Pamela Grundy

February 23, Iowa City, Iowa

Waves of sound fill Carver-Hawkeye Arena as the two teams, tied at 54, race up and down the court.

A score, a miss, a block.

The Hawkeyes are playing #3 UCLA. They struggled early in the season – new coach, new cast of players – but they beat #4 USC few weeks earlier and took #8 Ohio State to overtime just days ago.

*               *               *

Although I never had the chance to see Iowa’s renowned 6-on-6 high school tournament, I imagine it must have sounded much like this, as players dribbled, passed and shot in front of avid hometown fans.

Being in Iowa reminded me of the state’s remarkable support for women’s basketball.

It also emphasized the value of female independence – one of the most important themes in American women’s history.

I felt this keenly during my time at the Iowa Women’s Archive. While it was great to experience the hard-fought Iowa-UCLA contest, I was even more excited to visit the archive, and to meet both the current archivist, Janet Weaver (right), and her predecessor, Kären Mason.

Historical work depends heavily on the documents preserved in archives, and on the knowledgeable people who direct you to materials that can aid in your research. I had experienced both while working with the Iowa Women’s Archive for the first edition of Shattering the Glass. But I didn’t know much about the archive’s history.

During my visit, I learned that it was started by Louise Noun, a collector of women’s art and a historian of women’s suffrage determined to preserve the history of Iowa women.

During the 1980s, Noun worked with longtime political activist Mary Louise Smith to build support for the archive. When the University of Iowa offered space but no funding, Nunn financed the initial $1.4 million endowment by selling Frida Kahlo’s “Woman with Loose Hair.”

The independence conferred by a permanent endowment ensures that Iowa women’s history will continue to be preserved, regardless of administrative or political change. The archive now includes more than 1,200 manuscript collections, along with other resources that document the experiences of Iowa women.

The significance of independence also runs through the history of Iowa women’s basketball.

Historically, most supporters of the American women’s game were forced to depend on on the good will of organizations that supervised men’s as well as women’s play – and which almost always prioritized the men.

Iowa was an exception. In 1925, members of the Iowa High School Athletic Association voted overwhelmingly to do away with the recently established state girls’ tournament. Supporters of girls’ basketball, including a number of male coaches, rallied to create their own association, the Iowa Girls’ High School Athletic Union.

The IGHSAU tournament became one of the state’s most celebrated traditions, far outshining the boys’ competition.

In 1940, when Hansell High took the title, Life magazine reported that there “wasn’t a hall in town big enough to hold the crowds who turned out to greet the team.” A few years later, when Wellsburg won it all, the school bus carrying the players home was followed by a six-mile line of cars. In 1947, the tournament sold 40,000 tickets, and fans were turned away.

Everyone in Iowa watched women’s basketball – long before Caitlin Clark came along.

When Title IX became law in 1972, University of Iowa president Sandy Boyd appointed a women’s athletic director – the legendary Christine Grant. Since Grant ran a separate department, she did not have to fight administrators focused on men’s athletics for support. She could focus her energies on building up women’s teams, on leading the campaign to effectively implement Title IX, and on advising female leaders at less-fortunate schools.

After she retired, she made sure that her papers went to the Iowa Women’s Archive.

*               *               *

Back at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, the clock is winding down. A last-second shot bounces off the rim, and the Hawkeyes lose a heartbreaker, 67-65. Two weeks later, they’ll suffer a similar fate, falling to higher-ranked Ohio State, 60-59, in the quarterfinals of the Big 10 tournament.

They’ll have one more chance in the NCAA contest.

But thanks to their predecessors, Iowa women’s basketball does not depend on one team, one season or one star for its support. Generations of women – along with a few men –have made sure of that.

I’ll be in Iowa City from January 20 through January 23, signing books, talking about Iowa’s rich women’s basketball history and taking in the Iowa-UCLA game. Looking forward to it.

I’ll be sorting through my closet to dig out my winter clothes, which I rarely need here in Charlotte. On Thursday, the day I arrive, the low is predicted to be -9!!! Friday it will rise to a balmy 15. Please send warm wishes!

