Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Many of the organizations associated with Arthur—notably the ATP, TransAfrica, and the NJTL—were well established and on a strong footing, administratively and financially. And each in its own way continued to identify with Arthur’s professed ideals. Even the ATP, which represents a diverse clientele of professional tennis players, has presented an annual Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award since 1983. The NJTL, now under the umbrella of the USTA, still features Ashe in its promotional and training materials, a continuing connection that has helped to sustain a network of more than 350 local programs serving nearly 230,000 mostly inner-city youngsters.

  The Safe Passage Foundation also survived Arthur’s death, expanding to ten cities after moving its headquarters from Newark to Los Angeles in 1995. And so did several other institutional manifestations of his outreach to inner-city communities, notably his minority recruitment activities at Aetna, which honors his legacy with an annual Arthur Ashe Voice of Conscience Award; the Arthur Ashe Children’s Program, established in 1992 as an extension of Willis Thomas’s Washington Tennis and Education Foundation; and the Virginia Heroes sixth-grade mentoring program founded by Arthur and Wilder in 1990. Encompassing two of Arthur’s basic beliefs—the power of forgiveness and the importance of nurturing children—Virginia Heroes remains worthy of its name twenty-eight years after its founding, an enduring symbol of his reconciliation with the hometown that had once rejected him.18

  Several of Arthur’s lesser-known initiatives did not fare so well, however. The Black Tennis Foundation of South Africa (BTF), and the Black Tennis and Sports Foundation (BTSF) proved unsustainable and became defunct soon after his death. The BTF had been floundering since the mid-1980s, when co-founder Owen Williams moved from South Africa to Dallas after accepting a position with Lamar Hunt’s WCT, and the BTSF had never enjoyed a secure financial base.19

  Another unsuccessful initiative—one that had once seemed so promising but which foundered after Arthur’s death—was the African American Sports Hall of Fame. Despite strong support from local officials and corporate sponsors willing to donate a downtown building, the project lost momentum and came to a dead stop in 1997 when the city’s economic development staff moved on to other alternatives. Part of the problem was insufficient fund-raising, but there was also the complicating factor of dealing with a continuing controversy surrounding the placement of Paul DiPasquale’s sculptural tribute.20

  Hall of Fame or no Hall of Fame, DiPasquale remained committed to producing a statue that would honor Ashe as one of Richmond’s most distinguished citizens. And from early 1993 on, he had the support of Jeanne, Governor Wilder, the city’s African American city manager Robert Bobb, several city councilmen (including future senator and vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, who joined the council in July 1994), the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and a substantial proportion (though probably not a majority) of the city’s residents. What he did not have was solid support from Richmond’s artistic community. Per Arthur’s request, he designed a statue that incorporated children, books, and a sculpture of a people’s champion wearing a warm-up suit and untied tennis shoes. After sending a preliminary sketch to Jeanne in mid-February, he spent two months in his studio sculpting a ten-foot-high, two-thousand-pound clay statue, the first solid step toward the completion of a monument that, in his words, would inspire “reverence, inspiration and awe for everyone who sees it.”

  Jeanne, Johnnie, and other members of the Ashe family soon visited DiPasquale’s studio to view the clay statue, and their enthusiastic approval encouraged the city’s Ashe Memorial Committee to move forward. DiPasquale had worried about Jeanne’s reaction, knowing her endorsement was crucial to the success of the project. But his fears evaporated when she put her hands on the clay surface of the statue’s face and began to cry. Feeling the molded clay, she whispered through her tears that the likeness of Arthur was almost eerily accurate.21

  On February 8, 1994, the City Council authorized placing a finished version of the statue on city property at a site to be determined later. The project’s estimated $400,000 cost was a stumbling block, but the Virginia Heroes group—led by former Governor Wilder, who had left office in January, Arthur’s old friend Tom Chewning, now a successful businessman, and Marty Dummett, a former editor for Prentice Hall who served as the group’s executive director—stepped up to lead the fund-raising effort. During the next ten months, DiPasquale crafted a plaster-cast proof version of the statue, which Virginia Heroes presented to the public on December 6. At the presentation ceremony, Wilder, who had already privately expressed his site preference, announced he wanted to place the statue among the Confederate hero figures on Monument Avenue. As he later put it, “These are heroes from an era which would deny the aspirations of an Arthur Ashe. He would stand with them, saying, ‘I, too, speak for Virginia.’ ”22

