Lucy Diggs Slowe

Lucy Diggs Slowe was born in Berryville, Virginia, on the fourth of July 1885, the youngest of seven children. Both her parents died before she was thirteen; she was raised by an aunt in Baltimore.

She entered Howard University in 1904 on a scholarship — the first awarded to a woman by the District of Columbia colored high schools — and graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1908. While at Howard she co-founded Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority for African American women, on the fifteenth of January 1908.

She took her master's in English at Columbia University in 1915 and served as a public-school administrator in Baltimore and Washington. She founded the Shaw Junior High School in Washington in 1919 — the first Black-led junior high school in the District — and served as its first principal.

She was appointed the first Dean of Women at Howard University in 1922 and held the position for the last fifteen years of her life. She transformed the role from a chaperone position into a substantive academic administrative office, founded the National Association of Deans of Women in Negro Schools in 1929, and chaired the National Council of Negro Women's first major collegiate-organizing project under Mary McLeod Bethune (also placed in this archive).

She was an accomplished tennis player and one of the founders of the American Tennis Association — the Black-led tennis organization that produced Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe two generations later. She won the inaugural ATA Women's Singles Championship in 1917 — the first major sports title won by an African American woman.

She died of complications from kidney disease in Washington on the twenty-first of October 1937, age fifty-two.

She is honored here as the dean who built Black women's higher education at Howard.