📍Brook Road, Richmond, VA 23220, USA
1943 – 1960“I was born in Richmond, Virginia, in July 1943. In 1947 my father, Arthur Ashe Sr., became the supervisor of Brook Field, an eighteen-acre playground for Black children on Brook Road in segregated Richmond, and the job came with a small house right in the middle of the park. Our home was surrounded by baseball diamonds, a swimming pool, basketball courts and four tennis courts. My mother, Mattie, loved books and taught me to read before I went to school. When I was six, she died after an operation, still a young woman, and my father raised my younger brother, Johnnie, and me with great discipline and love, with help from a housekeeper, Mrs Berry. A year or so later, Ronald Charity, a student at Virginia Union University who practised on the Brook Field courts, saw me watching and offered to teach me. I was thin and small, but I loved the game's precision. Ron taught me my strokes and entered me in tournaments for Black players, since I couldn't play in Richmond's white tournaments or on its public courts. In 1953, when I was ten, he arranged for me to spend summers with Dr Robert Walter Johnson in Lynchburg, a physician who coached young Black players on the court behind his house. Dr Johnson taught me to play, but also to be polite, to call close balls in my opponent's favour and never to show my feelings on court. In 1960 I moved to St Louis for my final year of school to find better competition. I won a scholarship to UCLA, and in 1968 I became the first Black man to win the US Open, and later Wimbledon. Richmond honours me with a statue on Monument Avenue.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today