Dispatch #91 White Lesbian Age 69 Considers Legacies of Two Extraordinary Black Women Warriors – a Writer and an Athlete

March 9th 2022

412 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

683 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

On International Women’s Day, due respect is paid here to Valerie Boyd, a warrior woman now foremother who transitioned last month at age 58.  As a writing professor at the University of Georgia, Ms. Boyd built a narrative fiction program that nurtured a generation of young writers, primarily women of color, to pursue careers in nonfiction, and created supportive community that extended long beyond the program. Rosalind Bentley, who was among the first students in the program, said in a phone interview. “And here was a woman saying, ‘No, there are other people who have something to say, and I’m going to clear that path.”  www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/books/valerie-boyd-dead.html

Ms. Boyd was probably best known nationally for her book “Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston” (2003), which took her almost a decade to write and won widespread critical acclaim.  She was already well known around the South, especially in her hometown, Atlanta, as both an electrifying essayist and an energizing mentor. 

Ms. Boyd happened to meet Alice Walker during her research for the biography and said that Walker, upon learning of her work, touched her face and said, “Bless you, my child.” Some years after the publication of the Hurston biography, when Walker set out to publish her journals from the years 1965 to 2000, she selected Ms. Boyd as her partner in the endeavor. “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker,” edited by Ms. Boyd, is slated to be published April 12, according to the publishing house Simon and Schuster. in a statement provided by the Joy Harris Literary Agency, Ms. Walker said:

“Valerie Boyd was one of the best people ever to live, which she did as a free being. Even though illness was stalking her the past several years, she accompanied me in gathering, transcribing, and editing my journals. … This was a major feat, a huge act of love and solidarity, of sisterhood, of soul generosity and shared joy, for which she will be remembered.”  www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/02/15/zora-neale-hurston-biographer-valerie-boyd/

As the women’s NCAA Divison I basketball tournament approaches, Ora Washington is paid tribute here. Dominant in tennis and basketball in the 1920s through the 40s, Washington was so good at both sports that she was hailed in the Black press as “Queen Ora” and the “Queen of Two Courts”.

Washington “can do everything required of a basketball player,” the sports columnist Randy Dixon wrote in 1939 in the Black weekly newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier. “She passes and shoots with either hand. She is a ball hawk. She has stamina and speed that make many male players blush with envy.” Her remarkable basketball skills were “flashy and aggressive,” as The Courier said in 1931, and brought spectators rushing to see her decades before the women’s game became popular in mainstream society.

On the tennis court, Washington was perhaps even more spectacular. Beginning in 1929, she won seven straight national singles championships as part of the American Tennis Association, a league that welcomed all comers when the world’s top league, the United States Lawn Tennis Association, allowed only white players.

With a searing serve and an unconventional way of holding the racket halfway up its neck, Washington won her matches “with ridiculous ease” and “walloped opponents into the also-ran-columns” with her “flying feet, keen sight, hairline timing and booming shots,” The New York Age, another Black newspaper, wrote in 1939.

Washington was known for her physical, intimidating style of play. “Competitors 60 years after the fact had quite vivid memories of her skills and style,” said sport historian Rita Liberti.  Ruth Glover Mullen, who played against Washington in the 1930s, told Liberti that facing Washington “was just like playing a Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan.”

Washington passed away in 1971 in Philadelphia with little notice.  After retiring in 1947, she’d been working as a housekeeper, just as she’d done throughout her sports career and her entire life. www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/obituaries/ora-washington-overlooked.html

Check out The Black Sportwoman’s fabulous website for numerous articles about Ora Washington’s career and life, particularly for discussions about how Washington thrived during a time where competitive sports in general, and basketball in particular, were considered improper and frowned upon for women. E.g.,

“Starting in the 1920s, sports educators and authorities began a systematic effort to curtail female hoops. In 1923, the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation launched a campaign against women’s competition in high schools and colleges as well as in the Olympic Games, under the leadership of Lou Henry Hoover,” who also led the Girls Scouts. Opponents of competition claimed it hurt women’s bodies and reproductive organs, but there was an aspect of respectability at play, including what classified a “lady.”  www.theblacksportswoman.com/ora-washington/ 

Yeah, the patriarchy never ever wants to deal with strong powerful women collaborating for justice, especially our white supremacist patriarchy forced to deal with women of color.  Huh-uh, just look at how the powerful activism and relentless leadership by the WNBA players catalyzed the election of 2 Democratic senators in Georgia.

Rest in power, peace, and sisterhood Valerie Boyd and Ora Washington. You inspire us to do our work and believe in a future led by women.