#BlackHistoryStar: Arthur Ashe – Tennis Player, Actvist

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Arthur Ashe is the first African American to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and the first African-American man to be ranked No. 1 in the world.

Born on July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia, Arthur Ashe became the first, and is still the only, African-American male tennis player to win the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. He is also the first African-American man to be ranked as the No. 1 tennis player in the world. Always an activist, when Ashe learned that he had contracted AIDS via a blood transfusion, he turned his efforts to raising awareness about the disease, before finally succumbing to it on February 6, 1993.

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born on July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia. The oldest of Arthur Ashe Sr. and Mattie Cunningham’s two sons, Arthur Ashe Jr. blended finesse and power to forge a groundbreaking tennis game. Ashe would go on to achieve a number of African-American “firsts,” including becoming the first African-American male player to win the U.S. Open (1968) and Wimbeldon (1975), the first African-American man to be ranked No. 1 in the world (1975), and the first African-American man to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame (1985).

Ashe’s childhood was marked by hardship and opportunity. Under his mother’s direction, Ashe was reading by the age of 4. But his life was turned upside-down two years later, when Mattie passed away.

Ashe’s father, fearful of seeing his boys fall into trouble without their mother’s discipline, began running a tighter ship at home. Ashe and his younger brother Johnnie went to church every Sunday, and after school were required to come straight home. Arthur Sr. even clocked the distance: “My father . . .kept me home, out of trouble. I had exactly 12 minutes to get home from school, and I kept to that rule through high school.”