Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

5. Ora Washington: The First Black Female Athletic Star

Ora Washington pictured here, second from left, at the 1947 American Tennis Association Championships. To her right is George Stewart, and to her left are Walter Johnson and Althea Gibson. (Courtesy of Tuskegee University) 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 78 5 Ora Washington The First Black Female Athletic Star P A M E L A G R U N D Y On a now-forgotten day in the mid-1910s, a young African American woman stepped off a train car, and on to the bustling streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As Ora Washington gathered her belongings and set off to stay at an aunt’s home, she likely attracted little notice. The Great Migration was underway, and black southerners had become a dime a dozen in Philadelphia, pouring into the city by the tens of thousands in search of work and of some respite from rising racial oppression . Washington, arriving from rural Virginia, was just one more. But there was far more to Ora Washington than met the eye. In Philadelphia, she found not only a job, but an outlet for an extraordinary set of athletic gifts. By the mid-1920s, the young Virginian had become one of the brightest stars on a growing African American tennis circuit. By the 1930s, she was the nation’s first full-fledged black female sports star, dominating not only black women’s tennis, but basketball as well. No African American woman had ever played the way she did. Black newspapers across the country dubbed her “Queen Ora,” describing her as “brilliant,” “peerless,” and “inimitable.”1 “No one who ever saw her play could forget her,” recalled one admirer, “nor could anyone who met her.”2 Washington’s fame, however, proved short-lived. Her career stretched from the mid-1920s into the mid-1940s, ending just as many racial barriers in American sports began to crumble. After World War II, a hopeful black public focused much of its attention on a new generation of racial pioneers, barrier breakers such as Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, and Wilma Rudolph. Stars of the Jim Crow era faded out of view. In 1963, when veteran sportswriter A. S. “Doc” Young profiled Washington for his 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 79 book Negro Firsts in Sports, he termed her “virtually an unknown name.” A private person, Washington herself rarely talked about her achievements . “She wasn’t a person to tell you too much,” recalled nephew Bernard Childs. “She would tell you some things, some parts of her career. . . . Older people might have known a little bit, but we didn’t.” When she passed away, in May 1971, her death attracted little notice.3 In many ways, Ora Washington remains an enigma. Photographs show a tall, light-skinned woman with a square jaw, a quietly serious expression, and a sharply incised set of muscles. Descriptions of her play make clear that she possessed enormous natural talent, backed by a keen sense of strategy and a fierce competitive drive. But she left no memoir . The friends and family who knew her best have passed away. The reporters who rhapsodized over points scored and games won rarely dipped below the surface to chronicle what she thought of her life and accomplishments. Still, even in fragmentary, enigmatic form, hers is an emblematic story. Washington belonged to a remarkable group of working-class black women who seized on the opportunities created by the Great Migration, traveling from the rural south to the urban north and pioneering careers as businesswomen, evangelists, blues and gospel singers, even airplane pilots. Her triumphs point to the remarkable fortitude these women possessed and to the family and community resources on which they drew. The obstacles she faced make clear how taxing these struggles were. Together, they tell a story at once sobering and inspiring , about human potential both thwarted and achieved. Ora Washington blazed her own trail. She was born at the close of the nineteenth century, into a world where female athletic stardom was not even a far-fetched dream. Her parents—James Thomas “Tommy” Washington and Laura Young Washington—lived on a family farm amid the gentle hills of Virginia’s Caroline County, about halfway between Richmond and Washington, D.C. In the small, rural community of File, farming was the main occupation, and the Washington’s nine children— Ora was number five—lived lives focused...