Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Director Raoul Peck

Ernest Cole gravesite

ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND                    B+                                                           France  (105 mi)  2024  d: Raoul Peck

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, November 2, 1883, bronze plaque inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

Raoul Peck is the maker of The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), LUMUMBA (2000), SOMETIMES IN APRIL (2005), MOLOCH TROPICAL (2009), and 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro (2016), each one substantially different than the next.  Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which has a proud history of being one of the three major revolutions of the 19th century at a time when there were no other free black republics, his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1991, finding asylum and a new life working for the United Nations in the Republic of Congo, which became their second home for nearly twenty-five years, raised in the Congo, United States, France, and Germany, where Peck earned an economic-engineering Master’s degree at the University of Berlin and then studied film at the Academy of Cinema and Television in Berlin (DFFB).  After the restoration of democratic rule, he served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from 1996 to 1997, while also spending two years as a professor for screenwriting and directing at NYU Tish School of the Arts graduate program, and is also an artist-in-residence at the New School, a Greenwich Village private research university in New York City.  In 2010 he was appointed Chairman of La Fémis in Paris, the prestigious French national film school, a position that he retains as he continues to live in Paris, New York, and Haiti.  He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events, pointing his camera where others prefer not to look, at racism, colonialism, genocide, but also resistance, where he has a unique ability to seamlessly blend art and politics, turning to people like James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois and other writers and intellectuals because he could see in their work that they not only had artistic visions about themselves as writers, but also as thinkers and activists, people who were parts of larger revolutionary struggles and movements.  Having already made films about Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba, and James Baldwin, for Peck, the demythologizing of white supremacy and colonial ideologies has been a lifelong project, as genocide is an unspeakable word for some people.  Black Lives Matter is an unspeakable phrase for some people.  Trans rights are unspeakable for some people, yet these issues are crucial and transformative in the world of today, where there is a special urgency in the continuing struggle for human empathy, as we seem to have lost our moral vision and the ideals that helped define this country as a bastion of freedom.

Most have probably never heard of the featured artist before seeing this film, awarded the Golden Eye Best Documentary award at Cannes, where Peck has resurrected the career of a relatively obscure yet seminal artist of the 20th century, South African photographer Ernest Cole, the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a world audience, and in doing so accentuate the stark realities of colonial oppression.  Born and raised in an all-black township near Pretoria, one of the traumatic events that shaped his life was witnessing the demolition of his neighborhood to make way for whites, bulldozed completely to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble in order to guarantee no one could possible return, a pattern that persisted throughout many black neighborhoods, typically given only a few hours notice, accompanied by a strong police presence, as this was an urban renewal project driven by an ideology of white supremacy.  Ten percent of all South Africans, the majority white, owned more than 90% of national wealth, as some 80% of the population, overwhelmingly black, owned nothing at all.  The core of apartheid policy and power revolved around land, beginning in 1948, as black South Africans were stripped of their land and relocated to racially segregated townships far outside the city, where home ownership was practically impossible.  Black townships became extremely overcrowded and unsanitary, as they were distinctly cut off from infrastructure and urban utilities, living under tin roofs without services such as water and electricity, leaving people to fend for themselves.  From 1960 to 1983, the apartheid government policy of Forced Removals moved 3.5 million black South Africans in one of the largest mass removals of people in modern history.  Other incidents like the Sharpeville massacre left deep scars, as nearly 100 people were shot, many in the back fleeing police, including children, while over 200 were wounded.  Amidst this climate of fear and oppression, Cole discovered photography, capturing raw moments through his lens, which was his way to process the insanity happening all around him, where collecting evidence was a matter of survival, impressing the editors at Drum magazine, loosely modeled on America’s Life magazine, one of the few publications giving a platform to black voices, where in 1958 at the age of 18 he worked as an assistant to Jürgen Schadeberg, the magazine’s chief photographer and picture editor, capturing images on the streets of Pretoria, exposing unvarnished truths that others tried to hide.  Peck includes excerpts of interviews with Cole from Jürgen Schadeberg’s 2006 documentary about the artist, the only known interview of Cole on camera.  Working as a photographer at Bantu World, the black daily newspaper of Johannesburg, he photographed the daily indignities black people endured, risking his life every day, learning how to shoot at eye level while hiding his camera as he walked inconspicuously down the street and blended into crowds, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip | LaKeith Stanfield YouTube (1:23).  Cole also began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans, including journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement, so it helped radicalize his viewpoint to counter the official erasure of black history, as his anger only increased at the silence or complicity of the West in the face of the horrors of apartheid, where a jazzy score by Alexei Aigui and the music of Duke Ellington are beautifully integrated into the images of interconnecting worlds, Fleurette Africaine (African Flower) (Remastered) YouTube (3:36). 

