Arthur Ashe (1943–1993), born in Richmond, Virginia, was an author and athlete. In his twenty-year tennis career, he won some of the most coveted singles championship games: Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the World Cup Team Finals. He was a member of the US Davis Cup Team from 1963 to 1970 and in 1975, 1976, and 1978. As its captain, he led the team to victories in 1981 and 1982. He was a member of the US World Cup Team from 1970 to 1976, and in 1979. In 1980, after quadruple bypass surgery, he retired from professional tennis. He became National Campaign Chairman for the American Heart Association and the only nonmedical member of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Advisory Council. He contracted the HIV virus from a blood transfusion after a second bypass operation in 1983. Upon discovering this, he exhibited his perennial quality of action without acrimony and founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. He succumbed to the disease in February 1993. He was married to professional photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the author of Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers. They lived in New York City with their daughter, Camera. |
