by Arthur Ashe
On January 11, 1985, I was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. Although this was not a particularly risky act, I nevertheless found it disturbing. Because I had spent my life making sure no one would ever have cause to arrest me for anything, the experience of being handcuffed, carted away, and booked was daunting. I also knew that, in certain circles, my arrest could cost me some influence and prestige. I have always assumed, as I told Jet magazine, that it had been a sore point (perhaps the last straw) with the president of the USTA, Randy Gregson, as he pondered my future as Davis Cup captain. Very few professional athletes, let alone captains of national sporting teams, are arrested for taking part in political demonstrations. The cause itself seemed not to matter.
By 1985, I was at last satisfied that the anti-apartheid movement, once exotic, was blossoming in America. Arrested along with me that January 11 were sixteen other demonstrators, including teachers, municipal workers, and trade union officials. And we were only one small part of an ongoing national effort since November of the previous year, when three prominent blacks had staged a sit-in at the South African embassy in Washington. Behind the national effort was the Free South Africa Movement, coordinated by Randall Robinson, who had been one of the three people in that sit-in. Since November, a host of well-known figures, including Belafonte, Coretta Scott King, and myself, had walked the picket lines outside the embassy complex. The picketing continued long after my arrest, with demonstrations and arrests taking place in other cities. When Jesse Jackson was arrested in March, the police had charged almost 1,500 people in Washington alone; by August, 3,000 had been arrested.
The core of my opposition to apartheid was undoubtedly my memory of growing up under segregation in Virginia. The WHITES ONLY signs in Johannesburg shocked me back to the days when I could play tennis in Brook Field park with other blacks or with a visiting white player looking for a good game, but not in the many better-equipped public courts reserved for whites. It reminded me of going with Ron Charity, who had taught me to play tennis, to try to convince Sam Woods, the white man who practically ran tennis in Richmond, to allow me to play in a city tournament. Charity asked respectfully on my behalf, but Woods, a kindly, gracious, gray-haired man, said no. I was twelve years old. After my arrest I told the Washington Post, in explaining my opposition to apartheid, “I speak with a great deal of personal experience. I went through a segregated school system and a segregated society.”
I had also gone through that school system and the society that sponsored it without a protest. Blacks did not publicly protest much in Virginia when I was growing up; and they protested even less in my father’s household. If I had left the matter to my father, I probably would not have been arrested in 1985. Before going on the picket line in January, I had telephoned him in Richmond.
“Daddy, I want you to know that I’m probably going to be arrested tomorrow, in Washington.”
He paused before answering. When he spoke, I could hear a nervousness in his voice. “In Washington? Is this about that South Africa business, Arthur?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Well, son, I don’t know. South Africa’s an awful long way from us here. But if you think you have to do it, then I guess you have to do it.”
“I have to do it, Daddy.”
“All right, son. Just be careful.”
“Yes, Daddy. I’ll be careful.”
And I was. I was careful again when I received other requests to put my body on the line, even in this largely symbolic way, against apartheid. Sometimes I acceded to the requests, but most often I did not. Much as I admire certain well-known entertainers who are quick to respond to calls to the barricades, I did not want to become a fashionable protester giving photo opportunities, as they are called, to journalists.
I also wrestled with a far more perplexing question. To what extent was I trying to make up, with my anti-apartheid crusade, for my relative inaction a decade or more earlier during the civil-rights struggle?
No one knew better than I that a demonstration such as the one in Washington, when I was arrested, was mainly a staged or token affair, a piece of political choreography. I did not feel in any way like a hero for taking part in it. Indeed, I was painfully aware of the difference between, on the one hand, the symbolic punishment that I had allowed myself to be subjected to, and, on the other hand, the terror that the Ku Klux Klan and thousands of white Southern vigilantes and law officers imposed on the black men, women, and children who risked their lives during the civil-rights movement. While blood was running freely in the streets of Birmingham, Memphis, and Biloxi, I had been playing tennis. Dressed in immaculate white, I was elegantly stroking tennis balls on perfectly paved courts in California and New York and Europe. Meanwhile, across the South, young men and women of my age were enduring pain and suffering so that blacks would be free of our American brand of apartheid.
I certainly had been offered more than one opportunity to stand up for the movement. The black social revolution definitely reached UCLA. I remember one long conversation with the intense, argumentative, but likable Ron Karenga, a cultural nationalist who was the head of an organization ingeniously called US, which stood for “Us Slaves.” A passionate man, Karenga was driven by the need for blacks to learn their own history and develop their own rites and rituals as part of the building of a black nation. He even invented Kwanzaa, a ritualistic celebration for blacks based on a crossing of African beliefs and rituals with beliefs and rituals from other parts of the world; celebrated around Christmastime, Kwanzaa is obviously designed to rival or even supplant it, although some nationalists claim differently. Karenga was persuasive, and I listened with genuine respect. But I was never able to cross the wall that separated athletes with scholarships at UCLA from the other students. Besides, there was an irrational edge to US, as there is perhaps in all extreme cultural nationalism. In conflicts with the Black Panthers, two US members were killed at UCLA about this time, and the organization never recovered. Those killings did nothing to ease my misgivings about militant politics.