Ernest Cole is the first black freelance photographer in South Africa, and the first photojournalist, whose early pictures were shocking at the time of their first publication, as viewers of this film can see, perhaps for the first time, some of the decades-long compilation of work that formed his 1967 book House of Bondage, the only volume of Cole’s work to appear during his lifetime, comprised of 183 photographs accompanied by scattered texts, which was subsequently banned in South Africa.  In the book, Cole writes, “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa have placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem, and surrounded us with hate.”  These searing photographs shone a light on issues the world could no longer ignore, and practically overnight he became renowned, though it came at great personal cost.  Arrested by the South African police because of his activities, declared a threat by the apartheid government, Cole had no choice but to seek asylum in America, managing to outwit the Race Classification Board, which classified people into one of three groups, native, coloured, or white (Racial Classification Under Apartheid), though Asians were later added as a separate group, when he was re-classified as “coloured” by changing his name from Kole to Cole.  This gave him more freedom of movement privileges and he was soon able to leave South Africa in 1966, smuggling negatives with the help of Joseph Lelyveld (and intelligence officers from the U.S. embassy), then the New York Times’ South African correspondent, who also began to hire him for assignments.  While the featured photographs are riveting, they are accompanied by a first-person commentary written by Peck, adapted from letters and testimonies of family, friends, and those who knew him that are read in voiceover by actor LaKeith Stanfield from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) as a stand-in for Cole, providing the detail of his life in his “own” words, elevating Cole to a full-fledged co-writer of the film, becoming a de facto narrator, providing existential insight into the artist himself, allowing his words and images to speak for themselves, which recalls similar commentary by Samuel L. Jackson appropriating the magisterial quality of James Baldwin in 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro.  But unlike the eloquence of Jackson, this dry, off-putting reading is emotionally deflating, feeling overly detached, creating a distinct separation between viewers and the content, where he continues to narrate even from beyond the grave, a point of view that can feel confusing at times, which is the biggest hurdle for this film to overcome, and it’s not entirely successful, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:45).  The photographs, however, are a different story, bringing with them an unending barrage of searing intensity, taking viewers back to a different time, reminding us that the hate and racial restrictions of apartheid have never really left us, as they have returned with a vengeance to a contemporary world that has no use for immigrants or minorities, who continue to be blamed for all the world’s ills, just as they were in the last century.  Giving voice to a feeling that many marginalized people happen to experience, the essential question is what progress has really been made?  Has it only been a façade?  Has the appearance of tolerance and a quest for social justice only been a cover for deeper, crueler intentions that are rearing their ugly head today?  This film quietly, and intently, answers those questions with a noxious force, as some lives are simply viewed as disposable, where we’ve lost the capacity to feel empathy for the plight of others.  This past year, for instance, has been one of the deadliest in recent memory for journalists and photographers covering state-sanctioned violence, particularly in Gaza.  But these pictures say it all, as they are agonizingly raw and unpretentiously honest, a towering achievement capturing the essence of humanity in some of our darkest moments.      

