A swimming class at Brook Field Park, 1943 (Photo courtesy Richmond Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities)
Of the extremely limited public spaces where black children could frolic in segregation-era Richmond, Brook Field Park was the chief choice. Among the youngsters who roved its grounds, swam in its pool in sweltering summers and played on its tennis courts and baseball fields, there was a thin boy with a quiet nature named Arthur Ashe Jr. The world remembers Ashe as a legendary athlete who became the first African-American man to win the U.S. Open, a civil rights activist arrested more than once, and a humanitarian whose life was cut short by an illness that, at the time, few understood but most interpreted as a death sentence. For those who grew up alongside him in Richmond, Ashe was one of the many kids whose favorite haunt was Brook Field.
Long Time Coming
Brook Field is long gone, its 16 acres razed and swallowed up to make way for the Main Post Office presently at 1801 Brook Road, a project completed in August 1970. It has been over six decades since Charles Brown last set foot inside Brook Field, but his mind’s eye sees clearly the space where he spent many of his youthful days.
From left: Stuart “Moe” Thacker, Pernell Taylor, Leonard Edloe and Charles Brown, who played at Brook Field, stand near the post office that replaced it. (Photo by Jay Paul)
“My brothers used to carry me here on their shoulders,” says the 78-year-old native of North Side who recently downsized and moved to Williamsburg with his wife. “I remember us walking down Harrison Street to get there, and seeing swarms of other kids going the same way, headed to the pool.”
Brook Field was a big deal for black families in North Richmond. According to T. Tyler Potterfield’s “Nonesuch Place: A History of Richmond,” the park was “the largest public space for African Americans in the city during the segregation era.” The city of Richmond didn’t make public spaces accessible for black people until 1937, when the Oakwood playing fields were built, and “a small, ‘colored’ picnic area” was created in Joseph Bryan Park, writes Potterfield. In 1938, using federal funds from the Works Progress Administration — a massive project launched in 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration designed to pull America out of the Great Depression by employing millions of people to complete public works projects — the city of Richmond bought 16 acres straddling Brook Road in the Chamberlayne community, within walking distance of Virginia Union University (VUU), to create Brook Field. With its four tennis courts, baseball field, basketball court and sparkling swimming pool, Brook Field was an oasis for North Richmond’s African-American residents. Still, this addition to the city’s green and gathering spaces did not provide full remediation of the unfair and unequal existence blacks were forced to endure daily in the segregated city.
“The total public space open to African Americans by 1943 amounted to around 75 acres of a 1,054-acre Richmond recreation and parks system, a 7 percent toehold in a city where African Americans made up 31.7 percent of the population,” Potterfield writes.
Brook Field’s origin story reflects Richmond’s track record of inequity and racism, says Leonard Edloe, a minster and pharmacist who previously helmed Edloe’s Pharmacy, a chain his father founded in Church Hill in the 1940s. Edloe was a regular visitor to the park as a child growing up in the Barton Heights neighborhood.
“A lot of times we want to bury the past,” he says. “Brook Field was the only place we could go.”
Family Affair
On a temperate October afternoon, Brown strolls the sidewalk bordering Sledd Street, a little ways down Brook Road and around the corner from the post office that replaced the park. “Over there used to be the pool house, and nearby was the concession stand,” he says, nodding toward a fleet of mail trucks behind a chain link fence. “My brothers and I would have maybe a quarter or 50 cents each to get lunch and pop. And we made sure to throw away our trash, too, all of us did. If you didn’t, Mr. Ashe would sure get after you.”
Brown references Arthur Ashe Sr., young Arthur’s father and the caretaker-policeman at Brook Field Park, a position under the purview of the city’s police force. The elder Ashe was a man characterized by many who knew him as serious, stern, unsmiling. His youngest son and namesake confirmed — and contextualized — his father’s demeanor in a 1981 column he wrote for The Washington Post.
“There was no gray in Daddy’s world. His rules were black or white, without regard to race, and there was a time when I feared him. ... He was very strict, almost overprotective, and it was understandable. He had lost a father and wife in less than 12 months. He did not want to lose his children through any failure to follow orders.”
“Arthur Ashe Sr. served as supervisor of Brook Field and was the onsite caretaker,” reads a community history of the Chamberlayne neighborhood and VUU written by four longstanding residents of the area: Gary Flowers, Dr. Carmen F. Foster, Kathryn Reid and Jean Williams. A former chauffeur and handyman, the elder Ashe lived with his two sons, Arthur and Johnnie, in a home on Brook Field’s grounds. Under his supervision, Brook Field flourished as a social and cultural hub for black Richmonders, especially youth. Brown reels off memory after memory of his good times at Brook Field, recalling an airplane-model-making club that met at the park (Ashe Jr. was a member), and the languid afternoons he spent lying in the sun with friends after they swam in the park’s pool.
