Lucy Diggs Slowe was a trailblazer as an academic and athlete. In 1922, she was the first African American woman to serve as permanent Dean of Women and Professor of English at Howard University. Slowe established a separate women’s campus and three new dormitories to address women’s academic, physical, professional, and social development on the Howard campus.
In 1917, however, Slowe became the first African American to win a national title in any sport. She won her first women’s title at the American Tennis Association’s (ATA) tournament in Baltimore, Maryland. She would later win a total of 17 tennis cup championships. In 2011, Slowe was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame.
Lucy Diggs Slowe was born on July 4, 1883, in Berryville, Clarke County, Virginia, the youngest of seven children to Henry Slowe, a hotel operator, and Fannie Potter Slowe. Sadly, a year later, in 1884, Slowe’s father died, and five years later, when she was six years old, her mother died. Slowe was adopted and raised by her paternal aunt, Martha Slowe Price, who moved Lucy and her sister, Charlotte, from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. Slowe later graduated as a Salutatorian from the Baltimore Colored High School in 1904.
In the fall of 1904, Slowe received a scholarship to attend Howard University. In 1908, while at Howard, Slowe was one of nine founding members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority for college-educated African American women. Later that year she graduated from Howard University as class valedictorian. After graduation, she held her first teaching appointment at Douglass High School in Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1915, Slowe graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science in New York. Four years later, in 1919, the Washington, D.C., school system installed Slowe as the first principal of Shaw Junior High School. Under Slowe’s leadership, the school developed curricula and created an advanced teacher training program. Slowe also partnered with Columbia University to offer an extension course in education attended by black and white junior high school teachers.
Slowe was also a significant mentor and a tireless advocate for thousands of Black women in higher education. In 1923, she became the president of the National Association of College Women (NACW), which worked to improve conditions for black women faculty and encourage the publication of advanced scholarship among these professors. In 1929, Slowe founded the National Association of Deans of Women and Advisers to Girls in Negro Schools, a national leadership organization to uplift the educational training and professional development of black women.
By 1935, Slowe co-organized the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and served as its first Secretary. She broke racial barriers as one of the earliest members of the mostly white American Association of University Women (AAUW). Slowe never had children nor married. For 15 years, she has been credited with mentoring nearly 1,000 students annually. By early 1937, Slowe suffered from pleurisy, which caused shortness of breath, excessive fluid in her lungs, and kidney disease. She died in Washington, DC, on October 21, 1937, at the age of 52. Her longtime open lesbian partner, Mary Powell Burrill, a public-school teacher, was by her side when she passed.
Lucy Diggs Slowe is buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Suitland, Maryland.
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C.L. Miller and A.S. Pruitt-Logan, Faithful to the task at hand: The life of Lucy Diggs Slowe. (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012).
Karen Anderson & L.D. Slower, From” Brickbats and Roses”: Lucy Diggs Slowe, 1883-1937. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 22: 1-2 (1994), 134-140.
Edward T. James, ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971).
