Days of Grace (19 page)

LATER IN
1985, after my arrest, I again took to the streets in a symbolic action to protest South Africa’s racial policies. In the company of Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, and other demonstrators, I marched on the United States mission to the United Nations.

On the whole, however, I preferred to work more quietly with TransAfrica Forum and TransAfrica, for which I sometimes spoke publicly. Perhaps my most charged moment as a speaker came on a mission with Randall Robinson in 1988, when we visited Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, to aid the anti-apartheid struggle there. What made the visit memorable for me was not simply the extremely cold weather but my sadness that apartheid apparently had its supporters among the students. To dramatize the plight of black South Africans, some liberal and radical students had erected shanties on the campus. However, after agitation by the
Dartmouth Review
, a right
wing student journal supported nationally by older conservatives, the shanties had been demolished in the dead of night, presumably by supporters of the journal. (This on the campus of a college that once had identified itself with a commitment to the education of American Indians.) Outdoors, in freezing weather, Randall and I spoke briefly to assure the anti-apartheid students that they were not alone in their struggle. Seldom have I felt so embattled and outnumbered in the struggle against South Africa.

Meanwhile, as George Bush and Robert Dole fought bitterly elsewhere in New Hampshire for the Republican party nomination to succeed Ronald Reagan as president, neither would promise to go beyond President Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the white South African leadership. Most of us in the anti-apartheid movement considered “constructive engagement” to be a euphemism for “status quo.” One morning, in the leading hotel in Hanover, as I stood in a corner, I watched Dole stride purposefully through the lobby, surrounded by members of his entourage. The minority leader in the U.S. Senate, he was pursuing the presidency of the United States, the most powerful position in the world. I could only hope that, if he became president, he would face the leadership of South Africa with the same aggressiveness that he brought to pursuing the presidential prize.

It is important to me that I keep my faith in electoral politics. In the 1960s, so many people I knew, especially younger blacks, scorned them. But principled, inspired, skilled politicians, such as Robert Kennedy, can make a difference. Through Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law, and Donald Dell, I met him twice, in Washington, D.C., and in California, in 1968, when we had a long talk about politics, America, and the world. Kennedy burned with a desire to do good. A week later he was dead. Later, I applauded the ambition of Bill Bradley to run for the Senate. At one point in the mid-1970s, looking ahead to my retirement, I myself even thought seriously about running for public office. When I was growing up in Virginia, most public offices,
aside from the most elementary, were barred to blacks, as they were across the South. I never grew up thinking that one day I might be president of the United States. I did not think that any black could ever be elected governor of reactionary, segregated Virginia. In fact, my chances of becoming president of the United States probably seemed better than my chances of becoming governor. I never dreamed that one of the older boys who came to play at Brook Field on the courts my father tended could become governor of our state. But Doug Wilder did so.

In the mid-1970s, far from Richmond and transplanted as a New Yorker, I thought of running for the United States Congress from the Eighteenth Congressional District on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Our congressman, Bill Green, was popular and effective, but he was a Republican and by no means invincible. Ours is the celebrated “silk stocking” district, so called because of its wealth. The district is heavily populated but, with a good pair of walking shoes, one can walk around it in about two hours. A large part of the district is Jewish, and the people who approached me to run were themselves Jewish. They wanted to put together a group to look into my feasibility as a candidate. I would have run as a Democrat. Years later, in 1988, I voted for George Bush, and I have voted for other Republicans from time to time; I refuse to be a “Yellow Dog Democrat,” as the expression goes—someone who would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. Still, though an independent, I consider myself a supporter of the Democratic party. I think I would have made a good congressman; but my thoughts of Congress ended with my heart attack in 1979.

FOR ALL THE
strength of my opposition to apartheid, I deplored—and continue to deplore—all the violence that has taken place in South Africa, including not only the violence of the police, the African National Congress, and the Inkatha or Zulu group but also the intellectual violence that would allow, for example, the Dutch Reformed Church
there to defend apartheid. Still, I am with Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in their belief that violence achieves nothing but the destruction of the individual soul and the corruption of the state.

