ARTHUR ASHE
Athlete + Activist Project
Illustration of tennis legend Arthur Ashe for a project illustrating 24 US athletes from the past 75 years who took activist stances or represented socially/politically important issues through their sports achievements.
Arthur Ashe was born in 1943 in Richmond, VA. After attending UCLA he became the first African-American man to win the US Open (1968), Australian Open (1970), and Wimbledon (1975).
In 1983, along with Harry Belafonte, he founded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid to raise awareness of Apartheid policies and lobbied for sanctions and embargoes against the South African government. In the last year of his life he founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, which raised money for research into treating, curing and preventing AIDS, the end goal being the eradication of the disease.
Two months before his death he founded the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, to help address issues of inadequate health care delivery to urban minority populations. He died in 1993 in New York at the age of 49.