Black women have long energized American women’s basketball. Marian Washington, C. Vivian Stringer, Lusia Harris, Lynette Woodard, Cheryl Miller, Cynthia Cooper, Dawn Staley, Carolyn Peck, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Seimone Augustus, Brittney Griner, Maya Moore, A’ja Wilson – the list of stars and coaches goes on and on.

These achievements draw on a rich, deep history.

Black women have played basketball for well over a century. Women seized on the new sport as soon as it was invented, and Black colleges became early supporters. December of 1899, for example, Atlanta University’s alumni magazine proudly announced that “Through the liberality of some friends, supplemented by the work of our own shop, a basket ball outfit has been procured for the girls.”

A month later, as a new century dawned, student L.I. Mack outlined the many ways athletic competition supported Black women’s broader ambitions.

“Educated women who seek employment must keep in mind the fact that only by the sweat of the brow is man’s bread won,” she wrote. “They must also remember that if they descend into the arena, they cannot hope for success unless they accept the conditions under which an athlete must strive. They must be prepared for hard work, for persevering work, because the race will be the same for them as for the men. The men will go beside them, struggling for the same prize; and, since men have, in the start, the advantage of the women, they must brace up every energy, and bring into play every faculty, to avoid defeat and ensure victory. Whatsoever they undertake, they must, and will, and do go through with it to the end.”

By the 1920s, Black high school girls had taken up the game as well, sewing uniforms, posing for pictures, and proudly announcing their achievements.

Eager players at times had to contend with conservative parents. In Siler City, North Carolina, Ruth Glover’s high school career was temporarily derailed when her father objected to the team’s uniforms – specifically their shorts. He only relented when she agreed to keep a skirt waiting on the sidelines. “I had to put on that skirt as so as that game was over!” she recalled, laughing. “We didn’t have cover-ups, but I had to have a skirt.”

The skills Glover developed took her on to Bennett College, which in the 1930s sponsored one of the top Black college teams in the country. All-female Bennett had a lofty reputation, and its students were known as the Bennett Belles. But they saw no contradiction between social graces and athletic prowess.  “We were ladies,” Glover explained. “We just played basketball like boys.”

Alice Coachman, who attended Tuskegee University, became the first Black woman in history to take home Olympic gold when she won the high jump gold medal in the 1948 London Olympics. She also loved basketball. “To get that ball off that backboard, knowing that nobody else could jump that high. That was thrilling,” she said. “If things were as they are now, I probably would be at some university going with the Olympic team in basketball.” But women’s basketball would not be an Olympic sport until 1976, and track took precedence. Coachman became known for her high jumping, not her rebounding.

Black women also played on popular semipro teams, most prominently the Philadelphia Tribunes. Led by Ora Washington, whose prowess at tennis and basketball made her the nation’s first Black female athletic star, the Tribunes’ accomplishments were touted in Black newspapers around the country.

While memories of Washington’s achievements faded for a time, the BBC recently created a multi-part podcast Untold Legends: Ora Washington, in which WNBA star Renee Montgomery explored her life and helped bring her back into the public eye.

Jim Crow segregation meant that many of Black women’s early accomplishments took place within a largely Black world.

Black women were far from welcome at the national AAU tournament – in part because the tournament was dominated by white teams from the South. On the rare occasion that a team with Black players qualified, one longtime official explained, it “was placed in the bracket against the strongest northern team available” and “the officials received strong hints from the powers that be as to how they would like the game called.”

One year when the Tuskegee team was especially good, Alice Coachman overheard athletic director Cleveland Abbott remark, “This team here would go to the finals at the national basketball tournament.” But they never got the chance.

The first Black team to make a mark on the tournament – Philander Smith College – was invited in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. When the Philander Smith players arrived at the event, they were stunned to see dozens of white teams on the floor. Many had no idea that white women played the game at all.

