Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era

2 UCLA

chapter 2 As Ashe prepared to complete Mrs. Cox’s homework assignment, his comfort zonesuddenlyeludedhim.ThefreshmanEnglishteacheratMaggieWalkerHigh School had instructed her students to write a short essay that required each of the young men and women to take a position on an issue. The assignment offered Ashe the opportunity to think critically and form an opinion, somethingthathisfatherandDr .Johnsonhadsubtlydiscouraged.Survivingasablack youthinJimCrowAmerica,theypreached,demandedbeingdeferent,cautious, and inconspicuous, not loud, opinionated, and defiant. Those like Emmett Till, who said too much, were lynched, not praised. Yet this assignment represented an invitation to speak up, one that Ashe could not dismiss. He decided to write on the failures of black leadership. He took issue with those followers who did not properly evaluate the advice of their leaders. “I wrote,” he explained, “that I had learned not to accept everything at face value just because you heard it from a teacher, that we had to scrutinize, criticize constructively, and question everything because black people were too much like sheep.” When an apparent saviorappeared—beitapastor,apolitician,ateacher,oranorganizer—African Americans, Ashe concluded, all too often clung to his every word and were led in the wrong direction. The analytical depth of his essay so impressed Mrs. Cox that she read it to the entire class.1 Ashe’sargumentreflectedanapproachingshiftinthecivilrightsmovement. In April 1960 students and movement veterans, representing organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the National Student Association (NSA), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), gathered at Shaw University and collectively founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Conceived as a grass-roots, student-led organization, SNCChadnointentionoffollowingtheleader.“Studentshaveanaturalclaimto UCLA ucla 35 leadership in this project,” concluded one document from the Shaw conference . Forty years later, SNCC member Julian Bond wrote that SNCC “demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks.” The events at Shaw University resonated with activists in California, forcing Ashe and others to reevaluate their racial identities.2 “It would have been difficult for me to avoid getting involved in politics,” Ashereasonedin1981.“GrowingupintheSouthinthe1950s,studyingatUCLA in the 1960s, even playing tennis planted seeds of confrontation.” The early to mid-1960s were a period of sustained civil rights activism throughout the United States that included the nationwide sit-in movement beginning in February 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, and the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. In 1964, Harlem and six other U.S. cities erupted in race riots, and in the summer of 1965 the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles went up in flames in protest of police brutality.3 In the midst of the civil rights movement, and on the courts, fields, and diamonds of American sports, black athletes developed a heightened racial consciousness . Ashe described his own racial awakening as follows: “I was moved into the world of tennis that had little in common with the black experience. The game had a history and tradition [that] I was expected to assimilate, but much of that history and many of those traditions were hostile to me.” He and other black athletes in the 1960s experienced what one scholar has called “split existences.” Drawing from W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, he has argued, “On the one hand, black athletes were proud of their race for its forbearance and ability to survive and fought against the negative images of black inferiority. On the other hand, black athletes’ aspirations to success in American sport necessitated that they adhere to values upheld in the dominant society.” This dilemma of whether to conform to the social mores of his sport or stand with fellow blacks against injustice represented an emotional struggle for Ashe throughout the 1960s. His mentors’ philosophies of avoiding confrontation and moderate integrationism became impossible positions to hold.4 The maturation of the civil rights movement, the emergence of budding Black Power ideologies in Los Angeles, and the presence of a small but significant group of politically active students at UCLA challenged Ashe to reconsider someofhischildhoodbeliefs.Freefromtherulesandexpectationsofhisfather and Dr. Johnson, he became interested in politics, debating classmates on topics of race and civil rights, speaking out on international political matters, and developing a philosophy of his own somewhere in between moderate and militant integrationism. For Ashe, however, early exposure to Black Power 36 arthur ashe and black nationalist ideologies did not result in complete conversion. Leaders such as Ron Karenga made Ashe more aware of his place in...