At least initially, Cole was brimming with optimism about a new world that awaited him, filled with hopes and dreams of a world without prejudice, without the maddening fear, without the endless persecution and nullification of all identity, where there’s a gorgeous injection of music that is cleverly ironic, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:17), featuring the Manhattan Brothers, a popular South African singing group during the apartheid era with a harmony style that drew on American R&B Doo-wop music, and a very young Miriam Makeba, South Africa’s own (also exiled), still in her early 20’s, Lovely Lies - Manhattan Brothers And Miriam Makeba (1956) YouTube (2:50).  One thing that surprised him was the presence of happy interracial couples and queer couples kissing and holding hands in public, as that was something he never saw in South Africa, with Peck creating a montage of photos, many of which have not been seen by the public before, where it was unprecedented to work with an archive of this massive size.  Arguably the best sequence of the film is the artist analyzing one of his own photographs, detail by detail, where he’s able to see things that others overlook, evaluating the looks on people’s faces, either passive curiosity, or anxiety tinged with fear, or downright panic, watching the police go about their business of routinely stopping a young black boy on the street, as blacks were not allowed to circulate in white neighborhoods without a specific pass, described as a policy of “good neighborliness” by Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, where the demeaning and dehumanizing treatment the boy is subjected to is simply incomprehensible to imagine for whites, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:25).  As improbable as it sounds, just the taking of that photo was considered a crime, as documentary photography was illegal by a government that feared photography so much that they also banned foreign journalists.  Cole had a hard time adjusting to a new life in exile, feeling that he was pigeonholed into becoming a chronicler of misery, the only assignments magazines wanted to offer him, never allowed to expand into other areas of photography like his white counterparts, but he refused to subject himself to a life of unending personal trauma, having reached a creative and professional dead end that left him psychologically burdened, where he can be heard in exasperation, “exile is destroying us one by one,” where he was particularly troubled when his request for a passport to return home was denied.  A recurring phrase heard throughout the film is Cole’s belief that “one day South Africa will be free,” which bears a resemblance to a controversial chant associated with Palestinian liberation, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  The depth of his American photographs of New York City and the Jim Crow South carry the same weight, but were largely ignored, dismissed by his white editors as “having no edge,” so he never submitted them, but 275 photographs are the subject of a belated book release in 2024, Ernest Cole: The True America, with Peck writing in the preface, “On the contrary, it seems that most damaging for him, was the discovery that even in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, in a country that prides itself on being the bedrock of democracy and does not shy away from lecturing the rest of the world, there was misery, racism, ignorance, and solitude, regardless of one’s success or fame.” 

Drawing unmistakable parallels between South African apartheid and the racism of the Jim Crow South, Cole came to the startling realization that in South Africa he was afraid of being arrested, while in the American South he was afraid of being shot, a reality that is particularly chilling for black men, who were still being lynched in the 1960's, Ernest Cole Lost and Found Movie - video Dailymotion YouTube (2:00).  Think about that and allow that to marinate for a minute, as it creates a visceral reaction, suggesting that being black in America poses a much greater danger than the horrifying atrocities experienced during apartheid, which this country whole-heartedly deplored (James Baldwin reached the same conclusion, which is why he left America in 1948 to live in France), where this dichotomy caused Cole no end of grief, feeling homesick, falling into a spiral of depression and isolation, rarely finding stability or steady income, ending his life mired in poverty, homelessness, and anonymity, where he died a lonely death from untreated pancreatic cancer at the early age of 49 in 1990.  Just days after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and one year before apartheid was dismantled, Cole died believing the bulk of his life’s work had simply disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace, as his book fell out of print for decades while his body of work was considered lost for over forty years.  Cole made repeated trips to Sweden during the late 60’s and early 70’s, only for a collection of 60,000 35mm film negatives to inexplicably resurface in a bank vault in Stockholm in 2017, with most returned to his family, but 500 archival prints from House of Bondage are still a matter of dispute between his heirs, who founded the Ernest Cole Family Trust, headed by his nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, who provided full archival access for this film, and the Hasselblad Foundation, a not-for-profit Swedish foundation dedicated to promoting Nordic photographers, which organized the Ernest Cole Photographer exhibition that toured South Africa in 2010-11 and was later shown in the United States, featuring 113 rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s archive, yet stubbornly, or selfishly, refuse to relinquish control.  The film never addresses the source of this dispute, or explain the secret of the missing items, or even the late disappearance of Cole, dropping completely out of sight, remaining an exile disconnected from his roots, all of which remains clouded under an unexplained mystery, leaving unanswered questions at the end of the film that simply linger in our thoughts, unable to fathom what really happened, but the value of these photographs today is inestimable.  South Africa publicly displayed his photographs for the first time in 2001 with the opening of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where a permanent part of the museum is his collection entitled Life under Apartheid, forming a kind of elegiac collective memory, with so many artists failing to be recognized for their contributions until after their deaths, yet the fact that we are still discussing these works today speaks to Cole’s impact. 

