa to Yorktown, Virginia, by the slave ship Doddington. Ashe's mother, Mattie Cunningham, also of Richmond, taught him to read by the time he was four. She died when Arthur was six, one year after giving birth to her second son and last child, Johnnie.

Ashe, who was frail in his youth, was forbidden by his father, a police officer in Richmond's Department of Recreation and Parks, to play football on the segregated Brookfield playground adjacent to the Ashes' home. Instead, young Ashe took to playing tennis on the four hard courts of the playground. By the time he was ten Ashe had attracted the keen eye of Dr. Walter Johnson, a Lynchburg, Virginia, physician and tennis enthusiast who had previously discovered and coached Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Ashe's father and Dr. Johnson were both stern disciplinarians who insisted that Ashe cultivate self-discipline, good manners, forbearance, and self-effacing stoicism. These qualities would characterize Ashe throughout his entire life and, even in the midst of the most turbulent social conditions, would define him as a man of reason, conscience, integrity, and moral authority. His cool disposition enabled him not only to survive but to distinguish himself in an overwhelmingly white tennis environment.

In 1960 Ashe was awarded a tennis scholarship to UCLA, where he earned All-American status. Two years after he graduated with a business degree, he became the first black man to win one of the preeminent Grand Slam titles, accomplishing that as an amateur and U.S. Army representative at the U.S. Open of 1968. Numerous titles would follow, highlighted by Ashe's place on three victorious Davis Cup squads and the addition of two more Grand Slam titles, one at the Australian Open in 1970, and the other, his pièce de résistance, at Wimbledon in 1975.

Throughout those years, Ashe devoted considerable time and energy to civil rights issues. In 1973, after three years of trying, he secured an invitation to play in the all-white South African Open. Although his participation was controversial, it personified Ashe's lifelong belief in constructive engagement—an attitude that he abandoned only on one noteworthy occasion in 1976, when he joined in the call for an international embargo of all sporting contact with South Africa.

In 1979, at age thirty-six, Ashe suffered a myocardial infarction, which forced him to have bypass surgery and retire from tennis. Nevertheless, over the ensuing years he served as the U.S. Davis Cup captain (1981–1985), he worked as a journalist and television commentator, and he served or helped create various foundations, ranging from the American Heart Association to the United Negro College Fund to his own Safe Passage Foundation.

Eighteen months after undergoing a second heart operation in 1983, Ashe learned that he had contracted the AIDS virus through blood transfusions. He immediately set to work on his definitive three-volume history of black athletes in America, A Hard Road to Glory (1988). Forced by the national newspaper USA Today to reveal that he was suffering from AIDS in April 1992, Ashe worked as an activist for the defeat of AIDS until he died of the disease in February 1993.

Following his death, Ashe was honored in his native Richmond by the erection in 1996 of a statue on Monument Avenue, the city's central thoroughfare. Meanwhile, the Flushing Meadows Tennis Stadium, home of the U.S. Open, was rededicated Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997.

In 1992 Ashe started the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, with a goal to improve health care and education in America's urban environments. In 2002 the institute celebrated its tenth anniversary, keeping Arthur Ashe's vision alive. The U.S. Postal Service announced plans at the U.S. Open in 2004 to commemorate Ashe with a postage stamp bearing his image.

See also Gibson, Althea; Tennis; Williams, Venus and Serena

Bibliography

Ashe, Arthur R., Jr., with Frank Deford. Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Ashe, Arthur, Jr., with Neil Amdur. Off the Court. New York: New American Library, 1981.

Ashe, Arthur, Jr., and Arnold Rampersad. Days of Grace: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1993.

Towle, Mike, ed. I Remember Arthur Ashe: Memories of a True Tennis Pioneer and a Champion of Social Causes by the People Who Knew Him. Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 2003.

peter bodo (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005