This Week In Black History

* Arthur Ashe Jr., athlete, social activist, author and humanitarian, won the first U.S. Open Tennis Championship on this day, defeating Tom Okker of the Netherlands at Forest Hills Stadium in New York. That same year, Ashe was ranked first in U.S. Men's Tennis and won 10 tournaments. Seven years later as a professional, Ashe became the first Black to win the men's singles title at Wimbledon. Born in Richmond, VA, on July 10, 1943, Ashe started playing tennis in a neighborhood park and later joined a tennis group sponsored by Dr. Walter Johnson, a general practitioner from Lynchburg, VA. He went on to win indoor junior championships in 1960 and 1961, and a scholarship to UCLA where he won the national collegiate championship, and graduated with a B.S. in business administration. One of the most admired athletes of all time, Ashe, in an emotional 1992 press conference, announced that he had AIDS, apparently contracted in a blood transfusion during an operation in 1983. He died on February 6, 1993.

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September 12, 1992--

* Dr. Mae C. Jemison, astronaut, physician and educator, became the first Black woman to travel in space on this day. During her eight days aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, Jemison conducted experiments on weightlessness, claustrophobia and other conditions encountered in space. Born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, AL, her family moved to Chicago where she attended public schools. She graduated from Stanford (CA) University in 1977 with a B.S. degree in chemical engineering and a B.A. degree in African and African-American Studies. She earned her MD at Cornell University Medical College in New York in 1981. She later spent several years as a Peace Corps doctor in Western Africa. In 1985 she entered private practice and was accepted into the astronaut program at NASA in 1987. She left NASA in 1993 and currently is a professor at Dartmouth College where she teaches in the Environmental Studies Program.