Postscript

While a dispute over ownership rights with other agencies continues, as documented here, Ernest Cole's photographs are finally coming home, but ..., the Hasselblad controversy has ended, as on May 7, 2024, just prior to the Cannes Film Festival premiere, the Hasselblad Foundation handed over 496 vintage Ernest Cole prints to Leslie Matlaisane, chairman of the Ernest Cole Family Trust (Hasselblad Foundation | We're pleased to announce a ...).  Claiming they were “entrusted to us by image agency Tiofoto and its co-founder Rune Hassner, they’ve been safeguarded and maintained in optimal condition,” this puts an end to at least part of the contentious struggle to exercise control over the remarkable legacy of Ernest Cole, marking this as part of a recent pattern of European nations repatriating invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, as depicted in the recent Mati Diop film DAHOMEY (2024), where 26 plundered royal artifacts from the African kingdom of Dahomey that had been exhibited in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris for more than 100 years were finally returned to Benin.  

Director Raoul Peck Shares Thoughts on Ernest Cole Lost ... Curvy Critic (Carla Renata) interview with Raoul Peck, November 24, 2024 on YouTube (10:02)

Aljazeera— Studio B: Unscripted A filmed conversation between filmmaker Raoul Peck and Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, May 27, 2024 on YouTube (48:37)

Photographer, who inspired a generation of anti-apartheid ... Ernest Cole (2006) documentary by Jürgen Schadeberg on YouTube (53:41)

Citizen Ashe

 

Althea Gibson

Althea Gibson at Wimbledon

Arthur Ashe with his father

Ashe with the Davis Cup team

Ashe on his wedding day with Jeanne Moutoussamy

Jeanne Moutoussamy

Harry Edwards

Ashe and his wife publicly announcing he has HIV

Ashe meeting Nelson Mandela

Director Sam Pollard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CITIZEN ASHE                    B                                                                                                     USA  (94 mi)  2021    co-director:  Rex Miller