“When we got there and we saw that all the teams were white, we just thought that for sure we’re going to win,” Missouri Arledge later recalled. “I don’t know why, but we thought we were going to win the tournament because I guess we lived a sheltered life in college. We didn’t see too many—well I don’t remember seeing any—white girls playing basketball. All you saw were Black girls playing basketball. That’s what segregation will do for you. You just live in this little shell, and you don’t know what’s going on with the rest of the world.”

Philander Smith reached the quarterfinals, and Arledge was named the first Black female All American. But as with so many civil rights endeavors, progress remained slow. The next Black player to become an All-American, Sally Smith, would not be named until 1969.

Although support for women’s basketball faded in the conservative 1950s, women kept playing when and where they could.

Legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer grew up dribbling and shooting with the boys in her Pennsylvania hometown. She did not play in high school – her school fielded no women’s teams. But she persisted, and was hired to coach at historically Black Cheyney State University in 1971, the year before Congress passed the landmark Title IX legislation. She spent countless hours driving around Philadelphia, stopping to “look on the playgrounds and see who’s playing,” and recruiting the competitors she liked.

“There was a lot of talent,” she recalled. “There were a lot of local clubs and teams, and men and women that really just committed themselves to helping train these athletes. And there was a lot of pride.”

In subsequent years, the opportunities brought by Title IX, combined with unrelenting work and sacrifice, would carry Black women to the pinnacle of their sport, known not just for their play but for their leadership in movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Everyone should know this history. Pass it on.

Images: Cheryl Miller; Hampton University students; Winchester Avenue High students (Monroe, N.C.); Bennett College team (Greensboro Historical Archives, Ruth Glover third from left); Tuskegee team (Alice Coachman second row, center); Philadelphia Tribunes (Ora Washington third from right); Missouri Arledge; Rebekkah Brunson and Natasha Howard (Timothy Nwachukwu/Star Tribune via AP)

CHARLOTTE, NC

The hot pink billboard hovers over a shopping center on the east side of Charlotte, North Carolina. At the center, a young Black woman clad in a short skirt and cropped hoodie lounges on a gilded throne. To her left sits a glittering array of hair care products. To her right, the title proclaims: “From One Queen to Another.”

Angel Reese has come to town.

The LSU hoops star played her way to national renown at the 2023 Women’s Final Four, where her Tigers took the championship game from favored Iowa and the celebrated Caitlin Clark, 102-85. With 30 seconds left in that contest, Reese underscored the achievement by holding her hand between her face and Clark’s in a “can’t see me” gesture pioneered in the World Wrestling Federation. Her lacquered index fingernail marked the spot where her championship ring would rest.

Reese was named the tournament’s most outstanding player, and rose quickly to the top of college sports’ brave new world of Name-Image-Likeness (NIL). As of this November, she was the second-highest NIL earner among college basketball players, beaten only by LeBron James’ son Bronny.  She appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She signed contracts with firms that included Coach, Reebok and Mielle, the line of Black hair care products advertised in the Charlotte billboard.

Around the same time the Mielle billboard went up on Sugar Creek, a downtown banner advertising the Iowa-Virginia Tech Ally Tipoff presented Caitlin Clark in a far different light. Clark, whose pinpoint passing and breathtaking 3-point shooting made her college basketball’s 2023 National Player of the Year, stood in the foreground, hair pulled back, no makeup, all business.

Clark’s NCAA run also brought her plenty of NIL success, including contracts with firms such as Nike, Bose, H&R Block and State Farm Insurance. For 2023, her earnings ranked fourth among female basketball players, twelfth overall.

That two such dramatically different women have drawn this kind of widespread acclamation marks a sharp departure from the restrictions faced by previous generations of female athletes. Historically, athletic women have been encouraged – and frequently required – to blunt the “masculine” associations of athletic success by donning skirts, stockings and makeup, speaking in measured tones and downplaying their competitive zeal.

Efforts to fit top athletes into conventional views of decorative femininity showed especially clearly at the AAU national tournament in the middle of the twentieth century. While no Black squad was invited until the late 1950s, the AAU tournament showcased the nation’s best white players and teams, including powerhouses such as Babe Didrikson’s Golden Cyclones, Hazel Walker’s Lewis & Norwood Flyers and the star-studded Hanes Hosiery. Still, organizers felt the need to augment the top-flight play with an annual beauty pageant (won in 1944 by Hanes Hosiery’s Jimmie Vaughn, pictured below).