Some of my friends tried to assure me that I, too, was playing my part in the revolution, but they never convinced me of it, not completely. There were times, in fact, when I felt a burning sense of shame that I was not with other blacks—and whites—standing up to the fire hoses and the police dogs, the truncheons, bullets, and bombs that cut down such martyrs as Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, Mola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and the little girls in that bombed church in Birmingham, Alabama. As my fame increased, so did my anguish. I knew that many blacks were proud of my accomplishments on the tennis court. But I also knew that some others, especially many of my own age or younger, did not bother to hide their indifference to me and my trophies, or even their disdain and contempt for me.
In 1968, that year of death in America, when first Martin Luther King, Jr., and then Robert F. Kennedy died at the hands of assassins, I spoke out for the first time in public about race and politics. About three weeks before King’s death, on March 10, I spoke at the Church of the Redeemer, Presbyterian, in Washington, D.C., on the role of the black athlete in the wrenching changes taking place in American society. I had been invited to speak by the minister of the church, the Reverend Jefferson Rogers, an intelligent, influential black man deeply concerned with trying to merge religious conviction with the imperatives of race consciousness and progressive politics.
I was more nervous about my coming speech than about any tennis match I had played in a long time, especially after the Washington Post, a few days before the event, ran a story about my decision to speak. The headline said: “Ashe Becomes Activist, Plans Speech Here on Civil Rights.” A subheading read: “Negro Tennis Star Emerges from Shell.” I recognized the extent to which I was hemmed in by authority. A second lieutenant and a systems analyst in the data-processing department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, I was very much under army control, as I admitted before speaking. My speech
was limited by “what I can say and do as an army officer under army regulations,” I conceded to the Post.
What I told the packed hall assembled that Sunday was hardly revolutionary or militant. With self-confidence and a desire to help others, the black athlete, whether of average ability or a superstar, must make a commitment to his or her community and attempt to transform it. I cited the example set by certain major black athletes, such as the basketball star Bill Russell and the baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, as the model for what must be done by others, even those less gifted or famous. In assigning blame for our condition, I pointed in two directions, not just in one, as many nationalists insisted on doing. “There is a lot we can do and we don’t do because we are lazy,” I insisted. “This may be brutal, but poverty is half laziness.” I committed myself to work for the improvement of African American life. Many ghetto youths knew little about tennis and might not even recognize my name, but I would still try to make a difference, as we all should. “We must forget ourselves” and work for others, I declared, even if “what we do today may or may not bear fruit until two or three generations.”
When I returned to West Point, I was promptly invited by my superiors to explain myself and my actions. I was warned not to make any more speeches of even a vaguely political nature. I took the warning to heart, because I understood the Army’s reasoning. Army officers must be above or outside politics, and if silence was the price for maintaining that distance, then so be it. When I left the Army not long after, however, I did not suddenly become a firebrand. Like many people with even a modicum of conscience and intelligence, I was too confused about what was going on among the leaders of black America, especially the younger leaders, to know precisely where to tread. South Africa was a clearer issue, and I turned to it almost with relief.
As I have said, I was acutely aware at times that some people saw me as not having done enough for the cause. Should I have done more? It was hard for me to act when I could see that what some people wanted me to do would have clashed violently with the principles I had evolved for myself over the years, principles having to do with a love of peace, morality, moderation, and religion. My character was set in this way, and I would not change for anybody. I will never forget something that Jesse Jackson said to me one evening in the 1970s in Atlanta. We were in the basement playroom of the home of Walt Hazzard, then an Atlanta Hawks basketball player, who had been a star at UCLA during my time there. Several other young blacks were in the room, in addition to Jackson, Hazzard, Andrew Young, and myself. (Donald Dell was the only white there.) We were in the middle of a warm discussion of race, politics, and protest, and I was defending my principles, or trying to explain them, when Jackson stuck me with a needling comment.
“The problem with you, Arthur,” he declared, “is that you’re not arrogant enough. You’re just not arrogant enough.”
“You’re right, Jesse,” I answered. “I’m not arrogant. But I don’t think that my lack of arrogance lessens my effectiveness one bit. I really don’t think so.”
I had heard this complaint before, expressed in various ways. At best, the arrogance Jackson seemed to want in me was not a purely self-serving arrogance but one that employed ego for some larger goal. The trouble, however, is that, once empowered and turned loose, egotism and arrogance are hard to control. I am not sure that Jesse, in his own life, has ever understood this lesson fully, despite the good work that he has done. As for myself, I found out a long time ago that I am best when I keep my ego under tight control and try to reason and look ahead, beyond temporary, flashy victories at some other human being’s expense, to the future. One consequence of my commitment to reasoning and reconciling would always be to have some people think of me as conservative, or opportunistic, or even a coward. So be it.
Needless to say, there were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward. While I was growing up, I was undoubtedly timid away from the tennis court. I was not only my father’s child; I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.