  Jeanne and many others continued to favor a placement adjacent to the future site of what was now being called the Hard Road to Glory African-American Sports Hall of Fame, but the Monument Avenue proposal advanced by Wilder and the Virginia Heroes group ignited a firestorm of controversy that consumed nearly three years of public debate. Even though several official bodies—including the City Council and its Site Selection Committee, the City Planning Commission, and the City Urban Design Committee—ultimately endorsed the Monument Avenue site, there was spirited opposition to the proposed invasion of the city’s most sacred thoroughfare.

  Many local whites—especially residents of the elite neighborhood running along Monument Avenue—were appalled by the thought of desegregating the line of heroic statues memorializing Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, and other Confederate icons. Much of the opposition was voiced in the name of local control, historic preservation, and defense of tradition, but thinly veiled—and sometimes even overt—racism also became a factor in the debate. Not only did DiPasquale, Chewning, and other statue proponents receive hate mail and threatening phone calls from die-hard white supremacists, but also Confederate reenactors representing the Sons of Confederate Veterans routinely attended City Council meetings as self-appointed defenders of Monument Avenue’s racial purity. “Some people will never acknowledge Richmond’s prize, Richmond’s world-loved man,” DiPasquale explained in a letter to Jeanne in July 1995, but he assured her “their children will grow up knowing his message just as green means go and red means stop.”23

  While a number of liberal whites spoke out in favor of the proposal, popular support was heavily concentrated in the black community. One of the leading figures working behind the scenes to secure the Monument Avenue site was John Charles Thomas, the city’s leading black attorney and the first African American to serve on the Virginia Supreme Court (1983–1989). Another was Chuck Richardson, an outspoken black city councilman who chastised those among the opposition who refused to face the real issue at hand. “Everybody’s dancing around the question, which is ‘Do we put a black man on Monument Avenue?’ ” he declared. “The hand-me-down ideals those individuals represent is the very thing that chased Arthur out of this city. The Civil War is a part of our history. Now we have another part: Civil Rights.”

  Diametrically opposed to Richardson was Ray Boone, the influential editor of the Richmond Free Press, the city’s leading black newspaper. Along with Mayor Leonidas Young, he opposed the Monument Avenue site while pressing for the statue’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame project. “Identifying Arthur Ashe with racist generals of The Lost Cause would scandalize our hero’s shining memory,” Boone editorialized in 1995. “Subordinating him to a solid line of Confederate figures would intensify injustice, unfairly equating Arthur Ashe to a bronze row of history’s most traitorous villains.”

  Mayor Young, who later served time in prison for mail fraud and influence peddling, vacillated from one position to another until former Justice Thomas explained the facts of political life to him during a private meeting held at Thomas’s house on Monument Avenue. The Ashe statue will be “erected
on Monument Avenue, period,” Thomas told Young, “and if necessary it will be done over your political corpse.” One of Young’s plans—to abandon the Monument Avenue statue site in favor of a site at Byrd Park, with the renaming of a downtown street as Arthur Ashe Boulevard thrown in the bargain—was struck down by the City Council after a six-hour public forum held on July 17, 1995. Before adjourning, the council endorsed the DiPasquale design and the Monument Avenue site, drawing considerable praise from the press and seemingly bringing the controversy to a close. But, in actuality, wrangling over the Ashe monument was far from over.24

  Independent of the site controversy, DiPasquale’s design drew considerable opposition on aesthetic grounds. This criticism took on new life during the summer of 1995, when a local gallery owner named Betty Reynolds organized Citizens for Excellence in Public Art (CEPA), a cultural advocacy group that endorsed the Monument Avenue site but not DiPasquale’s statue. Speaking at the July 17 public hearing, Reynolds—a politically connected member of a wealthy Richmond family—called for a government-sponsored international competition to select a more appropriate design. Though rebuffed by the City Council, Reynolds and CEPA persisted in their criticism. “Many individuals are hesitant to speak out about the quality of the statue itself and the lack of a competition because of the high emotions surrounding the site, sensitivity to the Ashe family, and the fear of criticism being taken in racial terms,” she claimed in a letter to the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “But the fact remained,” she continued, “there is widespread feeling throughout the city that the current piece is of very limited artistic merit and many feel that this current statue is more appropriate for mall art than Monument Avenue.”

