In 1976, when the founders of the Black Athletes Hall of Fame put together that year’s class of inductees, they decided to honor Ora Washington, the preeminent Black female athlete of the early-20th century.
But they ran into a problem — they couldn’t find her. They optimistically engraved the customary silver bowl and placed a chair for her on the presentation stage, hoping she would appear. She did not. “We just don’t know what to think,” Hall of Fame founder Charlie Mays told the New York Times.
As the mystery of Washington’s whereabouts persisted, Mays remained upbeat. “Fame has finally found its way into Miss Washington’s life,” he said. “Hopefully it will be better late than never.”
But for Washington herself it was too late. She had died in Philadelphia five years earlier.
Washington dominated Black women’s tennis in the 1920s and 1930s, winning the singles title of the all-Black American Tennis Association every year but one from 1929 to 1937, and taking 12 straight doubles titles from 1925 to 1936. She won her final ATA championship in her late forties, when she and partner George Stewart defeated Walter Johnson and rising teenage star Althea Gibson for the 1947 mixed doubles crown.
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She also towered over Black women’s basketball, playing 12 seasons for the Philadelphia Tribunes, a barnstorming team that sparked excitement everywhere they went. An ad for a 1932 game dubbed Washington and teammate Inez Patterson “two of the greatest girl players in the world” and promised they would “make you forget the Depression.” In 1938, when the team traveled to Greensboro, N.C., to take on Bennett College, the local paper lauded them as “the fastest girls’ team in the world,” paced by “the indomitable, internationally famed and stellar performer, Ora Washington.”
Washington blazed her own trail. Born at the close of the 19th century in rural Caroline County, Va., she migrated to Philadelphia as a teenager and took a job as a housekeeper. She didn’t pick up a tennis racket until her twenties, but she took to the game immediately, winning her first ATA crown in 1929, around the time of her 30th birthday. (Her exact birth date is unknown.) By 1931, the Chicago Defender observed, “her superiority is so evident that her competitors are frequently beaten before the first ball crosses the net.” Her achievements were widely covered in the Black press, making her the nation’s first Black female athletic star.
But as soon as she stopped playing, she slipped into obscurity.
Despite her achievements, Washington had never been recognized by White America. She logged her victories at the height of segregation, when most Black athletes were barred from the nation’s dominant sporting institutions. In 1976, when her absence from the Hall of Fame ceremony sparked momentary interest in her career, a few people recalled that she had always wanted to test her skills against the era’s top White female player, the legendary Helen Wills Moody. A New York Times reporter phoned Moody to ask about Washington. Moody had never heard of her.
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Retirement obscured Washington’s accomplishments among Black fans as well. She left competition in 1948, just as Black athletes such as Gibson and Jackie Robinson were finally stepping onto an integrated stage. All eyes turned to them. Stars of the segregated era faded.
In the 1970s and 1980s, growing interest in Black history sparked new research into segregated sports, often through oral history interviews. But Washington’s early death meant no one could track her down and interview her. Nor were historians likely to encounter anyone who knew her well, in part because she made no effort to move into the elite social circles that ran Black tennis, or to assume the trappings of conventional feminine respectability that mattered so much to that ambitious group. She worked as a housekeeper all her life, even at the height of her success. And she was gay.
Shortly after her retirement, Philadelphia Tribune reporter Randy Dixon lamented, in the coded language of the time, that “the land at large has never bowed at Ora’s shrine of accomplishment in the proper tempo,” primarily because “she committed the unpardonable sin of being a plain person with no flair whatever for what folks love to call society.”
As with so many Black female stars, Washington’s refusal to conform to expectations came from the confidence and determination that were her greatest strengths. A hint of this inner fire emerged after she retired from singles play in 1937. Her successor as champion, Flora Lomax, was dubbed “the glamour girl of tennis.” Sportswriters enthused over Lomax’s trademark white pleated shorts, love of dancing and penchant for hobnobbing with stars such as Joe Louis.
Washington was having none of it. In 1939, she emerged from retirement, entered a tournament in Buffalo and defeated Lomax. She made no secret of her motive. “Certain people said certain things last year,” she told a reporter. “They said Ora was not so good any more. I had not planned to enter singles this year, but I just had to go up to Buffalo to prove somebody was wrong.”
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Washington has recently begun to gain more notice, in part because of the achievements of successors such as Serena Williams, A’ja Wilson and fellow Philadelphian Dawn Staley have elevated interest in the history of Black female athletes. She was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018 (although the Hall initially got her name wrong). The New York Times printed a belated obituary in February. And the BBC has just produced an eight-part podcast on her life, narrated by retired WNBA star Renee Montgomery.
But there’s a long way to go.
In the wake of Serena Williams’s first-round U.S. Open victory in August, an ardent fan tweeted out a historic lineup of Black female tennis players.
- Lucy.
- Althea.
- Zina.
- Chanda.
- Venus.
- Serena.
- Sloane.
- Madison.
- Naomi.
- Coco.
The list embodies Black female excellence. Lucy Stowe became the ATA’s first female champion in 1917. Althea Gibson integrated American women’s tennis, then won back-to-back titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1957 and 1958. Zina Garrison and Chanda Rubin helped pave the way for the transformative era of Venus and Serena Williams, who then inspired the younger stars Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys, Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff.
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Who is missing?
Pamela Grundy is co-author, with Susan Shackelford, of “Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball,” and author of “Ora Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,” in David Wiggins’s “Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes.” She is currently working on a biography of Washington for Yale University Press’s Black Lives series.
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