Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Boris Spassky, Magnus Carlsen, Emanuel Lasker...what do these names have in common? They are all famed chess grandmasters. If the list continued for another 100 members. They would have something else in common: there would be no black members in that group. In fact, if the list were to go through the ten thousand or so grandmasters throughout history, there would be no black players on that list until Maurice Ashley in 1999.
Maurice Ashley is a 50-year-old black chess player from New York. This year, the chess grandmaster – the first black man in history to attain that rank, also became the first, and only, black person to be inducted into the U.S. Chess