Born: 23 January 1898, United States
Died: 21 December 1971
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Tennis and basketball star Ora Washington was dubbed “Queen Ora” and the “Queen of Two Courts” by African-American newspapers of the time. Inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018, she was also considered by Arthur Ashe as one of the best tennis players of all time.
Born in Virginia circa 1899, she was the fifth of nine children. Her mother died in childbirth in 1908, and the family migrated north in the mid-1910s. In 1918, a YWCA opened for African-American women in her Germantown (Philadelphia) neighborhood. Not long after her older sister died of tuberculosis, Washington started playing tennis on the YWCA courts in the early 1920s. A state historical marker dedicated to her marks the location today.
Washington soon won the Wilmington, Delaware, city championships in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles in 1924. The next year, she bested the the reigning national African American singles champion Isadore Channels and won her first national title, with Lula Ballard in doubles at the all-Black American Tennis Association, going on to win at the tournament for the following 11 years. Moving to Chicago in 1929, she won her first singles championship that year, followed by seven more before retiring in 1938. Because Washington was still a dominant player and continued playing doubles until the mid-1940s, the press soon latched on to Flora Lomax, who won the 1938 singles title, as the reason, claiming that Washington had retired to avoid facing Lomax. The following summer, Washington came out of retirement temporarily to defeat Lomax in a tournament. Although she wanted to compete in United States Lawn Tennis Association tournaments, they were racially segregated until 1948.
Several years after taking up tennis, Washington played her first official basketball game with the Germantown Hornets in 1930, with the team’s 22-1 record that season earning them a national title. The team was also sponsored by the Germantown YWCA before becoming an independent, professional team that played against African-American women’s teams, white women’s teams and African-American men’s teams. Washington later led the Hornets to 33 consecutive victories. She went on to play center for, and coach, the Philadelphia Tribune Girls from 1932 to 1942, and was the team’s lead scorer. The team won 11 consecutive Women’s Colored Basketball World’s Championships, and Washington was dubbed “the best Colored player in the world.
A statue inspired by her, titled “MVP”, was erected in Smith Playground in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park in 2019.