This week in Black history

Arthur Ashe, tennis great and humanitarian, won the men's single title at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in England on this day. He was the first Black to win this prestigious tournament title. Ashe, who at 31 had never made a Wimbledon final, defeated heavily favored Jimmy Connors 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4 and was ranked No. 1 in the world. A native of Richmond, VA, he began playing tennis at age 7. Under the mentoring of Dr. Walter Johnson, a physician from Lynchburg who fostered Black tennis prodigies, Ashe honed his skills and was awarded a full tennis scholarship to UCLA in 1961. After he graduated, Ashe served three years in the U.S. Army and later continued his ascension in the world of tennis. In 1988, it was discovered Ashe had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion administered during an earlier heart bypass operation. He became a leading spokesman for AIDS awareness and created the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. Ashe died February 6, 1993, in New York City.

July 9, 1893--

Daniel Hale Williams, surgeon and educator, performed the first successful open-heart surgery in Chicago on this day at Provident Hospital. Dr. Williams decided to perform the risky surgery after a patient was admitted to the emergency room with a knife wound in an artery that was very close to his heart. Williams, assisted by his medical team, made an incision in the patient's chest and operated successfully on that artery and the pericardium, a membrane that surrounds the heart, which also had been punctured. Born in Hollidaysburg, PA, in 1856, Williams earned his medical degree in 1883 from Chicago Medical College. In addition to founding the Provident Hospital and Training School, the nation's first school for Black nurses and interns, Williams established a nursing school for Blacks at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., and surgical clinic at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. He died August 4, 1931, in Idlewild, MI.