Black Women Dazzle: Stories of American Women’s Basketball

The following post was originally published on shatteringtheglassbook.com by Pamela Grundy, coauthor of Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball, and is being reposted here with permission.

The revised edition of Shattering the Glass is on-sale tomorrow and available wherever books are sold.

Black women have long energized American women’s basketball. Marian Washington, C. Vivian Stringer, Lusia Harris, Lynette Woodard, Cheryl Miller, Cynthia Cooper, Dawn Staley, Carolyn Peck, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Seimone Augustus, Brittney Griner, Maya Moore, A’ja Wilson – the list of stars and coaches goes on and on.

These achievements draw on a rich, deep history.

Black women have played basketball for well over a century. Women seized on the new sport as soon as it was invented, and Black colleges became early supporters. December of 1899, for example, Atlanta University’s alumni magazine proudly announced that “Through the liberality of some friends, supplemented by the work of our own shop, a basket ball outfit has been procured for the girls.”

A month later, as a new century dawned, student L.I. Mack outlined the many ways athletic competition supported Black women’s broader ambitions.

“Educated women who seek employment must keep in mind the fact that only by the sweat of the brow is man’s bread won,” she wrote. “They must also remember that if they descend into the arena, they cannot hope for success unless they accept the conditions under which an athlete must strive. They must be prepared for hard work, for persevering work, because the race will be the same for them as for the men. The men will go beside them, struggling for the same prize; and, since men have, in the start, the advantage of the women, they must brace up every energy, and bring into play every faculty, to avoid defeat and ensure victory. Whatsoever they undertake, they must, and will, and do go through with it to the end.”

By the 1920s, Black high school girls had taken up the game as well, sewing uniforms, posing for pictures, and proudly announcing their achievements.

Eager players at times had to contend with conservative parents. In Siler City, North Carolina, Ruth Glover’s high school career was temporarily derailed when her father objected to the team’s uniforms – specifically their shorts. He only relented when she agreed to keep a skirt waiting on the sidelines. “I had to put on that skirt as so as that game was over!” she recalled, laughing. “We didn’t have cover-ups, but I had to have a skirt.”

The skills Glover developed took her on to Bennett College, which in the 1930s sponsored one of the top Black college teams in the country. All-female Bennett had a lofty reputation, and its students were known as the Bennett Belles. But they saw no contradiction between social graces and athletic prowess. “We were ladies,” Glover explained. “We just played basketball like boys.”

Alice Coachman, who attended Tuskegee University, became the first Black woman in history to take home Olympic gold when she won the high jump gold medal in the 1948 London Olympics. She also loved basketball. “To get that ball off that backboard, knowing that nobody else could jump that high. That was thrilling,” she said. “If things were as they are now, I probably would be at some university going with the Olympic team in basketball.” But women’s basketball would not be an Olympic sport until 1976, and track took precedence. Coachman became known for her high jumping, not her rebounding.

Black women also played on popular semipro teams, most prominently the Philadelphia Tribunes. Led by Ora Washington, whose prowess at tennis and basketball made her the nation’s first Black female athletic star, the Tribunes’ accomplishments were touted in Black newspapers around the country.

While memories of Washington’s achievements faded for a time, the BBC recently created a multi-part podcast Untold Legends: Ora Washington, in which WNBA star Renee Montgomery explored her life and helped bring her back into the public eye.

Jim Crow segregation meant that many of Black women’s early accomplishments took place within a largely Black world.

Black women were far from welcome at the national AAU tournament – in part because the tournament was dominated by white teams from the South. On the rare occasion that a team with Black players qualified, one longtime official explained, it “was placed in the bracket against the strongest northern team available” and “the officials received strong hints from the powers that be as to how they would like the game called.”

One year when the Tuskegee team was especially good, Alice Coachman overheard athletic director Cleveland Abbott remark, “This team here would go to the finals at the national basketball tournament.” But they never got the chance.

The first Black team to make a mark on the tournament – Philander Smith College – was invited in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. When the Philander Smith players arrived at the event, they were stunned to see dozens of white teams on the floor. Many had no idea that white women played the game at all.

“When we got there and we saw that all the teams were white, we just thought that for sure we’re going to win,” Missouri Arledge later recalled. “I don’t know why, but we thought we were going to win the tournament because I guess we lived a sheltered life in college. We didn’t see too many—well I don’t remember seeing any—white girls playing basketball. All you saw were Black girls playing basketball. That’s what segregation will do for you. You just live in this little shell, and you don’t know what’s going on with the rest of the world.”

Philander Smith reached the quarterfinals, and Arledge was named the first Black female All American. But as with so many civil rights endeavors, progress remained slow. The next Black player to become an All-American, Sally Smith, would not be named until 1969.

Although support for women’s basketball faded in the conservative 1950s, women kept playing when and where they could.

Legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer grew up dribbling and shooting with the boys in her Pennsylvania hometown. She did not play in high school – her school fielded no women’s teams. But she persisted, and was hired to coach at historically Black Cheyney State University in 1971, the year before Congress passed the landmark Title IX legislation. She spent countless hours driving around Philadelphia, stopping to “look on the playgrounds and see who’s playing,” and recruiting the competitors she liked.

“There was a lot of talent,” she recalled. “There were a lot of local clubs and teams, and men and women that really just committed themselves to helping train these athletes. And there was a lot of pride.”

In subsequent years, the opportunities brought by Title IX, combined with unrelenting work and sacrifice, would carry Black women to the pinnacle of their sport, known not just for their play but for their leadership in movements such as Black Lives Matter.