When the 25-year-old Arthur Ashe was cheered as a winner at the first U.S. Open in 1968, he threw an arm around the shoulders of his fiercely proud father, who wept.

Known for his cool, cerebral public diffidence, Ashe was the first and remains, to this day, the only African-American tennis player to be men’s singles champion at the United States Open (where the stadium at Flushing Meadows is now named for him), the Australian Open (1970) or Wimbledon (1975).

Born in 1943, Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. grew up in Richmond, Va. — the old Civil War capital of Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy — in a house on the all-black Brook Field recreation ground, where his fastidious, self-effacing father (who, the son recalled, “tried to get along with everyone”) worked as a caretaker. Ashe’s mother died when he was 6.

In 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, the young Ashe felt “electrified,” he later remembered, by the prospect that “we would have all the rights and opportunities that whites had.” But the court had said nothing about integrating American tennis.