Lucy Diggs Slowe was a barrier-breaking woman of many firsts who made integral contributions to sports, education and women’s empowerment in the District, nation and world.
Born in Berryville, Virginia, in 1885, Slowe was an orphan by 6 years old. She grew up with her aunt and eventually moved to Baltimore, where she excelled in the segregated public school system.
Slowe went on to attend Howard University, where she graduated valedictorian and helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
At Howard and beyond, she was also a 17-time tennis champion, winning the national title of the American Tennis Association’s (ATA) first tournament in 1917, becoming the first African American woman to win a major sports title.
She was featured among the women champions in the exhibit “Breaking the Barriers: The ATA and Black Tennis Pioneers,” sponsored by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum in 2007.
A graduate of Columbia University, Slowe founded the first junior high school in Washington, D.C., and served as principal until 1922, when she was appointed Howard University’s first dean of Women.
“Education must fit … [African-American] women, as it must fit all women, for the highest development of their own gifts; but, whatever those gifts, they will not be able to exercise them unless they understand the world they live in and are prepared to make their contribution to it,” Slowe once said, according to the Archives of Maryland.
The innovative leader, who also founded the National Association of College Women, died in October 1937 at the age of 52.
In 2021, as part of Howard’s homecoming festivities, the institution named the 2400 block of 4th Street NW to Lucy Diggs Slowe Way.
“Lucy Diggs Slowe, my goodness,” said actress and Dean of Howard’s Chadwick Boseman School of Fine Arts Phylicia Rashad, at the street renaming.
“You sit and wonder, what was that impetus,” continued Rashad, who is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. “What was that spirit inside this young woman — this faith and belief and confidence in herself? Because you have to [those qualities] to accomplish any one of the things that she accomplished, let alone the many.”
