Slowe, Lucy Diggs

Impact on the world

Won the inaugural American Tennis Association championship in 1917, becoming the first African American woman to win a national title in any sport, years before later co-founding the first Black junior high school in Washington, D.C. and then, in 1922, becoming the first Black woman appointed Dean of Women at any American university; as Howard University's dean for 15 years, she established a dedicated women's campus, fought to secure equal educational standards and protections for female students including resisting sexual harassment by male faculty, and was the first Black person invited to address the predominantly white National Association of Women Deans, while separately serving as a founding member and first president of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Life & background

Orphaned by age six in Berryville, Virginia, Slowe was raised by an aunt in Baltimore, where she graduated at the top of her segregated high school class and became Howard University's first graduate from that school on full scholarship, going on to graduate Howard as class valedictorian in 1908. While an undergraduate she helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority created by and for Black women, serving as its founding chapter president and helping draft its constitution, and the same era saw her become the first African American woman to win a national championship in any American sport, claiming the inaugural American Tennis Association title in 1917 in a tournament Black players had organized for themselves after the existing national tennis association barred them outright. Her first cousin, Elder Watson Diggs, would go on three years later to co-found and serve as the first national president of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, making the two cousins founders of separate, historic Black Greek-letter organizations. After earning a master's degree in English from Columbia University, she was tapped in 1919 to organize and lead Washington, D.C.'s first junior high school for Black students, and in 1922 became the first Black woman appointed Dean of Women at any university in the country when Howard University hired her, a role she used to study peer deans at other institutions and establish rigorous, specialized standards for women's education that influenced the appointment of female deans at Black colleges nationwide; her insistence that women deserved educational quality equal to men's repeatedly put her at odds with the university's male leadership, including a 1933 dispute in which Howard's administration, under President Mordecai Johnson, pressured her to leave the home she had shared for over a decade with her partner, playwright and educator Mary Burrill, and move into campus housing, a demand she resisted. She co-founded both the National Association of College Women, serving as its first president, and the Association of Advisors to Women in Colored Schools, and helped organize the National Council of Negro Women in 1935; she died of kidney disease in 1937 while still serving as dean, and Howard's Slowe Hall, a women's dormitory built partly through her own advocacy, was named in her honor in 1943.

Sources

1. National Women's History Museum; Maryland State Archives (Maryland Women's Hall of Fame); Encyclopedia.com; Columbia University Athletics; Ballot & Beyond