Ashe Returns to His Home : He Left a Segregated Richmond in 1960, and Later Wrought Change

Arthur Ashe went home Monday.

He had left Richmond, Va., during his senior year at Maggie Walker High, a black school in a black neighborhood in a city that offered him a black future, but made him aware of a past that shaped the way he looked at the world and, in some ways, the way it looked back.

He had gone away to play tennis, angry and not so much disillusioned with his hometown as aware that there was little opportunity for a black man in white Richmond in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

“When I decided to leave Richmond, I had no intention then of coming back,� he said in 1991.

But he did go back and is now at peace in a city where he made his peace long ago.

How to explain? How to describe a place and a time when young men grew up amid social change that came slowly and reluctantly, because change collided with custom 3 1/2 centuries old?

Only 100 miles away in Washington, the Supreme Court had struck down segregation in 1954, but by that time Arthur Ashe was 11, already painfully aware he was living in a black-and-white world in a city that prized the gray of its architecture and its Confederate heritage, but saw people in vividly contrasted hues that mandated separation.

It was a city where Patrick Henry finished a speech with “. . . give me liberty or give me death,� words that rang freedom’s bell throughout the colonies. Words that were memorized in every school. Words that were spoken in St. John’s Church, about six miles from the Ashe home on Lombardy Street, a home provided by the city for his father to keep the grounds at Brook Field Park.

Words.

“That’s what they were,� says Roy West, now a city councilman in Richmond and then an algebra teacher at Maggie Walker High. “They had no meaning to me or to many of us. We memorized them in school because we had to, but they were just words.

“We never learned the speeches of (Paul) Dunbar or some of the blacks in history, and they were good speeches. It was a kind of unwritten law that you didn’t teach black history (even in the black schools). In a sense, it was a concerted effort to rob us of our heritage.�

Although the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation specified integration “with all deliberate speed,� there was much more deliberation than speed in Richmond.

Integration there began with two children in a junior high in 1961 but was not considered complete until 1970, mandated in forced busing of students from black neighborhoods.

Those pre-integration days shaped the way Ashe would deal with the future. When he spoke out about apartheid in South Africa, he could do it with a personal perspective. He knew of apartheid. He had grown up in it, quietly absorbing all that it meant and seeing that every black dealt with it in his own way.

“Not to use a cliche, but Arthur chose to fight it by becoming better, not bitter,� West said. “He was too busy preparing for his future to fight. His destiny was not a matter of change, it was a matter of choice.

“He was very quiet about it and took a lot of jostling from other students.�

Ashe apparently realized that he didn’t have to be loud to be heard. In 1968, at Andrew Young’s home in Atlanta, a group was talking about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

“From the back of the room, a young guy yelled up, ‘Arthur, you’ve just got to be a lot more outspoken. You’ve got to be much more aggressive,’ � recalled Donald Dell, a friend and Ashe’s attorney.

“ ‘I’m just not arrogant, and I’m not going to be arrogant,’ � Ashe said. “ ‘I’ve got to do it my way.’ �

Thus did Ashe tell the Rev. Jesse Jackson of his choice in searching for equality.

For the young Ashe, choice meant leaving Richmond.

“The races coexisted in Richmond then,� said Gilbert Carter, who grew up with Ashe and is now assistant director of Parks and Recreation in the city. “We didn’t have a lot of turmoil. . . . There was very little rioting. The clashing was not as overt as in other places. It seemed as though we blacks knew our place, but we each fought the system in our own private way.�

The system was segregation.

Blacks went to Richmond Community Hospital, where black doctors did what they could with the facilities they were afforded. Whites went to St. Phillip’s on the campus of the Medical College of Virginia, where research was ongoing amid the finest surroundings.

Whites sat up front in the city’s buses, blacks in back. There was no painted line between the two.

“It was an imaginary line,� West said. “But it was very real.�

As the bus filled from front to back and back to front, inevitably there was a meeting in the middle. When a white man wanted to sit where a black was seated, he said, “Move!� and the law said the black had to get up.

“If he didn’t, the bus was stopped and the police were called,� West said.