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Stuart “Moe” Thacker (far right) and Arthur Ashe (to his right) on the 1960 State Champion Maggie L. Walker High School tennis team (Photo courtesy Stuart “Moe” Thacker)
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Oliver Johnson and Carolyn Rowe Benton, who was close to Arthur Ashe, in the pool at Brook Field in 1954 (Photo courtesy Charles Brown)
“It would take me five minutes to walk from my house on Seminary [Avenue] to Brook Field,” he says. Thacker adds that he and Ashe were in their alma mater’s honors society together, and the young men also shared another special experience in their high school years.
“In 1960, we played in the state [tennis] tournament, and we won it,” says Thacker of his shared doubles championship under the auspices of the American Tennis Association, the black analogue to the segregated United States Lawn Tennis Association.
Charles Brown squints and then points east up Sledd Street. “Right down there was Arthur’s house. A little white shotgun house, so close to the tennis courts he could walk to ‘em.” His lifelong friendship with Ashe budded at Brook Field. After daily summer swimming sessions, Brown stopped by Ashe’s house; sometimes, it was just the two of them, sometimes a passel of boys would crowd Ashe’s home. The two were also classmates at Maggie Walker, where Brown says Ashe was a serious student, showing up early each day for class when the staff was “still setting up the cafeteria for the day.” Brown was there when Ron Charity, described by the Richmond Tennis Association as “one of the best black players in the country,” became Ashe’s first mentor.
Legend in the Making
Charity drove Ashe to Lynchburg so that he could participate in a tennis camp organized by Dr. Robert Walter Johnson. Dubbed the “godfather of black tennis,” Johnson coached notable African-American players, including Ashe and Althea Gibson, a future hall-of-famer who was the first black player to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
“He pursued it, doggedly,” Brown says. “Arthur was at Brook Field every day, and he was beating the grown men who came to play on those tennis courts. This little, skinny kid!”
Charity died just two years before Ashe, in 1991. In his 1981 autobiography, “Off the Court,” Ashe said of his 1975 Wimbledon win, “I reached the pinnacle of an effort that began with Ron Charity in 1950 on a playground in Richmond. It’s a long way from Brook Field to Wimbledon’s Centre Court.”
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Arthur Ashe and coach Dr. Robert Walter Johnson (Photo courtesy Lange Johnson)
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Arthur Ashe (left) and a fellow student of Johnson’s (Photo courtesy Lange Johnson)
The same Brook Field tennis courts that first cultivated Ashe’s talent began to confine him. Those four tennis courts were the only ones in Richmond available to Ashe, due to segregation. Then, too, Ashe’s skill was such that he needed daily practice, even in winter weather. If there were indoor tennis courts in Richmond in the late 1950s, Ashe couldn’t have used them.
“My peers, the juniors who had become friends in many cases, would continue to progress,” Ashe wrote in a 1981 Washington Post column. “The Californians, for example, could play all year. To keep up with them, I had to be able to play winter tennis. There were no such opportunities in Richmond.” Ashe left Richmond at 17, spending his final year in high school living with a white family in St. Louis, where he continued to excel at tennis, year-round. Soon after, the city reallocated Brook Field’s grounds to make way for a new post office. The pool closed first, in 1959; the rest of the facilities — the athletic fields, the concession stand Brown remembers so well — closed within the next three to four years.
A New Narrative
There is a persistent rumor that Arthur Ashe grew up playing tennis at Battery Park. Artists painted a mural of Ashe at the tunnel at Battery Park and dedicated it to him in 2017, while media reports still share conflicting information about Ashe’s old stomping grounds. Overall, it’s puzzling and frustrating, Edloe says.
“You keep seeing and reading and hearing that Arthur Ashe learned to play at Battery Park. To my knowledge, that is just not true, and I don’t know why this narrative is being promoted. Actually, it’s a disservice to the dignity of Brook Field, what it stood for, and even Mr. Ashe [Sr.]’s work there. Give credit where it is due.”
Thacker agrees. “First of all, Battery Park was in disrepair back then. I [lived near Battery Park] from 1948 to 1960, and there were no nets there. There were tennis courts there in disrepair, but no nets. [Ashe] couldn’t have played at Battery Park.”
Also clouded with confusion is the real reason the city shuttered Brook Field in the early 1960s. In October, when asked directly why Brook Field closed, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department pointed toward its archives, housed at the Library of Virginia. Nothing in the archives, however, definitively lays out the reason the park was closed.
As a teen Ashe wrote a letter to the editor of The Richmond News Leader in April 1958, referencing the possibility of city officials shuttering Brook Field’s pool. Though he admitted that the pool needed repairs, Ashe opposed its closing, writing that “The only other place [to swim] is the James River, if the pool isn’t opened this year, it will be the scene of many tragedies and drownings, I’m sure.”
Some who grew up going to Brook Field believe the imminent threat of integration influenced city leadership to shut down the park and hand the land over to post office officials.
“When it was decided that there would be integration, they closed the pool at Brook Field, and that took away a lot of the activity,” Edloe says.