Among the unsung heroes of the 60’s, Arthur Ashe was always known for his soft-spoken dignity and grace.  A quiet man, known for his contemplative reflection, he grew up in the Jim Crow South in Richmond, Virginia, the Capitol of the Confederacy, under the shadow of statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, and others on Monument Avenue, a street where blacks were forbidden, pillars of a racist legacy of the past, growing up in a time when lynchings in the South were all too common, yet a telling moment in his childhood was the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year old kid who was beaten and mutilated before being lynched in Mississippi in 1955, suggesting all black kids growing up in the South could identify with Till, about the same age as Ashe, and a reminder of how you could completely disappear overnight for the slightest of offenses.  He also grew up in a home inside a segregated 18-acre sports complex known as Brookfield Park, which included basketball courts, a pool, three baseball diamonds and four tennis courts, as his father was the caretaker of the complex, so the tennis courts were literally 10 yards from his home.  His mother died when he was only six, raised by his father, something of a strict disciplinarian, advising him “Don’t do anything that will hurt yourself later,” but losing a mother at such a young age may have turned him inward, never one to show his emotions, exuding a cool veneer, an apt description for the man he would become, a professional tennis player and global humanitarian.  As a young sports fan, he idolized Jackie Robinson, as did most black kids in the late 40’s and early 50’s, also inspired by Althea Gibson, Bill Russell, and Sugar Ray Robinson.  Called “Bones” because he was so skinny, among his childhood dreams was becoming the Jackie Robinson of tennis, viewed at that time as a country club sport exclusively serving privileged whites.  At a young age he was discovered by local physician Dr. Robert Walter Johnson in his Junior Development Program, the tennis legend who had coached Althea Gibson, the first black athlete to win Grand Slam titles in tennis, winning 56 national and international female singles and doubles titles in an amateur era when there was no prize money at major tournaments, and direct endorsement deals were prohibited.  Johnson instilled social values into his game, learning not to argue points, how to maintain sports etiquette, never stepping out of line, while insisting he be “unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse (him) of meanness.”  This professional composure would follow him throughout his distinguished career, also developing a habit of reading books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing, a habit that would continue during tournaments in later years, while he was also a straight A student all through school. Ashe played baseball in high school, but Dr. Johnson kept him from playing on the high school baseball team, as that would distract him from playing tennis.  Black high schools in Richmond, in that era, had no tennis teams, but before long, because of him, they would all have tennis teams.  In Richmond, blacks were prohibited from using indoor tennis court facilities, the site of many major tournaments, effectively excluding blacks from participating, so Ashe received instructions in a tennis court built into Dr. Johnson’s back yard, eventually moving to St. Louis where he finished his senior year of high school under the tutelage of Richard Hudlin, captain of his University of Chicago collegiate tennis team in the 1920’s, the first black captain of a Big Ten athletic team (the school departed the Big Ten in 1946), who also successfully coached Althea Gibson.  Hudlin sued the city of St. Louis in 1945, forcing the city to open public tennis facilities to all players, particularly players of color, enabling blacks to participate in tournaments at municipal facilities, where Ashe led his Sumner High School, the first black high school west of the Mississippi, to win the United States Interscholastic Tennis Tournament, receiving a barrage of racial slurs, yet also becoming the first black to win the National Junior Indoor tennis title.  Scouted by UCLA, they offered him a tennis scholarship which was accepted “in about 3 seconds,” yet the casual Southern California lifestyle opened up doors for Ashe, allowing his tennis game to expand and accelerate with newly discovered freedoms, such as dating white women on campus with no negative repercussions.  Always known for having a thunderous serve and volley game, with an elegant backhand, never wanting to extend points, so while he was overly cautious off the court, he was a slashing, risk-taking attacker on it.  While in college, he was the first black player to be selected to the United States Davis Cup tennis team, which at the time was the most prestigious tennis tournament, as you were representing your country, while also winning the U.S. Men’s Hardcourt championships in 1963, winning the NCAA singles and doubles championship, helping UCLA win the team NCAA tennis championship in 1965, when he was named the #3 player in the world.  Since this was the era of the Vietnam War, he joined the ROTC program, a program training commissioned officers on college campuses, which also helped him offset his college expenses, so if he ever joined the Army it would not be as a private, but as an enlisted officer, eventually assigned to West Point, where he worked as a data processor, but was also put in charge of their tennis program.     