Anxieties about conventionally feminine appeal persisted into the early 2000s, when promoters of the fledgling WNBA were still seeking to squeeze players into a one-size-fits-all version of feminine charm.

“There was always this question: ‘How are we going to market women’s sport?’” recalled Sue Wicks, who played for the New York Liberty in those early years. “And their answer was, ‘Well, they need dresses and makeup.’” While some players enjoyed dressing up, many did not. “I see some of the pictures, and it’s comical because the players are so awkward,” Wicks continued. “They would never wear that dress, they would never wear lipstick, and you can see they’re just miserable.”

The world of women’s sports and NILs of course remains entangled in cultural conventions and expectations.

Conventional femininity still sells. Angel Reese’s NIL career has been fueled not simply by her remarkable talent, but by her stature as “Bayou Barbie,” a nickname inspired by her willowy figure, flowing hair, and dramatically long nails and lashes. “As the Bayou Barbie, I love to look my best on and off the court!” she gushed in a Mielle press release. “Mielle has always been there for me.”

In contrast, Caitlin Clark’s State Farm debut paired her with the firm’s trademark khakis. The decidedly non-glamorous attire underscored the classic “girl-next-door” image that is part of Clark’s appeal, and which also invokes the mainstream press goodwill that so often comes with being white.

This goodwill showed when Clark threw a “can’t see me” hand after shooting her sixth 3-pointer in Iowa’s Elite Eight victory over Louisville. Reactions were largely positive, including a shoutout from the gesture’s inventor, WWF competitor John Cena.

But when Reese deployed the gesture, social media became a battleground that featured, as sports journalist Dave Zirin put it, “loathsome right-wing men, mostly white, profanely criticizing Reese” as well as “what felt like a coordinated effort from the most wretched corners of the sports commentariat,” involving “people who two weeks ago did not know who Clark was rushing to her defense and attempting to turn her into their latest fragile white martyr—a casualty of the confidence of a Black woman, a confidence that they wanted to break.”

Mainstream condemnation spread so far that even Charles Barkley called Reese’s move “unfortunate,” prompting Zirin to remark: “If Charles Barkley is reaching for the fainting couch, you know that way too many men in the basketball world have lost the plot.”

Reese stood firm, tweeting: “I’m ‘too hood.’ I’m ‘too ghetto.’ I don’t fit the narrative and I’M OK WITH THAT. I’m from Baltimore where you hoop outside & talk trash. . . . Let’s normalize women showing passion for the game instead of it being ‘embarrassing.’”

Clark refused to play the victim, defending Reese and stating: “I’m just lucky enough that I get to play this game and have emotion and wear it on my sleeve. . . . That should never be torn down. That should never be criticized because I believe that’s what makes this game so fun. That’s what draws people to this game. That’s how I’m going to continue to play. That’s how every girl should continue to play.”

In the end, the sagas of these two remarkable competitors say a great deal about present-day American society and culture. They speak to the expanding media landscape that allows athletes to reach out to multiple audiences, to fans of Southern charm, Midwestern chutzpah, urban panache. They show that women can speak out and be heard, a shift underscored by the jump in popularity the WNBA enjoyed after players took leading roles in promoting Black Lives Matter. There’s a long and likely rocky road ahead for these players and their sport, as the spotlight on the women’s game intensifies. But this holiday season we all have much to celebrate.

DALLAS, TEXAS

Angel Reese’s left leg flashes royal purple as she glides across the court, sporting a single-leg athletic “sleeve.”

In a recent talk with The Sporting News, Reece explained she wears the covering in part to hide a surgical scar, and in part as a nod to WNBA stars A’ja Wilson and T’ea Cooper, who pioneered the popular look within their league.

Although she did not mention it, for many more “mature” basketball fans, the outfit also invokes the glamor of sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose flowing hair, elaborately painted nails and stylish, one-legged running suits transformed the image of female track stars in the 1980s.

