Ora Washington, right, and Dorothy Morgan, 1939. John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Temple University Libraries, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection.
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In the hard years of the Great Depression, the dazzling accomplishments of Virginia native Ora Washington made her the nation’s first Black female athletic star.
Born on a Virginia farm, Washington moved to Philadelphia in the 1920s. Like most of the millions of Black women who left the rural South during the Great Migration, she took a job as a domestic servant.
She also found the opportunity to develop her athletic talents and hone her keen sense of competition. She made her first mark in Black tennis circles in the late 1920s, soon after she started to play at Germantown’s “colored” YWCA. Between 1925 and 1938, she won eight American Tennis Association singles titles, along with 12 straight doubles titles. She also starred for the Philadelphia Tribunes basketball team, widely acclaimed as the best Black women’s team in the nation.
She never had the chance to play top white competitors such as Helen Wills, and her accomplishments were only rarely acknowledged outside of Black communities. But she made an indelible impression on the Black reporters and spectators who followed her career. “No one who ever saw her play could forget her,” recalled one admirer, “nor could anyone who met her.”
In the heady years that followed World War II, however, memories of her achievements were quickly overshadowed by enthusiasm for pioneers of integration such as Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe. She passed away in 1971, too early to take part in the resurgence of interest in the great teams and stars of the segregated era.
She has received more attention in recent years, appearing in scholarly works, newspaper articles and podcasts. I’m currently working on a biography of her that will be part of the Black Lives series at Yale University Press. I hope it will help solidify the place in American history that she so richly deserves.
History
Grundy, Ora Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star
Grundy and Shackelford, Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball
Lansbury, A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America
Wiggins (ed), Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes
Podcasts
The Parallel Legacies of Althea Gibson and Ora Washington (International Tennis Hall of Fame)
Untold Legends: Ora Washington (BBC)
Blogs
The Tennis 128: Ora Washington
Newspapers
“Long before Serena Williams, there was Ora Washington” (Washington Post)
“Overlooked No More: Ora Washington” (New York Times)