04/19/2026
On July 4, 1883, a baby girl was born in Berryville, Virginia, the seventh child of Henry and Fannie Slowe.
By the time she was six years old, both her parents were gone.
Her aunt, Martha Price, took in Lucy and her six siblings and moved the family from Virginia to Baltimore in search of better schools. It was a decision that changed everything — not just for Lucy, but for thousands of women who came after her.
Lucy Diggs Slowe entered the Baltimore public school system at thirteen, in a city where Black children attended segregated schools with fewer resources and less of everything. She had gaps in her education. She was older than most of her classmates. She didn't let either of those things stop her.
She excelled. Then she did more than excel.
She became the first female graduate and first scholarship recipient of the Baltimore Colored School to attend Howard University — one of the most prestigious Black universities in the country at a time when fewer than one third of one percent of African Americans attended college at all.
At Howard, she did what she would do everywhere she went for the rest of her life: she built things.
She co-founded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in 1908 — the first Greek-letter sorority established by and for African American women. She served as its first president. She drafted its constitution. The organization she helped create now has over 350,000 members worldwide and has shaped the lives of Black women for more than a century.
She also graduated as valedictorian.
And she played tennis.
Her family called her love of the game "insatiable." On the court, her fellow players had a nickname for the woman whose last name meant slow:
"She may have been Lucy 'Slowe,'" one of them said, "but on the court she was Lucy 'Fast.'"
In 1917, the American Tennis Association held its first-ever national tournament. It was created because the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association barred Black players entirely.
Lucy Diggs Slowe won it.
She became the first African American woman to win a major national sports title in any sport — years before Althea Gibson, decades before Arthur Ashe, in a country that had specifically organized its sporting institutions to make sure she couldn't compete.
She competed anyway.
By 1919, she had earned a master's degree from Columbia University and been appointed founding principal of Washington D.C.'s first junior high school for Black students. She built the curriculum, designed teacher training programs, and convinced Columbia to offer extension courses that Black and white teachers attended together — an almost unheard-of integration in 1919 Washington.
In 1922, Howard University asked her to return. Not just as a professor. As the first Dean of Women in the university's history — and the first African American woman to hold such a position at any college in the United States.
For fifteen years, she transformed the experience of women at Howard. She created three women's dormitories when none existed. She gave freshmen mentors. She ensured women had seats in campus policymaking. She built a professional network of deans at Black colleges across the country who modeled their programs on hers. She led the National Association of College Women as its founding president. She testified before Congress. She co-founded professional organizations that still exist today.
She did all of this while living, quietly and devotedly, with her partner Mary Burrill — a playwright and educator — in a Queen Anne Victorian home in D.C.'s Brookland neighborhood. They never publicly announced their relationship. Their closest friends knew. They were together for more than twenty years.
Then Howard University got a new president. Mordecai Johnson was not comfortable with Lucy Diggs Slowe.
He was not comfortable with her beliefs about women's autonomy. He was not comfortable with the power she had built. He was not comfortable with her refusal to live on campus under his supervision, the way he believed a dean of women should — even though male deans were never asked to do the same.
He cut her budget. He removed her from the Board of Deans. He let her pay fall behind her male colleagues. When a student reported sexual harassment by a professor, Slowe determined the professor should be fired. Johnson refused.
She didn't yield.
She went to the press. She went to alumni. She went to colleagues across the country. She fought every single battle he brought to her door.
Eventually the stress broke her health. She was bedridden.
In September 1937, Johnson sent a subordinate to her sickbed to deliver an ultimatum: return to campus within 24 hours or be removed as dean.
She had spent fifteen years building the foundation of women's education at one of America's great universities. She was dying.
She still did not yield.
Lucy Diggs Slowe died on October 21, 1937. She was 52 years old. Her family made clear that Mordecai Johnson would have no role in her funeral.
After her death, Mary Burrill kept Lucy's photograph on the piano — next to a vase of white carnations. They had been together for twenty-five years.
Howard University named a residence hall after her. A street bears her name. An elementary school. A plaque at the headquarters of the national organization she helped found. Her sorority has shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of women.
And somewhere on a tennis court in Baltimore in 1917, in a tournament that existed because America wouldn't let her play in the other one, a woman whose last name meant slow crossed the court like lightning and won.
"Education must fit women for the highest development of their own gifts," she wrote. "Whatever those gifts, they will not be able to exercise them unless they understand the world they live in — and are prepared to make their contribution to it."
She understood the world she lived in.
And she made her contribution to it every single day she was alive.