Part of the problem with this film is that it has a very narrow scope in who is chosen to offer their views, who is quoted, and who provides expertise, as many more are left out, so this feels more like a family portrait, surrounded by stories and photographs from his family, with a blend of archival newsreel and reenactments centering the story around only those closest to him, so naturally they’re going to offer the highest praise.  But what’s perhaps most interesting are the recorded comments from Ashe himself, which are surprisingly lucid, revealing his psychological state of mind at various points in his life.  After all, it’s his perspective that makes this film so interesting, feeling as if he’s providing comments specifically about the film, which was a technique used in another recent biographical portrait, Jamila Wignot’s Ailey (2021), with both eerily offering personal viewpoints from beyond the grave.  Ashe described 1968 as a year that was bad for all black people, starting with the assassination of Martin Luther King, which led to urban riots in black neighborhoods across the country, unable to contain their rage, followed by another assassination of Robert Kennedy, which really stung Ashe, as he had been with him just the day before, both gone in an instant, two of the leading advocates for blacks and marginalized people, creating a spiritual void, as both were among the best speakers in lifting the human spirit.  Making matters worse, segregationist George Wallace won 46 Electoral College votes for President.  But 1968 is also the year that Grand Slam tournaments agreed to allow professional players to compete with amateurs, the first time tennis players could make a living playing professional tennis, known as the Open Era.  Ashe had won 28 titles prior to the Open Era, becoming the first black man to win the U.S. Open title, winning the very first tournament, becoming the only player to have won both the amateur and Open National Championships in the same year.  It was also the only time his father would come down to the court to proudly congratulate his son.  In order to maintain Davis Cup eligibility, however, and have time away from army duty for important tournaments, Ashe was required to maintain his amateur status, so he could not accept the $14,000 first-prize money (The payout in 2022 is $2.5 million).  Struck by the activism from black athletes such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in a black power salute at the Summer Olympics, Muhammad Ali refusing his army induction, and Nelson Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment to fight for the right to vote in South Africa, Ashe was impressed that more than 100 black athletes boycotted the New York Athletic Club for its discriminatory membership policies, discovering there was a new breed of black athletes, sparking a particular interest in fighting for social justice, but he had yet to find his voice.  Ali had a profound impact on Ashe’s evolving sense of what it meant to be a black athlete, yet when sociologist Harry Edwards, a San Jose State professor and mentor to black athletes called for a boycott of the Olympics by black athletes, Ashe responded “That’s not my way,” feeling fiercely protective with anyone trying to control his life.  Never part of the “angry black athletes,” as the media portrayed them, his inaction got him labeled an Uncle Tom by Edwards and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (also attending UCLA at the time), among others, with Abdul-Jabbar calling him “Arthur Ass,” while Billie Jean King, a trailblazer in her own sport, acerbically remarked, “Christ, I’m blacker than Arthur.”  Described by the New York Times in a 1966 article as “A pioneer in short white pants,” CBS reporter Charles Kuralt described Ashe as a lone black face in the “white country club, white suited white guys” world of tennis, a sport with a long history of white elitism, all of which left him feeling isolated and alone, wanting to rebut the commonly held misconception that athletes were “all brawn, no brains.” 

It’s unfortunate that Abdul-Jabbar, who is still completely accessible, was not part of this film, as he’s become a best-selling author and cultural critic, writing several books on black history, as it would be curious to understand how and when his perceptions about Ashe began to change, as he’s now mentioned prominently by President Obama, claiming the two athletes that he most emulated and admired were Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, two opposite sides of the same spectrum.  Ali was flamboyantly outspoken, while Ashe was cautious and reserved, Ali excelled in a brutal sport, Ashe in a quietly genteel one, Ali refused induction into the Vietnam War, Ashe was a lieutenant in the Army, Ali joined Malcolm X into the Nation of Islam, Ashe followed the peaceful teachings of Martin Luther King, while in 1968, Ali appeared on the cover of Esquire magazine in April, Ashe appeared on the cover of Life magazine in September.  Born within a year of each other, in large cities in the segregated South (Ali was born in Louisville), both rose to the top of his sport, and, at the same time, transcended it.  Both entered the 60’s as the most promising black athletes, each becoming spokesmen for the black experience of the 60’s, taking their messages to Africa in the 70’s, and recording their final triumphs in 1975.  By the 1980’s, each man would show courage in the face of physical deterioration that tragically struck them early.  Both felt a deep kinship to Emmett Till and brought different messages to a country, and a black community, that had lived through a constant struggle for Civil Rights.  Ali’s experience growing up in the South led him to believe that America would never live up to its professed ideals of equality when it came to blacks, while Ashe’s experience led him to try to prove that the nation could.  Their lives can be read as a conversation about what it means to be black, and, by extension, what it means to be American.  The only time the two met was following a trip to Africa in 1973, with Ashe visiting Ali at his training camp in rural Pennsylvania, with Ashe recounting the experience, “Ali spoke in his usual folksy way, with the bad grammar and the colorful idioms.  But there certainly is no doubt in my mind that a very natively clever man lurks behind this façade.  We had a most forthright and intelligent conversation.”  Ashe continued to play on American Davis Cup teams, and in ten years representing his country he helped the U.S. win five championships (1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1978), while in 1969 he campaigned for U.S. sanctions against South Africa, marching against South African apartheid and the mistreatment of Haitian refugees, also winning the Australian Open in 1970.  But in 1973, he became the first black professional to play in South Africa, having his visa denied repeatedly for his outspoken remarks against apartheid, yet after asking for opinions from various activists, including Andrew Young, the American ambassador to the United Nations, who urged him to go, Ashe agreed so long as they went together, which finally allowed him to perform in the National Championships, losing to Jimmy Connors in the finals but winning the doubles championship.  While he took plenty of flak for that trip, it allowed persecuted blacks who were excluded from the event to see what was possible.  He also visited the slums of Soweto, where a 14-year old kid followed him around, learning he was “the first truly free black man” the kid had ever seen, offering a jolt of reality, yet he also met with high-ranking officials, and debated his trip with activists, though perhaps his biggest surprise was being called “master” by the domestic help at the home where he was staying in Johannesburg, something that felt like a surreal experience.  Ashe supported the founding of the Association of Tennis Professionals, was elected its president in 1974, while in May 1975, Ashe beat that John McEnroe nemesis Björn Borg to win the season-ending championship WCT (World Championship Tennis) Finals in Dallas, Texas.  Ashe was appointed captain of the United States Davis Cup team in 1981, the year after his retirement as a player, and his two first campaigns were successful, winning the competition in 1981 and 1982, largely due to the success of John McEnroe, whose temperamental style was often at odds with his captain, but they were successful together.

