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Some people might have called him a sellout. “Arthur could go into a room and really make a difference.”Īdded Miller, whose Jamaican mother once played a tennis match against Althea Gibson: “Arthur could go into the stuffiest white country clubs and engage with Republican leaders of business. “If Harry went into a room, everyone was afraid of him because he was so radical,” Pollard said. When Ashe eventually stepped into the fray, his disarming demeanor proved effective. He was focused on establishing his tennis bona fides.” “Harry reached out, he was hoping Arthur would be like Jim Brown, Kareem and Ali, who were vocal and jumped into the fray of activism,” Pollard said. While those never-before-seen images help capture the physical essence of Ashe, the documentary includes interviews with Ashe’s wife, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, tennis legends Billie Jean King and John McEnroe, and sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards, who all help shape the story of how a Black tennis player who came of age while playing in an all-white environment grew to gain his voice to publicly challenge the issue of racism in sports and society, a battle that he was once reluctant to openly address.Ĭitizen Ashe highlights the internal struggle for Ashe: He went from growing up in Richmond, Virginia - a Southern city where Black people were viewed as less than - to mastering a predominantly white sport that led to a scholarship at UCLA, where he occasionally dated white women, an act that could have gotten him killed back home.Īll the perks afforded Ashe for being a tennis star - the ability to comfortably exist in white environments - were in direct conflict with the activism lane that some of his friends and civil rights leaders desperately wanted Ashe to enter. “He did it differently than Muhammad Ali or Jim Brown or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which is important to show that African American people aren’t monolithic and can approach things in very different ways and still have a major impact.” “People will also learn that, off the court, he was a very, very serious civil rights activist in his own way,” said Pollard, a multiple Emmy winner whose resume includes his work as producer and supervising editor for When the Levees Broke, the 2006 Spike Lee documentary.
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Military Academy at West Point at the time he won his first Grand Slam title at the 1968 US Open). While the tennis success of Ashe has been widely documented - he remains the only Black male tennis player to win singles titles at the US Open (1968), the Australian Open (1970) and Wimbledon (1975) - Citizen Ashe deeply explores Ashe’s life as an activist and as a patriot (Ashe was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army and was assigned to the U.S. The film will later have its broadcast premiere on CNN before landing on HBO Max next summer. The 95-minute documentary will be released theatrically this month (on Friday in New York, Dec. It’s that conversation six years ago that provided the impetus for this week’s release of Citizen Ashe, a CNN Films documentary directed by Miller and Sam Pollard. “I like your Althea Gibson film you should do a documentary on Arthur.” “We have 41 rolls of film of Arthur Ashe that nobody’s ever seen before,” Miller recalls being told by Zimmerman, who was archiving the work of her father, who had shot Ashe for Life magazine. Not long after directing the 2014 documentary Althea, Rex Miller was contacted by Linda Zimmerman, the daughter of esteemed photographer John Zimmerman, who floated a project.