Arthur Ashe

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, on the tenth of July 1943, the son of a parks-department maintenance worker. He learned tennis at Brook Field, the segregated city park where his father was the resident caretaker, under the coaching of Robert Walter Johnson — the African American physician who had previously coached Althea Gibson.

He took an athletic scholarship to UCLA in 1963 (the first awarded to an African American tennis player) and graduated with the NCAA singles championship in 1965. He served as an Army second lieutenant from 1966 to 1969.

He won the U.S. Open in 1968 — the first African American man to win a Grand Slam singles title. He won the Australian Open in 1970 and Wimbledon in 1975, defeating Jimmy Connors in straight sets in the Wimbledon final. He is, to the present day, the only African American man to have won any of the three Grand Slam tournaments named above.

He was repeatedly denied visas to South Africa through the 1960s and early 1970s under apartheid; he was finally admitted in 1973, and used the visit to identify the network of Black South African tennis players whose careers had been suppressed by apartheid restrictions. He served as the principal American tennis-establishment voice for the international sports boycott of apartheid for the next two decades.

In 1983 he underwent quadruple-bypass heart surgery; the blood transfusions he received during that operation transmitted HIV. He publicly disclosed his diagnosis on the eighth of April 1992 after a journalist threatened to expose the case. He used the remaining ten months of his life to organize the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS and to argue publicly for racial equity in AIDS treatment.

He died of AIDS-related pneumonia in New York on the sixth of February 1993, age forty-nine. He was the first African American to lie in state in the Governor's Mansion in Richmond, Virginia.

He is honored here as the only African American man to win Wimbledon, and the activist who shaped both American tennis and the international response to AIDS.