Like Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle, where his incredulous knockout of the heavily favored knockout artist George Foreman took the world by surprise, so too did Ashe’s carefully calibrated victory over brash upstart Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon Finals, which remains one of the most epochal and popular upsets in tennis history.  Ashe had never beaten Connors, who was ranked #1 in the world and was playing with unprecedented confidence, seemingly invincible, having gone 99-4 the year before.  But there was bad blood between them, as Ashe believed fervently that playing for one’s country was an honor, yet Connors refused to join the Davis Cup team, and was leading a $3 million dollar lawsuit against Ashe for comments he made about it, calling him unpatriotic (the lawsuit was later dropped after the match).  Two years earlier, Ashe also helped lead a boycott against Wimbledon, which led to more player control for the first time in the sport, something that tremendously benefited Connors, who wanted no part of the boycott.  Wearing red, white, and blue sweatbands and his Davis Cup team jacket, with USA emblazoned across the front and back, Ashe personified his view of the beef, literally wearing America’s colors while masterfully executing a plan to eliminate pace, which Connors thrives on, and play only soft junk shots, dinks, drop shots and lobs, avoiding the hard serve, instead pushing him out wide with his sliced serves, leaving the rest of the court open, winning convincingly, like Althea Gibson had done nearly 20 years earlier, with Ashe turning to his player’s box and raising his fist, briefly, in celebration, continuing to show restraint, remaining the only black man to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open, retiring four years later with 818 wins, 260 losses, 51 titles, and $1,584,909 in tournament winnings, where he is still the only black man to ever be ranked #1 in the world.  Afterwards, Ashe began speaking up more on social issues, making speeches, which caught the eye of Harry Edwards who realized they were more radical than his own speeches, but delivered in such a polite manner, realizing that the targeted audience was largely educated whites, where Ashe could bring all schools of thought to the table, even engage Republican leaders of business in stuffy white establishments, reaching an entirely different demographic than the typical black activist audience.  In October 1976, he met photographer and graphic artist Jeanne Moutoussamy at a United Negro College Fund benefit, daughter of architect John Moutoussamy, the first black architect to design a high-rise building in Chicago.  Four months later they were married, with their wedding performed by Andrew Young.  Her comments are priceless, explaining Ashe was a typical chauvinist man who never thought to consider women’s rights, but they brought out the best in each other, expanding the reach of their knowledge and potential, as his activism grew and embraced not only the Civil Rights movement, but all oppressed people throughout the world.  When Nelson Mandela was released from Robbins Prison, becoming South Africa’s first black President, he traveled to New York, where one of the first people he openly embraced was Arthur Ashe, seeking him out, remembering his earlier commitment to his country. 