As long as American women have played sports, their appearance has been closely examined for clues about their relationship to prevailing feminine ideals – ideals that the assertive clashes of competitive sports have often challenged. Some of this century-long interplay among clothes, players, and changing social norms can be found in Bloomers and Beyond, an article I published in Southern Cultures in the fall of 1997. It’s a fun read – I recommend it.

The present-day is no different. But in a departure from much of women’s basketball history, the uniforms worn by college players at the Final Four and elsewhere have not been deliberately designed to address questions of femininity.

Not that the NCAA doesn’t regulate what college athletes wear. On any imaginable subject, the specifics in the NCAA rules books boggle the mind. To take just one example, in the 2022-23 women’s basketball book Section 16, Article 1 decrees: “The ball shall be spherical. Spherical shall be defined as a round body whose surface at all points is equidistant from the center, except at the approved black rubber ribs (channels and/or seams).”

Uniform requirements display similar detail. They regulate colors, the size, number, and placement of school and manufacturer logos, and the design of sleeves, headbands and socks. They designate a “neutral zone” on jerseys within which “commercial names, logos, marks, and slogans are prohibited.” There is some leeway regarding color: “a tonal design effect is permitted within the neutral zone(s) provided the tonal shifts are not more than 15 percent from the color of the neutral zone.” Players must tuck in their shirts.

The regulations fill five and a half pages of the NCAA women’s basketball rules book as well as six pages of a separately issued “Supplemental Apparel Guide,” which includes instructions such as “Institutional names, mascots or logos are permitted on the game shorts. There is no limit to the number of these permissible logos on the game shorts, but these count toward the color of the shorts.”

Despite their Byzantine appearance, the regulations embody a fairly straightforward set of priorities – helping coaches and referees identify players, tamping down commercial entanglements, and in the words of the supplemental guide, regulating “IMAGE – How players appear on television/fan appeal” (this seems to reference the tucked-in shirt requirement).

Unlike the guidelines laid out by North Carolina officials in 1921, which declared that the state’s female high school players “should be dressed in clothing which is not only proper but attractive, and which will remain in place during the game,” NCAA rules are essentially identical for men and women.

Such developments do not mean that college basketball games unfold in a gender “neutral zone.” Rather, it is left up to coaches and players to chart their own paths, using tools such as hairdos, makeup, and the outfits worn by coaches on the sidelines. And although female athletes have more leeway than ever regarding self-presentation, the greatest social media followings, and the highest NIL payments tend to go to those women who fashion images that mesh well with persisting ideals about glamorous femininity.

The dramatic success of players such as Reese, who has filed to trademark the nickname “Bayou Barbie,” or NIL stars Haley and Hanna Cavinder make clear that while some things have changed, some remain very much the same.

It is the summer of 2003 and I am sitting in the heart of Philadelphia, at a microfilm reader in the archives at Temple University. I squint at the dim screen as I crank through issues of the Philadelphia Tribune, tracking the five-game basketball series played by the Germantown Hornets and the Tribune’s Newsgirls back in 1932. I am having a fine time. The contest see-saws back and forth before my eyes, and the writing is a joy to read.

“The cash customers fanned to fever heat by the ardor and closeness of combat gave outlet to all kinds of riotous impulses,” Tribune sportswriter Randy Dixon wrote after Game 5 went into overtime, and the Newsgirls scored eight unanswered points to triumph 31-23. “They stood on chairs and hollered. Others hoisted members of the winning team upon their shoulders and paraded them around the hall. They jigged and danced, and readers believe me, they were justified. It was just that kind of a game.”

I have come to Temple in search of Ora Washington, the finest black female athlete of the early twentieth century. Basketball fans considered her “the greatest girl player of the age.” In tennis, the Chicago Defender once observed, her “superiority” was “so evident that competitors are frequently beaten before the first ball crosses the net.” Watching her play, one advertisement claimed, could “make you forget the Depression.”