With mounting excitement, I read the news, as the 1980s drew to a close, that the famous winds of change in Africa, announced by Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan more than a generation before, finally seemed to be blowing democracy into South Africa. Change was coming imperfectly, through the concessions and maneuverings of South Africa’s prime minister F. W. de Klerk in response to the pressures exerted on apartheid; but it was coming. I treasured the many letters and telephone calls that came to me from my friends there, because they were often far more enlightening than the news reports. Although I refuse to be cynical or pessimistic about the possibilities of social change, I also had to resist making too much of what those same winds had actually brought thus far to South Africa. Thus, in September 1989, at the United Nations Plaza Hotel in New York, I made a plea to the board of the Association of Tennis Professionals, which was on the verge of approving two tournaments in Johannesburg for the coming year, not to do so. Passionately at times, I stressed that the major black South African leader, Nelson Mandela, wanted the sports boycott maintained, that the organizers of the Olympic Games were skeptical about South African promises, and that other sporting bodies were insisting on more telling signs of the demise of apartheid. To my intense satisfaction, the ATP board decided not to include the tournaments.

Accompanying me on that mission, at my invitation, was Mark Mathabane. Fifteen years before, as a boy of fourteen or so, he had followed me around Ellis Park in Johannesburg and stunned me with his remark that I had been “the first truly free black man” he had ever seen. Now he himself was free (in so far as any of us is ever free), and the author of an acclaimed book,
Kaffir Boy
, about growing up in South Africa, as well as other books.

In
Kaffir Boy
, Mark wrote about what my example and
my first visit to South Africa had meant to him. “The more I read about the world of tennis,” he recalled, “and Arthur Ashe’s role in it, the more I began to dream of its possibilities. What if I too were someday to attain the same fame and fortune as Arthur Ashe? Would whites respect me as they did him? Would I be as free as he? The dreams were tantalizing, but I knew they were only dreams. Nevertheless, I kept dreaming; after all, what harm could that do me?” Finally, at Ellis Park, he saw me play. “How could a black man play such excellent tennis,” he wrote about my victory over a white opponent, “move about the court with such self-confidence, trash a white man and be cheered by white people?” Eventually with the help of Stan Smith and others, Mathabane came to the U.S. to attend college and find expression for his literary talents that easily might have been destroyed in South Africa.

I THANK GOD
that I lived long enough to see Nelson Mandela come to the United States and be welcomed with a ticker tape parade through the canyons of Wall Street in New York. I was seldom more proud of America and my fellow Americans than when I saw the way we welcomed him as a hero. The success of the parade was a sure and gratifying sign that many people, black and white, rich and poor, recognize his sacrifice and applaud the almost superhuman way he preserved his dignity, his humor, and his unquenchable moral sense through the nearly three decades of his imprisonment.

To have spent twenty-seven years in jail for political reasons, to have been deprived of the whole mighty center of one’s life, and then to emerge apparently without a trace of bitterness, alert and ready to lead one’s country forward, may be the most extraordinary individual human achievement that I have witnessed in my lifetime. I marvel that he could come out of jail free of bitterness and yet uncompromising in his basic political beliefs; I marvel at his ability to combine an impeccable character, to which virtually everyone attests, with the political wisdom of a Solomon. In
jail, I am told, his white guards came to have such respect for him that in some ways he was their warden and they the prisoners, more prisoners of apartheid.

He became one of my heroes long before I met him, so it was a special thrill when we first came together. When the ABC-TV journalist Ted Koppel held an internationally televised “town hall” meeting with Mandela at City College in New York—a sensational appearance by the South African—I sat with other guests in a special section near the stage. At the end of the program, I approached David Dinkins, the mayor of the city and an old friend, and asked him to introduce me to Mandela. I knew that Nelson loved sports, but I had no idea whether he would know who I was on sight.

I watched David go over to Mandela and whisper in his ear. I saw Nelson’s head raise abruptly, and he broke into a beautiful smile.