At the age of 36, Ashe suffered a heart attack while holding a tennis clinic in New York, which drew plenty of attention to the hereditary aspect of the illness, as Ashe was a well-conditioned athlete, but his mother suffered from heart congestion, while his father suffered two heart attacks during his 50’s, one occurring just a week earlier.  Ashe underwent a quadruple bypass operation, but continued to develop symptoms afterwards, needing a second surgery four years later.  In 1988, however, he was diagnosed with HIV, quickly developing into AIDS, apparently contracted from a tainted blood transfusion during his second heart operation, a condition he kept private for a number of years, with Ashe teaching college courses, providing lectures at colleges and universities, commentating for ABC Sports, writing a regular column in The Washington Post, but also writing for Time magazine, Tennis magazine, The New York Times, and four autobiographical works before publishing a three-volumed book chronicling the participation of black athletes in American sport from 1619 to the present entitled A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, a project of extraordinary magnitude, having worked on it with a team of researchers for a period of six years, identifying people like Jack Johnson, Joe Gans, Isaac Murphy, Marshall Taylor and Howard P. Drew, athletic icons ignored in sports histories after WWII, but in their day, they were much better known and admired than Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey, with Ashe contending scholars largely omitted the subject because so few books were written about it.  But by 1992, word got out about his condition, so he went public about his illness, founding the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, working to raise awareness about the virus, dying not long afterwards at the age of 49.  His funeral attracted 6,000 mourners as his body lay in state at the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond, the first person to lie in state at the mansion since the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson in 1863, allowing an additional 5,000 mourners to pay their respects.  Cinematographer Rex Miller was contacted by Linda Zimmerman, the daughter of esteemed photographer John Zimmerman who was doing a photoshoot on Ashe from Life magazine, suggesting he make a film, “We have 41 rolls of film of Arthur Ashe that nobody’s ever seen before.”  Unlike Pollard’s earlier film, Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me (2017), this lacks the distinctive filmmaking and personal intensity and is much closer to the vest, still not telling the whole story about this man’s life, leaving gaping holes (which this review attempts to fill), where the reach of his influence is barely touched upon, as we don’t hear from historians, or the Williams sisters, Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, President Obama, or for that matter Bill Russell or Jim Brown, or anyone from the Black Lives Matter movement, voices connecting that 60’s arc of activism to today’s black athletes.  While his brother Johnnie, who was in the Marines during the Vietnam War, states plainly that he added a second tour of duty to protect his brother (due to devastating family losses in WWII, the military drafted the Sole Survivor Policy, prohibiting drafting more than one family member), allowing his career to develop, taking satisfaction that he had a hand in his considerable success.  Billie Jean King and John McEnroe offer personal memories along with Andrew Young, while Ashe’s widow adds her own heartfelt commentary, “Arthur was the one who took on that role as an activist, like Jackie Robinson did,” both adopting a young daughter who lost her own father at the age of seven, much like Arthur lost his mother at the age of 6, sharing in her husband’s words, “We both want to distress the comfortable and comfort the distressed.”  Inspiring whites and blacks alike, Ashe was that rare athlete who transcended all boundaries. 

Postscript

Ashe was inducted into the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Hall of Fame, the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, while also founding numerous charitable organizations, including the National Junior Tennis League, the ABC Cities Tennis Program, the Athlete-Career Connection, and the Safe Passage Foundation.  The U.S. Postal Service introduced a commemorative Arthur Ashe stamp, the main stadium at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York is named in his honor, while his hometown of Richmond, Virginia honored him with a statue on Monument Avenue, something previously reserved only for Confederate leaders, renaming the street Arthur Ashe Boulevard.  A tennis club in Manayunk, Pennsylvania is named in his honor, also an Ashe Athletic Center in Richmond, Virginia, while the UCLA campus has the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center.  Sports Illustrated named Ashe its Sportsman of the Year in 1992 and USA Today named him one of the twenty-five most inspiring people of the last quarter of the 20th century, a list including Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Ryan White, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, and Mohammad Ali.  President Clinton posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.