Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era

Notes

Introduction 1. David Wolf, “Arthur—the New King of the Courts,” Life, 20 Sept. 1968, 34. There is no scholarly biography of Ashe. For more on his life, see Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace: A Memoir, with Arnold Rampersad (New York: Knopf, 1993); Ashe, Off the Court, with Neil Amdur (New York:NewAmericanLibrary,1981);Ashe,ArthurAshe:PortraitinMotion,withFrankDeford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); Ashe, Advantage Ashe, as told to Clifford George GeweckeJr.(NewYork:Coward-McCann,1967);LouieRobinsonJr.,ArthurAshe:TennisChampion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); John McPhee, Levels of the Game (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969); Mike Towle, ed., I Remember Arthur Ashe: Memories of a True Tennis Pioneer and Champion of Social Causes by the People Who Knew Him (Nashville: Cumberland House,2001);SundiataDjata,BlacksattheNet:BlackAchievementintheHistoryofTennis,2vols. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006–8), 1:42–68; Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World, produced and directed by Julie Anderson (New York: Home Box Office, 1994), videocassette, 59min.; and Damion L. Thomas, “‘Don’t Tell Me How to Think’: Arthur Ashe and the Burden of ‘BeingBlack,’” InternationalJournaloftheHistoryofSport 27,no.8(May 2010): 1313–29. 2. Mark Asher, “Ashe Wins U.S. Open Tennis,” Washington Post (hereafter WP), 10 Sept. 1968, D1, D3; Wolf, “Arthur”; Jim Murray, “Ashe Goes Big League,” Los Angeles Times (hereafter LAT), 10 Sept. 1968, E1. 3. Wolf, “Arthur.” 4. Examples of these studies include Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012); Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1985); William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (Urbana:UniversityofIllinoisPress,2006);RandyRoberts,JoeLouis:HardTimesMan(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (New York: Vintage Books, 2005); Lewis A. Erenberg, The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997; reprint , New York: Ballantine, 1998); Aram Goudsouzian, King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Mike Freeman, Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an American Hero (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); and Notes 274 notes to pages 3–8 David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). 5. Althea Gibson, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (New York: Harper, 1958), 124. See also David K. Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 200–220; David K. Wiggins and Patrick B. Miller, eds., Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth Century America (New York: Routledge , 2003); Wiggins, ed., Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); and Gerald Early, A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 6. Wiggins,GloryBound,200–220;WigginsandMiller,SportandtheColorLine;Wiggins, Out of the Shadows; Early, Level Playing Field. 7. Murray, “Ashe Goes Big League.” 8. Kenny Moore, “The Eternal Example,” Sports Illustrated (hereafter SI), 21 Dec. 1992, 16–27. 9. Ashe, Days of Grace, 113–14. 10. Martin Luther King Jr. to Ashe, 7 Feb. 1968, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York (hereafter SCRBC), box 2, folder 1. chapter 1: Richmond 1. Louie Robinson Jr., Arthur Ashe: Tennis Champion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 76; Ashe, Off the Court, with Neil Amdur (New York: New American Library, 1981), 33. 2. Steve Clark, “Heroes Are Not Made Overnight,” Richmond Times-Dispatch (hereafter RTD), 11 Feb. 1993 (quotation); Richard Steins, Arthur Ashe: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 6; John McPhee, Levels of the Game (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 64–65; Robinson, Arthur Ashe, 11. 3. I use the term moderate integrationism to refer to those individuals, activists, and organizations that favored desegregation yet were willing to accept gradual progress. The NAACP, a civil rights organization that focused on litigation, is an example of...