“Arthur is here?” he asked, with obvious surprise and delight.

“He’s right here,” David said, turning to me.

“Oh my brother,” Nelson said, looking straight at me. “Come here!”

He threw his arms around me and held me for a moment in a most affectionate embrace. He told me that in prison, he had read my three-volume work
A Hard Road to Glory
, about black American athletes. A mutual friend, Yusuf Surtee, a prominent Indian merchant in Johannesburg and a financial supporter of the African National Congress party, had given him the books as a present. I didn’t want to delay Mandela’s exit from the hall, so I moved him along up the aisle and into the lobby, talking with him all the way. I could scarcely believe he was there at my side, I was so thrilled.

Ironically, I had first heard of Mandela in the 1960s, from a white man, a tennis professional. In fact, he was a South African, Ray Moore, with whom I used to discuss the philosophy and ways of apartheid all the time.

“I think there is one man in South Africa capable of
leading my country out of this mess,” Moore told me one day.

“Is he white?” I asked Moore.

“No, he’s not,” Moore replied. “He is a black man, a lawyer imprisoned on Robben Island, in the Atlantic. His name is Nelson Mandela.”

“Mandela? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Well, you will,” Moore insisted. “In fact, I think he will become president of South Africa one day.”

After that, I looked for news of this black man who apparently possessed the personal magnetism, intellectual ability, and moral character that Moore described. The idea that a black man could be president of South Africa in the foreseeable future also seemed farfetched. But since Moore, while quite liberal by South African standards, was himself not a political radical, his assessment of Mandela was really quite intriguing.

I thank God that I lived long enough for one last visit to South Africa, in November 1991, which I made in a delegation of African Americans invited by Mandela himself. To go to South Africa, I was compelled to lie on my application for a visa and declare that I did not have an infectious disease. I try never to lie, but I lied. I had to see South Africa at least one more time, to talk directly to friends there and see some of the changes for myself.

In many ways, Johannesburg, where we spent three days, had not changed much since 1977; but in at least two ways it was drastically different. The apartheid signs—
WHITES ONLY
,
NONWHITES ONLY
—were gone, except in a few instances. And, more astonishing, the black people seemed transformed. The old subservience and obsequiousness had vanished, and the same people now seemed self-assured and even fearless. They were ready for the future.

We saw a great deal of Mandela on this visit. I never entered his home but saw where he lived—a walled compound, replete with armed guards, built by the African National Congress with security, uppermost in mind. I had several stirring conversations with him, which formed the
highlight of my visit. As I had done once in the past, I stayed at the home of a wealthy, liberal Jewish merchant—not the same merchant, but another friend of Yusuf Surtee.

I visited the Colored poet Don Mattera, the author of the poem smuggled to me at the airport at the end of one of my visits in the 1970s. Mattera had fallen into official disfavor and, overnight, had become a nonperson, forbidden to publish his work, travel abroad, speak in public, and attend certain functions. Now he was free again. I had a private lunch with a group of whites, who peppered me with questions about President Bush’s attitude to the changes that were beginning to sweep their country. All of us were absolutely certain that, in the wake of his military triumphs in Kuwait and Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war, Bush’s reelection was assured.

Not least of all because our visit would have been unthinkable even two years before, it was a glorious occasion for most of us Americans on the trip, whose aim was to see justice for blacks in South Africa, because the prize seemed almost within their grasp. On the airplane flying back to the United States via London, we were almost euphoric about the unexpected improvements that had come to pass in so short a time in South Africa. The end of apartheid seemed a miracle at hand. The musician and producer Quincy Jones, the executive Adam Clayton Powell III, Randall Robinson, the radio station owner Bert Lee, Earl Graves of
Black Enterprise
magazine, and many of the rest of us talked enthusiastically about the prospect of raising money, lots of money, to boost the funding of TransAfrica. Hollywood was a major source of support, and Quincy promised to throw a gala party at his home in Los Angeles to attract prospective donors.