Previous Message

Before Serena, and even before Althea Gibson, there was another African American superstar in the sport of tennis whose name is hardly known due to segregation.

Meet Lucy Diggs Slowe (pictured below.) One fellow teammate described her as "Lucy Fast" on the court despite her last name of slowe.

In 1917, she won the inaugural ATA championship match at Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, Maryland, becoming the first African American woman to win a national championship in any sport, paving the way for Althea Gibson, who later broke the International Tennis color line. Ms. Slowe was also a 17-time tennis champion.

In 2011, Slowe was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame.

Slowe's success went far beyond the tennis court. She graduated from Howard University in 1908 and received her bachelor’s degree in English. She graduated at the top of her class as valedictorian.

Three years later, Slowe pursued further education at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science in New York. In 1915, she earned her master’s degree in English.

As an educator, she created the first junior high school in the Washington, D.C., school system and served as its first principal in 1919 before becoming Howard University's first Dean of Women in 1922.

If you're interested in learning more about the life of this fascinating woman, there are two main books about her: "Faithful to the Task at Hand: The Life of Lucy Diggs Slowe" by Carroll L.L. Miller and Anne S. Pruitt-Logan, and "Her Truth and Service: Lucy Diggs Slowe in Her Own Words" edited by Amy Yeboah Quarkume.