  In August, the city went forward with what one observer called “a quiet groundbreaking ceremony” at the intersection of Monument Avenue and Roseneath Road, four hundred yards north of the monument dedicated to Confederate naval hero Matthew Fontaine Maury. The site of the Ashe statue now seemed set, yet that did not stop Reynolds and CEPA from organizing a petition drive and letter-writing campaign to pressure the city’s Committee on Architectural Review (CAR) to sanction a design competition. In December, CAR held a public hearing on the matter, but at the end of the evening a solid majority voted to retain DiPasquale’s design.25

  Having worked on the Ashe statue on and off for nearly three years, DiPasquale finally had permission to proceed to completion and installation. But the resolution came too late for Jeanne, who had grown tired of the bickering. She was also disgusted by the insulting, backdoor efforts to preserve Monument Avenue’s racial sanctity, and she said so in an eloquent op-ed piece published in the Times-Dispatch on New Year’s Day 1996. She began: “Richmond, can you remember that the ‘Arthur Ashe monument,’ as you call it now, was never meant to be a monument just to Arthur? Rather it began with Arthur’s own dream of creating an African-American Sports Hall of Fame. . . . He saw it as a culmination of his life’s work to leave behind a lasting memorial to all African-American athletes. That it would be in Richmond, where he was born and raised, left him even more proud. It was in this context that Arthur agreed to cooperate with the sculptor, Paul DiPasquale, for a statue that would go in front of the Hall of Fame.”

  She had nothing but praise for DiPasquale, whom she described as a “wonderful artist.” “It distresses me,” she wrote, “that he has in any way been criticized when I know that his intentions were to honor my husband with his talent. Likewise, I can certainly understand that Arthur’s family wants to name as many things after him as is possible. No one appreciates more than I how very much there is about Arthur to be proud of! But, somehow, what Arthur wanted has been lost in the shuffle.” From there she moved to the heart of the matter: “No, I am not in agreement with the decision to place the ‘Arthur Ashe monument’ on Monument Avenue. My reasons are not politically driven; nor are they artistically or racially motivated. I have always felt that in all this controversy, the spirit that Arthur gave to Richmond has been overlooked. I am afraid that a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue honors Richmond, Virginia, more than it does its son, his legacy, and his life’s work.”

  “Why can’t we return to Arthur’s original dream for his hometown?” she asked. “As 1996 begins, my wish for the new year is that there can be a national effort to build a Sports Hall of Fame in Richmond that is a place of honor for all the great people Arthur saluted in A Hard Road to Glory. Arthur returned to his roots. Let his legacy grow in your soil. Water it, nurture it, and it will be the shining star that Arthur was for all of us. For that dream, you have my support. And with that, Richmond would have something dear and significant—much more than another statue on a boulevard of statues.”26

  These words drew an immediate response from city officials, including Mayor Young and the City Planning Commission. Nearly everyone professed surprise that Jeanne harbored serious misgivings about placing the statue on Monument Avenue, but Young and others scrambled to accommodate her position. On January 2, the Planning Commission voted 6–2 to postpone final approval of any Ashe statue site for at least sixty days, while the mayor proposed a compromise plan calling for the temporary installation of the statue on Monument Avenue to be followed by eventual removal to the Hall of Fame grounds.

  Jeanne’s op-ed also refocused attention on the Hall project, which had been limping along for more than two years. In late February, she joined the basketball star Ralph Sampson and other celebrities at a reception at Richmond’s Jefferson Hotel, hoping to kick-start an ambitious campaign to raise the estimated $23 million needed to construct the Hall. Harrison Wilson, the father of future Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, had been hired as executive director of the project, and for a time Jeanne gained renewed hope that under his leadership the Hall would eventually become a reality. But the necessary funds never materialized, even though the city pledged $1 million as seed money.27

