Biography | Arthur Ashe — He Learned the Game on the Only Courts Richmond Let Him Use, 1950

Arthur Ashe is remembered for rooms he was the first Black man to walk into. The ground that made him was one a city built so that he would not walk into the others.

In 1938 Richmond bought sixteen acres on Brook Road with Works Progress Administration money and opened Brook Field.

It had four tennis courts, a baseball diamond, a basketball court and a swimming pool, and it was the largest public open space in the city that Black residents were permitted to use.

That is the accurate way to put it. Richmond did not fail to admit Black residents to its parks.

The city ran a segregated parks system and built one good park on the side of it where they were sent.

Arthur Ashe Sr. was the caretaker there, and a special police officer with authority over the grounds. The family lived on the park itself, in a small frame house near the courts.

His son Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born on 10 July 1943 and grew up with four tennis courts outside the door. His mother, Mattie Cunningham Ashe, died before he turned seven.

Ronald Charity, a Black player and coach who used the same courts, began teaching him at about that age, which places it in 1950 or 1951.

From 1953 Dr Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg took him onto the junior circuit of the American Tennis Association, the separate national body Black players had run since 1916. Johnson had already coached Althea Gibson.

Brook Field did not survive integration. The pool closed in 1959 and the rest of the facilities followed within three or four years.

The city published no reason. Richmond Magazine has reported the local understanding that the closures answered the prospect of having to desegregate them.

The sixteen acres were cleared for the Main Post Office at 1801 Brook Road, completed in August 1970.

By then Ashe had won the first US Open, in 1968, as a serving US Army lieutenant and an amateur — barred by that status from the fourteen-thousand-dollar champion's cheque and reported to have taken twenty dollars a day in expenses instead.

The courts he learned on had been closed for most of a decade.

Coordinate: 37.560259, -77.446651, at a precision radius of 350 metres. Brook Field is gone, so the pin is the Main Post Office standing on the site. Two independent sources: the US Census Bureau TIGER geocoder returns 37.559848, -77.447417 for 1801 Brook Road, and the OpenStreetMap post-office feature sits at 37.560670, -77.445885. They are about 163 metres apart across a sixteen-acre site, and the published pin is their midpoint. No surveyed position for the park's tennis courts has been located.

Cover: Arthur Ashe playing Dennis Ralston at the Southern California Intercollegiates, 16 March 1964. Photograph by Art Rogers for the Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library Special Collections, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. It is not Brook Field. No free-licensed photograph of those courts has been found; this shows Ashe at twenty, on a hard court in Los Angeles.