Ora Washington (1898-1971) was a dual-threat on both the tennis and basketball court who fought through early 20th century obstructions of race, class, and gender to become the first African American female sports superstar.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today we are celebrating a dual-threat athlete on both the tennis and basketball court. Amidst collecting trophies and winning tournaments, she fought through early 20th century obstructions of race, class, and gender to become the first African American female sports superstar.
Meet the “Queen of the Courts”, Ora Washington.
Ora Washington was born on January 23, 1898, in Caroline County, Virginia. She was the fifth child out of nine. Her parents, James Thomas and Laura Young, owned a farm. But the economy was too poor to make much of a living.
At 15,,Ora joined the estimated 6 million African Americans who migrated from the South to the industrialized North. She settled in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia with her Aunt Mattie and found work as a housekeeper.
It is believed that Ora decided to take up tennis as a way to cope with the death of her sister. She spent many hours at the neighborhood Germantown YWCA, which was reserved for non-white women. Ora excelled at tennis from the beginning. But it wasn’t until she was 25 that she began playing competitively.
Tennis, at the time, was racially segregated. The United States Tennis Association banned Black players from competing. In response, Black professionals founded the American Tennis Association -- the A-T-A -- in 1916. It’s the oldest Black sports organization in the U.S.
In Ora’s second year of tournament play, in 1925, she won her first national tournament in women’s doubles at the ATA national championship. For the next 12 years, Ora would remain undefeated. She went on to win 8 singles championships, 12 consecutive doubles titles, and three mixed doubles titles.
She was so dominant that in 1931, the Chicago Defender wrote, “Her superiority is so evident that her competitors are frequently beaten before the first ball crosses the net.”
Ora was dubbed “The Queen of the Courts”.
But she ruled over more than just the tennis courts..
In 1930, Ora began her professional basketball career during the tennis off-season.Back at the Germantown Y, where she’d first picked up a tennis racket, Ora joined the Germantown Hornets basketball team as the starting center. In her first year, she led the team to a national title, ending with a 22-1 record.
In 1932, Ora was recruited to play for the Philadelphia Tribunes, a team sponsored by the city’s oldest black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune. Due to their sponsors, the players were nicknamed the “Newsgirls.”
Their dominance in their own league meant they occasionally competed against white teams and male teams — and they won. During her 10 year period with the team, Ora was the leading scorer, carrying the Newsgirls to ten straight Women’s Colored Basketball World Championship titles.
Ora had seemingly endless stamina and the ability to shoot with both hands. During a period when women’s athletics were gaining mainstream popularity, Ora’s career did not go unnoticed.
She pioneered Black female athletic stardom. She pushed back against feminine ideals that society believed to be under threat during this rise in female athleticism. Instead of conforming, Ora stayed true to herself by never marrying, wearing shorts instead of a long skirt on the tennis court, and refusing to change her rugged appearance into something more feminine when she got off the court. Unable to deny Ora’s athletic prowess, critics took shots at her physical appearance.
Fortunately, the criticism didn’t get in the way of her winning. Between tennis and basketball, Ora won 201 trophies.
In 1938, Ora retired from singles in tennis. That same year, “tennis’ glamour girl,” Flora Lomax, entered the scene as the one to beat. So in 1939, Ora came out of retirement to specifically play Flora. Ora traveled to Buffalo to compete in the same tournament as Flora, beat her, and then retired again.
While Ora got her opportunity to beat Flora, she was not awarded the same chance to beat the USTA’s leading white female athlete, Helen Willis Moody. Helen refused to play Ora.
Despite not getting the opportunity to compete with the top white player,, Ora’s success was not questioned. It was actually her dominance that encouraged the Roosevelt administration to build hundreds of public tennis courts in primarily black and brown neighborhoods during the height of the Great Depression. These courts would be the ones on which tennis legends Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson would learn the game.
In fact, it was Althea Gibson who Ora played and beat in her final doubles title in 1947, before officially retiring from both sports.
American tennis didn’t desegregate until the end of Ora’s career and the beginning of Althea’s, in 1948. Due to this timing, Ora is not listed in the International Tennis Hall of Fame, despite her incredible accomplishments. She is 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.
After retiring, Ora disappeared from the spotlight and continued her work as a housekeeper, a job she maintained throughout her athletic career. She was able to purchase an apartment where she lived quietly and comfortably until her death.
Ora died at the age of 73 on May 28, 1971, in Philadelphia.
Because of segregation, Ora is often left out of the tennis superstars conversation. But rest assured, before there was Althea Gibson and Venus and Serena Williams, there was Ora Washington.
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