  On February 26, when the City Council met to render a final judgment on the Monument Avenue site, some observers feared a majority of the nine-person council was prepared to vote no, having reportedly succumbed to the pressures of recent behind-the-scenes maneuvering. But during an open forum prior to the vote, Tom Chewning turned the tide with a clever response to Vice Mayor John Conrad’s leading question. Why should a statue of a tennis player be placed among the great heroes of the Confederacy—all distinguished leaders known for their sterling character, Conrad asked? Chewning, after conceding that Monument Avenue should indeed be reserved for public men of high character, proceeded to read a biographical sketch of such a man—without revealing the man’s identity. Caught off guard and obviously flustered, Conrad reluctantly acknowledged that the character sketch “fit Arthur Ashe to a tee.” Only then did Chewning reveal that the sketch had been taken from an encyclopedia entry on General Robert E. Lee. This startling revelation sent a murmur of recognition through the council, which a few minutes later voted 8–1 in favor of placing the Ashe statue on Monument Avenue. Conrad, unmoved by Chewning’s clever ploy, cast the only negative vote.

  When the Monument Avenue statue was unveiled and dedicated four months later on July 10—on what would have been Arthur’s fifty-third birthday—feelings of relief and triumph enveloped those who had fought long and hard to honor perhaps the only local hero whose legacy held the power to liberate the city’s from its stifling Confederate heritage. The symbolic importance of the statue was undeniable, even among those who opposed it, turning a vision of social and cultural change previously considered to be fanciful into something viable. Adding to the air of unexpected fulfillment, Mal Washington had reached the men’s singles final at Wimbledon four days earlier—the first African American to do so since Arthur in 1975. As Arthur’s life had proven, seemingly impossible dreams could be achieved if enough heart and soul and determination were brought to bear on the task at hand—even in the rarefied sanctums of Monument Avenue and Centre Court.

  Unconvinced that the Monument Avenue placement was a
good idea, Jeanne quietly boycotted the ceremony. But Arthur’s brother Johnnie, Wilder, and Chewning stepped up to headline the festivities, which included a rousing performance by the Harlem Boys Choir. Deviating from his sister-in-law’s position, Johnnie told the interracial gathering of fifteen hundred: “Arthur Ashe Jr. is a true Virginia hero. He belongs here. We expected the profound from Arthur Jr., and he gave it to us. A man from humble beginnings who rose to great heights. It is out of love, respect and appreciation for a true humanitarian that we gather here today.” Long one of the strongest proponents of the Monument Avenue site, Wilder declared: “Today is not just any day in Richmond. Monument Avenue is now an avenue for all people.” Chewning—citing his friend’s “character and respect for his fellow man”—struggled to keep his composure as he spoke in the statue’s shadow, and those in the crowd old enough to remember Richmond in the 1950s understood the significance of his presence. Richmond’s two best tennis prospects of that era, once separated by the barriers of Jim Crow, were now figuratively joined as one on a day of hope and long-delayed redemption.

  To those who had fought for the placement of the statue on Monument Avenue, and who had beaten the political odds, the installation of DiPasquale’s artistry was cause for jubilation. Justice John Charles Thomas spoke for many of Ashe’s local admirers when he composed a poem titled “In Proportion” soon after he left the dedication ceremony. The poem closed with the stanza:

  And so it was, cast as it is in bronze

  A monument to a man and his faith

  A symbol of hope and a sign of a new era

  An appropriate coda to hysteria

  And all in proportion to the sky

  As the world passes by28

  There were, of course, many individuals who failed to appreciate the uplifting message so obvious to Thomas. As recently as late February, a Richmond Times-Dispatch poll had revealed that a substantial majority of local whites opposed the placement of the Ashe statue among the Confederate heroes. One white observer speaking before the City Council claimed that putting a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue was equivalent “to putting a commode in your living room.” While a certain segment of the white community probably agreed with this sentiment, only a dozen or so Confederate-flag-waving protesters showed up at the unveiling. One protester held up a sign attacking the invasion of Monument Avenue as a “hate crime,” but most of the rest of the crowd, black and white, seemed to appreciate the shining new monument. There it stood for all of Richmond to see, with its twelve-foot bronze statue of Ashe holding books in one hand and a tennis racket in the other, four bronze children extending their hands upward, and an 87,000-pound block of Georgia granite supporting the figures. A verse from the Book of Hebrews was etched in the granite. “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” the inscription read, “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”