Then, however, she faded from view. In 1976, when she was inducted into a recently organized Black Athletes Hall of Fame, the Times reported that “the seat reserved for her on the dais the night of the induction ceremonies was empty. The silver bowl, gold ring and medallion she was to receive have been returned to the Hall of Fame offices in New York. And Miss Washington’s whereabouts remain a mystery.”

Hall officials did not realize that Washington had passed away five years earlier.

Happily for all of us, she is now getting more notice: a historical marker and online recognition from the state of Pennsylvania, a place in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, an episode of WBUR’s Only a Game, an eight-episode BBC podcast on her life, a piece in the Washington Post’s Retropolis series and now an obituary by Juliet Macur in the New York Times “Overlooked” series, which commemorates people who lived remarkable lives beyond that august institution’s gaze.

Washington has long deserved these honors. Her story also illuminates a vibrant world of African American women’s sports, underscoring the creativity, courage and determination of the generations of African Americans who left the rural South and made new lives for themselves in a rapidly changing world.

Washington retired from competition in the 1940s, just as public attention turned to a rising generation of black players who were finally getting the chance to perform on an integrated stage (in her last national championship, the ATA mixed doubles title of 1947, she and partner George Stewart defeated Walter Johnson and an up-and-coming star named Althea Gibson). She lived in Philadelphia until she passed away in 1971. But when interest in segregation-era sports began to revive, and historians began to tell the stories of stars such as Josh Gibson and “Pop” Gates, they found only traces of Washington – a handful of photographs, a list of victories. Even her name got muddled – some time after she died she was mistakenly dubbed Ora Mae, and the old-fashioned, girlish moniker somehow stuck.

When I started to research Washington’s life for Shattering the Glass, I had a handful of sources: a brief description in A.S. “Doc” Young’s 1963 Negro Firsts in Sports, the pioneering work done by Arthur Ashe in A Hard Road to Glory, and some oral history interviews recorded by Rita Liberti as part of a project on black women’s college basketball. None of them said anything about Washington’s early life. But then, a line in an obituary led me to rural Caroline County, Virginia, where a local librarian connected me with one of Washington’s nephews, J. Bernard Childs.

Childs’ eyesight was fading, but his memory was sharp, and he told story after story about his aunt, and about the large, close Washington family – a narrative backed up by data from the U.S. Census.

Ora had been born in Caroline County at the end of the nineteenth century, the fifth of nine Washington children, in an era when the grip of white supremacy was tightening across the South. Times were hard, and one by one the Washingtons left the family farm to seek their fortunes in Philadelphia. Ora’s aunt Mattie was the first to go. A few years later, when teenaged Ora followed, she stayed with her aunt until she found a job as a housekeeper – work she would do all her life.

Like many young black working women, she joined the “colored” Germantown YWCA, founded in 1918. She picked up a tennis racket sometime in 1924. Her ability must have shown from the beginning – she won her first national title in 1925, and quickly became the brightest star on the black women’s tennis circuit. Women’s basketball was also gaining popularity, and she took up that sport as well, playing center for the Germantown Hornets before switching to the better-funded Tribunes. The promotional talents of manager Otto Briggs, enthusiastic coverage in the Tribune, and Washington’s star power made the Tribunes into the most celebrated female sports team in the nation.

In 1934, for example, the team traveled to Greensboro, North Carolina, to play the Bennett Belles from Bennett College (unlike most white colleges, many historically black institutions encouraged female students to compete). Briggs booked Greensboro’s spacious city arena, where black teams rarely played, and more than a thousand fans showed up to see what the local paper called “the fastest girls’ team in the world,” paced by “the indomitable, internationally famed and stellar performer, Ora Washington.”

She did not disappoint. Six decades later, when Rita Liberti tracked down several of the Bennett players, they had vivid memories of the Tribunes and of Washington. “She wasn’t a huge person, or very tall,” recalled Ruth Glover Mullen. But she was so fast. So fast and so good.”

“She was intimidating,” added Amaleta Moore. “The way she looked at you: ‘You’ve got no business in my way.’”