Looking out for his two motherless sons, my father tried to keep us out of harm’s way, and the possibility of harm was real. We all knew what had happened to Emmett Till, whose death in 1955 cast a shadow over my youth and that of virtually all black kids in Richmond and no doubt across America. Fourteen years old and from Chicago, Emmett was visiting his family in Mississippi when, on a dare, according to reports, he whistled at a white woman. White men came for him at his uncle’s house, took him away, murdered him, mutilated his body, and dumped it in a river. We assumed that the Ku Klux Klan was to blame. Virginia was not Mississippi, but the Klan was with us, too. It could happen to any of us.
My father respected the skilled, courageous leaders in the black community in Richmond, including lawyers such as Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson III, who had strong connections to the legal side of the movement; but protesting was for other people. He himself worked hard at his humble jobs, and tried to get along with everyone. He followed the unfolding saga of civil rights as best he could, and he recognized that freedom for blacks was at stake and that we had to fight for it. But he made sure that my brother and I never risked our lives against anyone, much less the police or the Klan. His semi-literacy undoubtedly was a factor in the distance he kept, but at some point a wary conservatism had also shaped him. This conservatism itself had been shaped by a mixture of religion, morality, economics, and personality, factors that determine our political and cultural consciousness in such a stealthy fashion that most of us are shaped and bent like a tree in the wind without ever being fully aware of its subtle pressures.
LATER IN 1985, after my arrest, I again took to the streets in a symbolic action to protest South Africa’s racial policies. In the company of Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, and other demonstrators, I marched on the United States mission to the United Nations.
On the whole, however, I preferred to work more quietly with TransAfrica Forum and TransAfrica, for which I sometimes spoke publicly. Perhaps my most charged moment as a speaker came on a mission with Randall Robinson in 1988, when we visited Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, to aid the anti-apartheid struggle there. What made the visit memorable for me was not simply the extremely cold weather but my sadness that apartheid apparently had its supporters among the students. To dramatize the plight of black South Africans, some liberal and radical students had erected shanties on the campus. However, after agitation by the Dartmouth Review, a right wing student journal supported nationally by older conservatives, the shanties had been demolished in the dead of night, presumably by supporters of the journal. (This on the campus of a college that once had identified itself with a commitment to the education of American Indians.) Outdoors, in freezing weather, Randall and I spoke briefly to assure the anti-apartheid students that they were not alone in their struggle. Seldom have I felt so embattled and outnumbered in the struggle against South Africa.
Meanwhile, as George Bush and Robert Dole fought bitterly elsewhere in New Hampshire for the Republican party nomination to succeed Ronald Reagan as president, neither would promise to go beyond President Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the white South African leadership. Most of us in the anti-apartheid movement considered “constructive engagement” to be a euphemism for “status quo.” One morning, in the leading hotel in Hanover, as I stood in a corner, I watched Dole stride purposefully through the lobby, surrounded by members of his entourage. The minority leader in the U.S. Senate, he was pursuing the presidency of the United States, the most powerful position in the world.
I could only hope that, if he became president, he would face the leadership of South Africa with the same aggressiveness that he brought to pursuing the presidential prize.
It is important to me that I keep my faith in electoral politics. In the 1960s, so many people I knew, especially younger blacks, scorned them. But principled, inspired, skilled politicians, such as Robert Kennedy, can make a difference. Through Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law, and Donald Dell, I met him twice, in Washington, D.C., and in California, in 1968, when we had a long talk about politics, America, and the world. Kennedy burned with a desire to do good. A week later he was dead. Later, I applauded the ambition of Bill Bradley to run for the Senate. At one point in the mid-1970s, looking ahead to my retirement, I myself even thought seriously about running for public office. When I was growing up in Virginia, most public offices, aside from the most elementary, were barred to blacks, as they were across the South. I never grew up thinking that one day I might be president of the United States. I did not think that any black could ever be elected governor of reactionary, segregated Virginia. In fact, my chances of becoming president of the United States probably seemed better than my chances of becoming governor. I never dreamed that one of the older boys who came to play at Brook Field on the courts my father tended could become governor of our state. But Doug Wilder did so.
In the mid-1970s, far from Richmond and transplanted as a New Yorker, I thought of running for the United States Congress from the Eighteenth Congressional District on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Our congressman, Bill Green, was popular and effective, but he was a Republican and by no means invincible. Ours is the celebrated “silk stocking” district, so called because of its wealth. The district is heavily populated but, with a good pair of walking shoes, one can walk around it in about two hours. A large part of the district is Jewish, and the people who approached me to run were themselves Jewish. They wanted to put together a group to look into my feasibility as a candidate. I would have run as a Democrat. Years later, in 1988, I voted for George Bush, and I have voted for other Republicans from time to time; I refuse to be a “Yellow Dog Democrat,” as the expression goes—someone who would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. Still, though an independent, I consider myself a supporter of the Democratic party. I think I would have made a good congressman; but my thoughts of Congress ended with my heart attack in 1979.