Black History Museum highlights tennis legend Arthur Ashe’s legacy

“They instituted poll taxes and literacy tests. But the one that really did the most damage was the grandfather clause: If your grandfather didn’t vote, you couldn’t vote,” she explained. The effect on the Black vote was devastating: Before the bogus requirement, Norrell said, about 3,000 men in Jackson Ward had been registered to vote. Afterward, only 33 remained on the rolls.

In the face of such repression, African Americans continued to push for civil rights and economic development. They included John Mitchell Jr., who edited the Richmond Planet newspaper, and Maggie Walker, the first Black woman to serve as a bank president in the United States.

In 1904, Walker and Mitchell “headed up a boycott of the segregated street cars here in Richmond,” Norrell recalled.

The BHMVA also details Virginia’s role in ending school segregation.

In 1951, students at a Black high school in Prince Edward County walked out to protest the separate and unequal conditions to which they were subjected. The strike was led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, whose statue now represents Virginia in the U.S. Capitol.

Virginia lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson sued on behalf of the students. The case was combined with four others from across the United States. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The court ordered states to comply with “all deliberate speed.”

Virginia responded with a policy of “Massive Resistance” – closing public schools rather than integrate them. Prince Edward County’s public schools did not reopen until 1964.

Many white parents pooled their money and opened private “segregation academies” for their children. But most Black children “were just denied an education,” Norrell said. “It changed the trajectory of their lives.”

A plaster model used to create the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue

Jeff South

A tribute to tennis star and social activist Arthur Ashe

The museum’s first floor has a 13-foot plaster cast of Ashe – the model that sculptor Paul DiPasquale used to create the statue erected on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 1996.

Two rooms on the second floor of the BHMVA contain the new exhibit dedicated to Ashe, with memorabilia from both his tennis career and his advocacy for equal rights. It will run through June 13.

A tennis racquet that Arthur Ashe gave to his doubles partner at Maggie Walker High School in 1960

Jeff South

Ashe is the only Black man ever to win the singles titles at the U.S. Open (1968), the Australian Open (1970) and Wimbledon (1975). He campaigned for racial equality and against apartheid in South Africa. He wrote a three-volume book, “A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete” and published an autobiography, “Days of Grace.”

From a blood transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, Ashe contracted the virus that causes AIDS. He then created the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS and the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health. In 1993, Ashe died of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 49.

“Arthur Ashe broke barriers not only with his tennis racket but with his unwavering sense of justice,” the BHMVA exhibit states. “His life reminds us that true greatness is defined not only by victory but by the ability to uplift others and transform adversity into a force for good.”

It recounts how Ashe learned to play tennis on the courts at Brook Field, then a recreational hub for the Black community. The exhibit highlights people important in Ashe’s life, including:

• His father, Arthur Ashe Sr., who worked as the Brook Field caretaker and instilled in his children “the values of discipline, respect, and the importance of maintaining a good reputation.”
• His mother, Mattie Ashe, who died in 1950 when Arthur was 7. “Perhaps to distract him from his grief, he was given a racket and began to play tennis himself.”
• Ronald Charity, the tennis coach and Virginia Union University student who introduced young Arthur to the sport.
• Dr. Robert Walter “Whirlwind” Johnson, a Lynchburg physician who further mentored him. Considered the “godfather of black tennis,” Johnson had coached Althea Gibson, the first Black player to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
• Ashe’s younger brother, Johnnie, who opted to serve a second tour of duty in the Vietnam War so that Arthur would not be sent overseas. (Arthur had joined the Army after graduating from UCLA and worked as a systems analyst and assistant tennis coach at West Point.)
• Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Arthur’s wife and a professional photographer who helped document his life, especially during his battle with AIDS.

One room of the exhibit, Norrell said, features something the BHMVA had never done before: “an immersive experience” with video and other multimedia about Ashe. It includes a “listening station” from UCLA’s Arthur Ashe Oral History Project – recordings that “demonstrate his global reach and the impact of his personal relationships in the voices of the people who knew him best.”

As the exhibit states, “When tennis was dominated by white athletes, Ashe’s grace, skill, and composure set a new standard for professionalism and sportsmanship. His historic victory at Wimbledon in 1975, defeating the strongly favored Jimmy Connors, was more than a personal triumph – it was a statement about the power of discipline, intellect, and determination. Ashe used his platform not to boast, but to question and improve the conditions of those without a voice.”

First public exhibition of former Gov. Wilder’s artwork

L. Douglas Wilder is known as a trailblazing political figure: After breaking barriers serving as a state senator and lieutenant governor, he became the first African American elected governor in the United States, leading the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1990 to 1994. And in 2004, Wilder became the first popularly elected mayor of the City of Richmond.

Now 95, Wilder is a Distinguished Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where the School of Government and Public Affairs is named for him. A graduate of Virginia Union University and the Howard University School of Law, he is also the author of “Son of Virginia: A Life in America’s Political Arena.”

Moreover, Wilder is an artist whose paintings are “vivid meditations on memory, landscape and lived experience,” says Kirk Shannon-Butts, museum curator at Virginia Union University.

Through Feb. 28, the BHMVA is presenting “Brushstrokes,” featuring 38 of Wilder’s paintings. Curated by Shannon-Butts, “these paintings form a visual autobiography, revealing the inner life of a statesman through color, form, and the resonant rhythm of a man who continues to shape history.”

It is not only an art exhibition but also a fundraiser: Select works will be auctioned, with proceeds benefiting the National Ovation Scholarship Fund, which provides financial assistance to students at VCU’s Wilder School.

Experts at the BHMVA help history come alive

Norrell, 74, retired from the Richmond Public Schools after more than four decades as a teacher and librarian. She has been with the museum for six years.

She knows the history because she and her family have lived it. Her grandfather, Albert V. Norrell, was born enslaved in 1857. After the Civil War, he graduated from the Richmond Colored Normal School, a high school and teacher training program established during Reconstruction, and then taught in the Richmond school system.

“He taught for 65 years and established a tradition in our family that for 133 consecutive years, over 30 of his direct descendants – children, grandchildren, spouses – worked in Richmond Public Schools until I retired in 2017,” Norrell said.

In 1962, Norrell was among 19 Black students who desegregated then all-white J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School in Richmond’s North Side. In 2018, the school was renamed Barack Obama Elementary.

Tour guide Faithe Norrell describing Jackson Ward, once known as Black Wall Street

Jeff South

As a teacher, Norrell pushed back against the “Lost Cause” narrative espoused by Virginia’s textbooks – the falsehood that slavery was benevolent, the Civil War was an honorable fight for “states’ rights” and Confederate soldiers were heroic. The BHMVA’s exhibits expose such propaganda as lies.

The need for truth-telling is especially important at a time when Black history is being erased, visitors on a recent museum tour agreed. In January, for example, the National Park Service removed references to people George Washington enslaved from the President’s House, a historic site in Philadelphia. On Feb. 16, a judge ordered that the information about slavery be restored. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.

Young people in particular need a better understanding of history, Norrell said. They are usually flabbergasted to hear that Norrell herself is just two generations away from slavery.

“When I talk to children a lot of times, that brings history alive – because they have no idea of timelines in their mind. You know, they think Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln were born at the same time.”