THIS weekend, the world’s best tennis players will be competing for the men’s and women’s singles titles at the US Open at Flushing Meadows in New York.

Those battles will be fought on the tennis centre’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, seating 23,000 and named after the late African American tennis player who won the US championship in 1968, the first of the open era, when the event was still played on grass at Forest Hills.

Ashe stands alone as the sole black man ever to win three of the coveted Grand Slam titles, adding Wimbledon and the Australian Open to his collection. He also played for and captained the US Davis Cup team and was elected leader of the first tennis players’ union, established in 1974.

Off the court, Ashe was reserved, extremely well read, and politically engaged. He campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, a country he visited twice, as well as for literacy and health initiatives, especially among children and youth. He died from Aids in 1993 at the age of 49, after receiving tainted blood transfusions during heart surgery 10 years earlier.

Today, Ashe still stands alone. His is the sole surviving statue on Monument Avenue in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, a tree-lined boulevard that once also displayed monuments to five confederate leaders of the US Civil War, including its most famous general, Robert E Lee.

Given the company he would be joining, the decision to position the Arthur Ashe Monument there was a matter of considerable controversy. The black community was divided over whether Ashe should be standing among those who fought to uphold slavery or whether placing him there instead sent a strong message about the country’s long history of racism and the region’s historical role in attempting to perpetuate it.

Some Southern white groups also objected, seeing the presence of Ashe as an affront to their heritage, possibly made the more acute by the decision to position Ashe with his back to the row of Confederate leaders behind him on the avenue.

But in 1996, on a unanimous vote by the Richmond city council and with the support of the Ashe family, the bronze sculpture, made by local artist Paul DiPasquale, went up on Monument Avenue as planned. It features Ashe standing tall, his arms raised, with books in one hand and a tennis racket in the other. Four children sit at his feet, each also with a hand raised toward him. Notably, the hand holding the books is raised higher than the one with the tennis racket. For Ashe, knowledge and education was always more important than anything else.

Then, in 2020, after the May 25 police killing of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, unrest flared up across the country. In Richmond, the statue of Jefferson Davis, who served for three years as the president of the Confederate States, was torn down by protesters.

Virginia governor Ralph Northam then ordered the removal of the Lee statue, and Richmond mayor Levar Stoney called for the statues of the three other confederate leaders on Monument Avenue to be taken down as well, along with other statues and canons around the city.

The Lee statue lingered, however, embroiled in a legal battle, and was only removed in September 2021, leaving Ashe literally and symbolically, the last man standing; a black hero in a Southern city with a 43 percent black population. But for how long?

Shortly after returning to the US presidency, Donald Trump began ordering the return of Confederate statues under an executive order entitled Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.

The order, a cover for erasing black history, especially slavery, attacks public institutions for engaging in what the White House called “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Most absurdly, one of Trump's chief targets is the National Museum of African American History in Washington, DC, which, like others within the Smithsonian Institution has, the order says, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centred ideology.”

Accordingly, the order directs the restoration of pubic monuments that “have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimise the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

So far, one confederate statue has been restored in Alabama, and a second is due to be re-erected in Washington DC. A confederate statue was also removed last weekend from a majority black town in North Carolina and appropriately consigned to storage in the city jail, although it could be restored to another, less prominent location.

There is no sign of the Richmond statues being restored to their plinths, also removed, although some are currently out of storage and on loan to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as part of an exhibition re-examining the legacy of American history.

Ashe often stood alone on the tennis court as well, not only as a black man in a white sport, but as a champion of decorum and grace in an era of brashness and rebellion. That was never more evident than in his now legendary encounter with fellow American Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final.

Connors was a fiercely competitive left-hander who was known for a cocky and sometimes crude on-court style. He was 22, almost 10 years younger than Ashe, and the defending Wimbledon champion. He had also just sued Ashe for $3 million for libel, part of a wider lawsuit against the player union, a group Connors had refused to join. Ashe, who was particularly irked that Connors had also declined to represent the US on the Davis Cup team, had described Connors in a letter to the union as “brash, arrogant and unpatriotic.”

On the court, Ashe settled everything with his racquet, defeating the counterpunching Connors in an astonishing upset, 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4, by craftily abandoning his usual power game, instead using slow balls and slices that undermined the younger player’s customary ability to grind down his opponent.

Since then, a number of black players have risen to prominence in the tennis rankings, although the women have so far enjoyed greater success than the men, most notably Venus and Serena Williams and more recently Coco Gauff.

Racism is still in evidence, of course, including at this year’s US Open, when Latvian player Jelena Ostapenko after losing to African American Taylor Townsend, accused her opponent in a heated exchange at the net of having “no class” and “no education” because Townsend had failed to apologise for a lucky net cord, as is customary in the sport.

Ostapenko’s choice of words echoed all too familiar racist tropes and sparked a short-lived controversy, although Ostapenko later apologised and said that she had not understood the implications of what she said, since English is not her native language.

On the men’s side, none are yet to equal Ashe’s achievements. The French Open, played on clay, was the only Grand Slam singles title to elude Ashe, but it was won by his protege, Yannick Noah, in 1983. Noah was 11 when Ashe discovered him during a US State Department visit to Cameroon. “He has the strokes, the desire and the passion to do it all,” Ashe said presciently, before arranging a place for the young Yannick at a tennis training facility in France.

But when Noah won the French Open, Ashe was not there. He was recovering from a heart attack, receiving the transfusions of contaminated blood that would eventually kill him.

It was the Virginia governor at the time, Douglas Wilder, a fellow African American, who suggested that the Ashe statue be placed on Monument Avenue.

“For those who knew him, they knew he was not a lonely man, but that image says so much: solitary, strong and proud,” said Wilder on seeing the sculpture.

“No-one has been more open to others… he had a quiet soul amid a very busy and noisy life. He lived and carried that grace and dignity, setting an example for so many people.

“If I can do it, you can do it. That was his message.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She was formerly the editor of Tennis Week.