Raymond Arsenault has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is Arthur Ashe.
Arthur Ashe
Summary
The first comprehensive, authoritative biography of American icon Arthur Ashe - the Jackie Robinson of men’s tennis, a pioneering athlete who, after breaking the color barrier, went on to become an influential civil rights activist and public intellectual. Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943, by the age of 11 Arthur Ashe was one of the state's most talented black tennis players. Jim Crow restrictions barred Ashe from competing with whites. Still, in 1960 he won the National Junior Indoor singles title, which led to a tennis scholarship at UCLA. He became the first African American to play for the US Davis Cup team in 1963, and two years later he won the NCAA singles championship. In 1968, he won both the US Amateur title and the first US Open title, rising to a number-one national ranking. Turning professional in 1969, he soon became one of the world’s most successful tennis stars, winning the Australian Open in 1970 and Wimbledon in 1975. After retiring in 1980, he served four years as the US Davis Cup captain and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985. In this revelatory biography, Raymond Arsenault chronicles Ashe’s rise to stardom on the court. But much of the book explores his off-court career as a human rights activist, philanthropist, broadcaster, writer, businessman, and celebrity. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ashe gained renown as an advocate for sportsmanship, education, racial equality, and the elimination of apartheid in South Africa. But from 1979 on, he was forced to deal with a serious heart condition that led to multiple surgeries and blood transfusions, one of which left him HIV positive. In 1988, after completing a three-volume history of African American athletes, he was diagnosed with AIDS, a condition he revealed only four years later. After devoting the last 10 months of his life to AIDS activism, he died in February 1993 at the age of 49, leaving an inspiring legacy of dignity, integrity, and active citizenship. Based on prodigious research, including more than 100 interviews, Raymond Arsenault’s insightful and compelling biography puts Ashe in the context of both his time and the long struggle of African-American athletes seeking equal opportunity and respect.
©2018 Raymond Arsenault (P)2018 Simon & Schuster
The Sound of Freedom
Summary
Award-winning civil rights historian Ray Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial - an early milestone in civil rights history - on the 70th anniversary of her performance. On Easter Sunday 1939, the brilliant vocalist Marian Anderson sang before a throng of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington - an electrifying moment and an underappreciated milestone in civil rights history. Though she was at the peak of a dazzling career, Anderson had been barred from performing at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall because she was Black. When Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR over the incident and took up Anderson’s cause, however, it became a national issue. Like a female Jackie Robinson - but several years before his breakthrough - Anderson rose to a pressure-filled and politically charged occasion with dignity and courage, and struck a vital blow for civil rights. In the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King would follow, literally, in Anderson’s footsteps. This tightly focused, richly textured narrative by acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault captures the struggle for racial equality in 1930s America, the quiet heroism of Marian Anderson, and a moment that inspired Blacks and Whites alike.
©2009 Raymond Arsenault (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Freedom Riders
Summary
The saga of the Freedom Riders is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, 450 Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. Arsenault recounts how a group of volunteers - Blacks and Whites - came together to travel from Washington, DC, through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals and putting their lives on the line for racial justice. News photographers captured the violence in Montgomery, shocking the nation and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration. Here are the key players - their fears and courage, their determination and second thoughts, and the agonizing choices they faced as they took on Jim Crow - and triumphed. Winner of the Owsley Prize, this publication is timed to coincide with the airing of the American Experience miniseries documenting the Freedom Rides.
©2011 Raymond Arsenault (P)2011 Audible, Inc.