Overlooked No More: Lucy Diggs Slowe, Scholar Who Persisted Against Racism and Sexism

Originally Published in the New York Times on October 1, 2020

By Helen T. Verongos

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. It is also part of The Times’s continuing coverage of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote.

When she was 6, Lucy Diggs Slowe, wriggling and obstreperous, was sent home from school with a note: Her teacher was exasperated with her unruly behavior and her difficulties with the alphabet. The remedy would be a few years of home-schooling, after which she returned to the classroom lagging far behind her peers. She didn’t graduate from high school until she was 21.

It was an inauspicious start for a renowned educator. Slowe would go on to become the first dean of women at Howard University in Washington. Today she is remembered as a progressive force in American higher education, unyielding in her push for reforms, particularly those supporting Black women in the 1920s and ’30s.

Impelled by her vision of what the modern Black woman could become in post-World War I society, Slowe helped a generation of Howard women transcend the intersecting disadvantages of race and sex to become intellectually distinguished, socially aware and globally conscious.

She influenced broad campaigns for racial equality, feminism, personal freedom and peace activism. She made it a priority to create a separate women’s campus at Howard. And she developed the fortitude to take moral stands against oppressive authority.

One such authority, Howard’s first Black president, was venomous in his refusal to grant her equal stature and comparable pay because of her gender. He dealt her only misery and insult. But he was not the first or the only obstacle she faced.

Lucy Diggs Slowe is believed to have been born on July 4, 1883, in rural Berryville, Va., about 65 miles northwest of Washington. She was the youngest of seven children of Fannie Potter and Henry Slowe. Her father’s occupation has variously been listed as farmer, hotelier and restaurant proprietor. He did not live to see Lucy’s first birthday.

When her mother died, her father’s sister, Martha Slowe Price, whisked Lucy and her sister Charlotte to Lexington, Va., where, a few days later, Lucy endured her humiliating banishment from the classroom.

Her aunt believed in a quality education and moved the household to Baltimore for its better schools. After finishing high school there, Slowe attended Howard with the help of scholarships and the money she earned from jobs. She was a founder of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority for Black university women.

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