The United States Supreme Court mandated that public schools be integrated — meaning black and white children would attend the same schools — with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954. Many Southern states refused to accept school integration. Virginia lawmakers led by Sen. Harry Byrd employed a racist, statewide strategy called Massive Resistance, creating laws designed to block the integration of schools in the commonwealth. These policies led to the closure of schools in several vicinities, leaving black children in parts of Virginia without access to public education for several years in the 1950s and producing a lasting, widespread anxiety about integration.
As debate continues about renaming one of Richmond’s busiest thoroughfares in Ashe’s honor, people like Edloe and Brown feel Brook Field’s foundational contribution to Ashe’s legacy has been overlooked.
“We talk about the Ashe Center, we talk about the statues, we talk about renaming Boulevard, but the place where he first picked up a racket and started playing tennis is not acknowledged at all,” Edloe says.
We talk about the Ashe Center, we talk about the statues, we talk about renaming Boulevard, but the place where he first picked up a racket and started playing tennis is not acknowledged at all.
—Leonard Edloe
“Few people remember this place,” says Brown, gesturing toward the fenced-in mail trucks at the Main Post Office but meaning Brook Field.
It is about 60 years too late to save Brook Field. The physical space and its buildings are gone, but what remains is the park’s purpose in Ashe’s life and its critical function for black people in segregation-era Richmond. Edloe plans to work on obtaining a historical marker for Brook Field, so that Richmonders may learn of its significance to the city. It is an idea that Ashe would probably approve of.
“Looking back at my childhood, I see my world defined as a series of concentric circles,” Ashe wrote in his Washington Post column nearly 40 years ago. “At the center was our house at 1610 Sledd St. The next circle was Brook Field, which played an important role in defining my future.”
Post Brook Field Park
Three mentors who shaped the future of Arthur Ashe | By Don Harrison
Ron Charity
Arthur Ashe and Ron Charity (Photo courtesy Richmond Tennis Association)
“You want to learn?” That’s how Ron Charity, an 18-year-old Virginia Union University student, casually queried a shy 7-year-old Brook Field caretaker’s son — who had been watching the teenager serve from his porch. The answer changed tennis. Charity, one of the finest tennis players in Richmond at that time, was the first to show the fundamentals to a young Arthur Ashe. He not only introduced his charge to Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, who took over Ashe’s tennis education, he also kept a close connection to Ashe.
According to Charity’s son Khris, the duo went into business together with a pair of tennis merchandise stores in the ‘70s, and Ashe visited his father in his Danville home to break the news to him that he had contracted AIDS. But Ron Charity, who died in 1991, taught Ashe more than tennis.
“My dad was all about helping the community,” Khris Charity says.
The mentor started a scholarship fund, assisted Johnson in the formation of the American Tennis Association’s Junior Development Program, and also spearheaded a network of families offering housing to African-Americans on tour.
Dr. Robert Walter Johnson
Althea Gibson and Dr. Robert Johnson (Photo courtesy Lange Johnson)
Often referred to as the godfather of black tennis, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson (1899-1971) coached Arthur Ashe and the pioneering women’s player Althea Gibson, but that’s just one part of his legacy. Johnson was responsible for mentoring hundreds of African-American kids during a time when Jim Crow laws denied them the right to compete fully.
Johnson was bold but careful. “Given the times, he stressed to us how we should conduct ourselves on and off the court: ” says his grandson Lange Johnson, whom he also trained. “The success of the program was in how we were perceived, and we could not dishonor the group and what he was trying to accomplish. Even balls that were two inches out [of bounds], you learned to give them to your opponent to make sure there was no sense of impropriety.”
The Lynchburg clay court where “Whirlwind” Johnson taught tennis tactics to a young Arthur and Althea — hallowed ground to many — was recently restored with the help of the United States Tennis Association through the Whirlwind Johnson Foundation. “If anyone in the Lynchburg area wants to develop and spearhead programs like my grandfather did, it’s available to them.”
John A. Watson
John A. Watson (Photo courtesy Virginia Union University)
As the varsity tennis coach at Virginia Union University for 43 years, John Watson had many accomplishments, but his greatest contributions may have been what he did in his time off: teaching tennis to African-American kids on the Brook Field courts and becoming young Arthur Ashe’s practice partner.
“I probably saved a whole lot of people from going to jail,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1999. “Just by putting a tennis racket in their hands and giving them some sneakers or clothes to wear so they could play, telling them this is your entry to a different life.” Watson, who died in 2006, maintained a close friendship with Ashe, acting as one of his loudest local supporters in Ashe’s final years battling AIDS.
“I’ll tell you about Arthur Ashe,” he recalled to The New York Times in 1992. “When I first remember him he was so eager to succeed that he would get out of bed every morning at 5 o’clock, winter and summer, rain and shine, and before breakfast he would hit 1,000 tennis balls. One thousand. Think about that.”
