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BEFORE ALTHEA GIBSON, THERE WAS ORA WASHINGTON

By Chanté Griffin

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WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Ora Washington did more on two courts than most ever do on one.







It’s spectacular for any athlete to make it into one national hall of fame, but
to qualify in more than one sport is a rarity, reserved for the elite of the
elite — for athletes like Ora Washington.

Now often relegated to the footnotes of history, Washington dominated
professional women’s basketball from 1930 to 1943, serving as the leading scorer
and captain for the Philadelphia Tribunes for 11 consecutive years. “She
basically created female basketball stardom,” says sports historian Pamela
Grundy. “She certainly created Black female athletic stardom.”

Yet basketball was a secondary sport, one Washington played during her off
season from tennis, where she captured more than 20 national titles with the
American Tennis Association (ATA) during her two-decade career on the court.
“She was like Serena Williams, the Althea [Gibson] of her time,” says Arthur
Carrington, ATA historian and author of Black Tennis: An Archival Collection
1890–1962. Her unprecedented ascent into basketball and tennis stardom is more
remarkable given the intersectional dynamics of race, class and gender of early
20th century America that simultaneously fueled and impeded her career.

Nothing about Washington’s upbringing or physique suggested athletic promise.
She was born to farmers in the late 1890s or early 1900s in Caroline County,
Virginia, and grew to be only 5 feet, 7 inches. But in the 1910s, Washington
made her way to Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration, during which an
estimated 6 million African Americans moved from their Southern homes to
industrial Northern cities. There she lived with her aunt Mattie, found work as
a maid and took up tennis at the Germantown YWCA, which was reserved for
non-white women. This Y would become the epicenter of Washington’s athletic
career — and a cultural hub for the city’s Black community. During its 1918
grand opening, poet James Weldon Johnson, writer of the Black national anthem
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” delivered the keynote address.




Washington’s natural athleticism was apparent from the beginning of her training
at the Y. In 1925, her second year of tournament play, she captured the women’s
doubles title at the ATA nationals. She went on to win eight singles
championships, 12 consecutive doubles titles and three mixed doubles titles.

But the forces of segregation that provided Washington the opportunity to become
the first Black female sports star also precluded her from becoming one in
American society as a whole. The all-Black ATA formed in 1916 because the United
States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) — which would eventually become the USTA
— refused to allow Black athletes to play. Helen Willis Moody, the leading USTA
female athlete in the ’20s and ’30s, never played Washington, says Carrington,
even though the leading white male player of the era, Grand Slam winner Don
Budge, played Jimmie McDaniel, the reigning ATA champ, in a historic match in
July 1940. 

Undeterred, Washington added another sport to her roster. When she returned to
Philadelphia in 1930 after a brief stint in Chicago, she started her
professional career in basketball, first with the Germantown Hornets, based at
the Germantown Y, and then with the “Tribune Girls,” an industrial team
sponsored by The Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest U.S. newspaper serving the
African American community. “She became a staple of the sports pages of the
black press, sometimes capturing the headline over the male players,” writes
historian Jennifer H. Lansbury in A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in
Twentieth-Century America. Continuous coverage by the Tribune only increased her
notoriety as a formidable competitor on the court. Nicknamed the “Newsgirls,”
Washington and her teammates balled hard. Washington, particularly, was noted
for her stamina and the fact that she could shoot with either hand. Sometimes,
the Newsgirls even played male teams — and won.

 


The Tribune Girls basketball team, circa the 1930s. Ora Washington is third from
the right.

Source Charles L. Blockson Collection at Temple University.

Washington’s career emerged during the United States’ “golden era” of sports
when women’s athletics gained mainstream acceptance. But this uptick fueled
fears that it would destroy femininity, make women sexually insatiable or damage
their reproductive organs. To counter such arguments, female athletes were
encouraged to be hyperfeminine and not too competitive.

“There was a lot of interest in having women who could be athletic but also sort
of conventionally feminine,” says Grundy. But Washington pushed against the
tide: She’s thought to be the first Black female tennis player to wear shorts on
the court, and she never married.

While Washington’s name sits in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame,
Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, Black Athletes Hall of Fame and Black Tennis
Hall of Fame, it is not listed in the International Tennis Hall of Fame — though
Althea Gibson, whom Washington beat in her last professional mixed doubles
championship game, is. The USTA didn’t desegregate until 1948, right when
Washington’s career was ending and Gibson’s was beginning. Gibson, of course,
went on to international tennis stardom, while Washington lived a quiet
postathletic life, working as a maid, and died with no fanfare on May 28, 1971.

Unless Washington is inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, she
will most widely be celebrated for her prowess on the basketball court, which
was recently cemented with a statue of a young girl playing basketball, erected
in her honor on the Smith Playground in Philadelphia. To sports historians,
however, “Queen Ora” will always be the queen of two courts.


 * Chanté Griffin, OZY Author Contact Chanté Griffin




The Daily Dose March 23, 2020

TOPICS

 * African American Culture
 * Badass Women of History
 * Black History
 * SPORTS
 * Sports History


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