At the major department stores in Richmond, blacks could spend money, but couldn’t try on the clothes they wanted to buy. And couldn’t even think about returning them.

Ashe was taught algebra by West at Maggie Walker High from books and with supplies handed down from John Marshall High, a white school that had new materials.

The Maggie Walker cadet corps marched with rifles that the John Marshall cadets had marched with before trading them for newer pieces.

The commonwealth had its colleges and universities: Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia; William and Mary College, second-oldest in the nation only to Harvard.

And it had its black schools: Virginia State, Virginia Union, Norfolk State, Hampton Institute, St. Paul’s. They were available to offer bachelor’s degrees to blacks so they could teach in black schools.

“The state would not let blacks into the graduate schools,� West said. “Instead, the state would pay for us to attend graduate schools anywhere we wanted to--out of the state. They paid tuition, room and board and books for us to go to Harvard or Yale or New York University or Oxford or Cambridge, anywhere we wanted as long as it wasn’t in Virginia.

“It’s an irony, really, that many of the people that the system sent out of state to be educated came home to help change the system.�

The best of the black high schools’ athletes went north to college--Earl Faison to Indiana, then to become all-pro with the Chargers; Leroy Keyes to Purdue to become an All-American--or to black colleges. Maggie Walker’s Willie Lanier went to Morgan State and then became an all-pro with the Kansas City Chiefs. And Bob Dandridge went to Norfolk State before becoming an NBA all-star with the Milwaukee Bucks.

This, at a time when the University of Virginia’s football team was having 0-10 and 1-9 seasons, losing 28 games in a row with all-white teams; and when the Cavalier basketball team was an Atlantic Coast Conference doormat.

Tennis was a white man’s game, and Ashe learned it playing at the North Richmond black recreation center, Brook Field, where the facilities were as good as Arthur Ashe Sr. could make them for his son and others.

“Black athletes tend to get involved in the sports taught in the public schools,� Ashe said in 1984.

But there were no courts and no team at Maggie Walker High.

The best tennis competition was at Byrd Park, then and now an immaculate facility, but blacks were not allowed there when Ashe was learning the game.

And the tennis at Battery Park was almost as good. When north-side neighborhoods were integrated, Battery Park was opened to blacks. But only after whites had taken down the nets on the tennis court and turned off water to restrooms and drinking fountains.

This was the Richmond that Ashe left, going first to Lynchburg, Va., where Dr. Walter Johnson was a black tennis patron who taught going along to get along; and to UCLA, where the legend of Jackie Robinson lived among students whose knowledge of segregation came from books and television news.

Eventually, he went back, winning three tournaments as a professional in Richmond, which grew to appreciate the acclaim that surrounded a son who was a Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion.

Toward the end, he grew closer to Richmond, in May of 1992 conducting a clinic at the Byrd Park courts he had not been allowed to walk on as a youth and becoming a force behind Virginia Heroes, Inc., which brought together national and local role models for hundreds of Richmond children.

“For somebody like Arthur Ashe to come in and make the type of comments he did, that had to have a big impact on the kids,� said Rayford L. Harris Sr., former chairman of the Richmond School Board. “And he didn’t have to sound a trumpet. All those kids had to do was consider where it was coming from, and that was enough to get the message across.�

Carter and Ashe were working on Ashe’s dream--a National African-American Hall of Fame to be built in Richmond.

“You tend to hope that a man like Arthur Ashe, coming back the way he did to a city that treated him the way Richmond did, will be a beacon for kids to see what can be done,� Carter said.

After funeral services in the Arthur Ashe Athletic Center in Richmond, Ashe will be buried today in Woodland Cemetery, near the grave of his mother and in a Richmond different from the city he left in 1960.

There is a black governor, Douglas Wilder, and the Richmond City Council has six blacks among its nine members. Walter T. Kenney, an African-American, is the city’s mayor.

But the city Ashe knew as a child lingers, albeit in smaller parts. On Monday, Richmond’s school board addressed the problem of Bellevue Elementary School, where a black principal had set up clusters in which white teachers taught white pupils and black taught black.

And in Woodland Cemetery, there are still no graves of whites.