When Bennett center Lucille Townsend faced off against Washington at the start of the first game she heard a whispered warning: “Don’t outjump me.” She disregarded the admonition at her peril. “I never saw her when she hit me, but she did it so quick it would knock the breath out of me, and I doubled over,” she explained. “She could hit, and she told me that she had played a set of tennis on her knees and won it.”

Ora Washington needed every ounce of that determination. Like most black female athletes, she navigated multiple worlds. African American tennis was dominated by doctors, lawyers and other professionals who saw the genteel game as evidence of their arrival among a national elite. The working-class crowds who packed the Tribunes’ games were looking for heart-stopping entertainment. The wealthy whites whose homes she made her living cleaning – even a star of her magnitude never made enough from sports to pay the bills – expected deference and discretion. Through it all, it seems quite clear, she stayed true to herself.

Her force of personality shows clearly in one of my favorite stories. She officially retired from tennis singles in 1937, after winning her eighth national title. But in the summer of 1939, she picked up her racket for one last tournament. She reached the finals, defeated rising star Flora Lomax, 6-2, 1-6, 2-6, and promptly retired again. She minced no words about her motives. “Certain people said certain things last year,” she told the Baltimore Afro-American. “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. I lost the second set to her but this was the first and only set she ever won from me.”

I suspect that self-assurance contributed to her quick slide from the public eye. Unlike Lomax, a flirtatious beauty who became known as “the glamour girl of tennis,” Washington focused on her play, spoke her mind, and formed her closest relationships with other women. Socializing after games was not her style. “The land at large has never bowed at Ora’s shrine of accomplishment in the proper tempo,” Randy Dixon wrote after her retirement, surmising that “She committed the unpardonable sin of being a plain person with no flair whatever for what folks love to call society.”

But that independence also meant she had a life beyond the court. When her athletic career ended, she slipped into obscurity, but not poverty or despair. She kept working, and spent her time with friends and with her large, extended family. In the summers, when she gathered with family members at the Caroline County farm, she avidly joined the games played on the family croquet court. “She was out there mostly with somebody, about every day,” Childs recalled. “They would go there just about every afternoon.”

Ora Washington’s latest wave of fame thus commemorates not simply athletic talent, but the ability to build a new life from the opportunities at hand. She traveled farther and achieved more than anyone could have imagined for an African American farm girl making her own way at the inauspicious start of the twentieth century. Bringing her back into the public eye not only honors her athletic achievements, it reminds us of the courage and determination that remain to be discovered in so many corners of our nation’s history.

For more about Washington, see “Ora Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star,” published in David K. Wiggins’ fine edited collection Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes (University of Arkansas Press, 2006).

Ora Washington, trophy in hand, looks over at fellow tennis player Dorothy Morgan, posed beside her with an awkward smile. Morgan is taller and far younger than Washington, but she has been no match for the 40-year-old star, who has just beaten her 6-2, 6-1 to win the Philadelphia Open. Washington stands with balanced, easy grace. Her expression suggests utter satisfaction.

Ora Washington, the greatest Black female athlete of the early twentieth century, left few clues to the private side of her extraordinary career. She wrote no memoir, and the sportswriters of her era offered little insight into athletes’ nonsporting lives. Basic facts remained in doubt – even as the twenty-first century began, the few scattered accounts of Washington’s achievements got plenty wrong.

I started running into these mistakes when I began researching Washington’s life for Shattering the Glass, and it seemed my duty as a historian to nail down as many facts as possible. I visited archives, scrolled through microfilm, and scrutinized photographs. I did some oral history interviews, although the number of people who remembered Washington was rapidly diminishing.

I wrote a short essay about what I had learned and published it with the hope that someone else would come along – someone younger, perhaps, someone more personally invested in Black women’s sports, someone who had the passion and the imagination to dive deeper than I could.
And now, almost two decades later, here we are. I’m delighted to announce that Stance Studios, working with the BBC, has produced an eight-episode podcast on Washington’s life, shaped in many ways by young Black women. Hosted by WNBA star, political activist and team co-owner Renee Montgomery, “Untold Legends” debuted August 29^th. You can listen to it here, and read Montgomery’s thoughts on Ora here.