Qualla: Arthur Ashe Monument

Arthur Ashe Monument: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On July 10, 1996, a bronze statue of Arthur Ashe was unveiled on Richmond's Monument Avenue, the grand street that for a century had displayed the Confederate dead in bronze - Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Matthew Fontaine Maury. Ashe stood twelve feet tall on a sixteen-foot granite pedestal, holding a tennis racket in one hand and books in the other, surrounded by children. The books were raised higher than the racket; Ashe had asked for that himself, because he always emphasized education over sports. The placement of the statue was bitterly contested for a year. His widow argued the location honored Richmond more than it honored her husband. Then, in the summer of 2020, every other statue on Monument Avenue came down. Today, Arthur Ashe stands alone on the boulevard where he was once the outsider.

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Arthur Ashe Monument: The Boy From St. Philip Hospital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Arthur Ashe was born at St. Philip Hospital for Negroes in Richmond on March 10, 1943. The hospital existed because Black patients were not admitted to white hospitals in Jim Crow Virginia. As a child, Ashe was denied entry to tennis tournaments held on the city's best courts, si...

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Arthur Ashe Monument: The Sculptor and the Studies

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Paul DiPasquale, a Richmond sculptor, met Ashe in 1992 when a mutual friend, Wyatt Kingston, made the introduction. DiPasquale asked permission to design a statue of him. Ashe agreed. DiPasquale created nine crayon and pencil studies before Ashe's death in 1993. After Ashe died, ...

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Arthur Ashe Monument: The Family's Objection

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On January 1, 1996, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a letter by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe arguing that the monument as planned "honors Richmond, Virginia, more than it does its son, his legacy, and his life's work." Her husband, she wrote, had expected the monument to stand i...

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Arthur Ashe Monument: What the Critics Saw

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The statue has never quite landed as its sculptor intended. In 2017, Mental Floss placed it third on a listicle titled "10 Unintentionally Horrifying Statues of Famous People," describing Ashe as "frozen forever in a state of seemingly mocking [the children] for their lack of hei...

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Arthur Ashe Monument: Alone on the Avenue

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On July 1, 2020, amid the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Mayor Levar Stoney ordered every statue of Confederate generals on city property taken down. By the end of that summer, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Davis, and Maury were gone. The only statue st...

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