Lucy Diggs Slowe was born on July 4, 1883, in Berryville, Virginia. Slowe and her family moved to Baltimore, where she graduated from Baltimore Colored School. Slowe then attended Howard University, where she was a leader of the Alpha Phi Literary Society and a founder of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority for Black women. Slowe went to Columbia University to study English in graduate school and then began a career as a public school teacher in Washington, D.C.  

Slowe met Mary Powell Burrill in 1912. A few years later, Slowe moved to Washington, D.C., with Burrill. They later purchased a home in Brookland, a D.C. neighborhood, and lived together as partners for the rest of their lives. Beginning in 1922, Slowe became the first Dean of Women at Howard University and was elected President of the National Association of College Women.  

Slowe served as assistant secretary of the Baltimore National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, advocating for women’s right to vote. In 1919, she was elected president of the College Alumnae Club, an association of college-educated Black women. In that role she worked with notable suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell. Slowe and Burrill were both founders of the National Council for Negro Women in 1935. Slowe passed away on October 21, 1937. 

For more on Slowe, see Genny Beemyn, A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington DC (New York: Routledge, 2014); Carroll L. L. Miller and Anne S. Pruitt-Logan, Faithful to the Task at Hand: The Life of Lucy Diggs Slowe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); Wendy Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For an OutHistory exhibit that addresses Slowe, see The Queer History of Women's Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025, by Wendy Rouse.