At a glitzy downtown New York hotel, the recently founded Black Athletes Hall of Fame was holding its annual ceremony.
It was March 1976 and the host was giving a speech about the latest inductee. You probably won’t know her name.
Ora Washington was a champion, a star of two sports, but prejudice stopped her competing for the biggest prizes of the day. Her sporting career spanned three decades of change in her native United States, but change didn’t come quickly enough.
Washington retired from tennis and basketball in the 1940s. In the mid-1970s a new generation started to dig deeper into her story.
As the host finished introducing Washington to those gathered for that glamorous occasion, they started on something new: an apology.
Washington wasn’t there. There was a chair placed out on the stage for her, empty. The host said they were sorry but they hadn’t been able to track her down.
The New York Times wrote in its report the next day: “The silver bowl, gold ring and medallion she was to receive have been returned to the Hall of Fame offices in New York. And Miss Washington’s whereabouts remain a mystery.”
What nobody seemed to know was that Washington had already been dead for five years.
Washington’s is a powerful and important story. She was one of the most extraordinary Black female athletes of the 20th century. Tennis great Arthur Ashe described her as “the first Black female to dominate a sport”.
There are still lots of things we can’t know about Washington, but we do know she received homophobic abuse, and that racism and white supremacy denied her both the opportunity and recognition she deserved.
Washington’s life threw up obstacles all along the way. And she took on the same types of injustice that many are still fighting today.
Washington was born in January 1898 or 1899 - the records aren’t clear. Her early life was spent in a small farming community called File in Caroline County, Virginia.
Hers was a large, tight-knit family, and they owned a farm. They’d built up some economic independence by the standards of the day. Historian Pamela Grundy, who contributes to the podcast series, went there some years ago and found out Washington was the fifth of nine children.
Grundy tracked down JB Childs, Washington’s nephew, who shared his memories of the farm.
“They grew tobacco, corn wheat, rye and all sorts of vegetables,” he told her. “Tobacco was the biggest money strike. They raised tobacco and sold it in the winter - always have some for Christmas, whoever needed it. That’s the way they made a living.”
As residents of Virginia, the Washingtons lived under a web of legislation ensuring they would remain second-class citizens at every stage of their lives - formal segregation by race.
Across the first quarter of the 20th century, Black American people were leaving the South and heading for the cities and jobs of the North: New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and many others. What historians call ‘The Great Migration’.
We can’t be sure when, but sometime in the 1910s a teenage Washington packed her bags and left the old family farm, and the South, for good.
She took the train north to Philadelphia to join her Aunt Mattie, stepping into the big city for the first time, into a new life.
The world she was entering was rich with newly emerging opportunities that previous generations of women - particularly Black women - never had, including organised sport. – (BBC Sports)