Slowe-Burrill House

Slowe-Burrill House

Photograph by Eric Griffitts, courtesy of Washington, DC Historic Preservation Office

Quick Facts

Location:

Washington, DC

Significance:

Education and social history, LGBT History

Designation:

Listed in the National Register – Reference number 100005324

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private

The Slowe-Burrill House was once home to the most famous lesbian couple in Washington D.C. Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill lived on Kearney St form 1922 until Slowe's death. Slowe and Burrill were prominent activists and educators in Washington’s Black community but neither publicly claimed their relationship. Despite this in later decades, Slowe and Burrill always were known as romantic partners to their large circle of friends and now are cited as the most well-known lesbian couple in Washington during the 1920s. Unlike the other monuments to Slowe and Burrill around the city, Kearney St. centers their queerness alongside their professional achievements. 

In the 1920s while still facing the intersection of oppression as women and people of color, Black women had access to more jobs than previous decades. Both women seized these new professional opportunities. Slowe was the first women to win the American Tennis Association Women’s Singles Championship in 1917. She also helped found the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority before becoming Howard’s first Dean of Women in 1922. Burrill was a long-time high school teacher and accomplished Harlem Rennaissance playwright in her own right. Burrill and Slowe’s accomplishment are both exceptional and part of a larger movement of women in the United States claiming independent personal and professional lives. 

A key part of this independence was housing. Slowe and Burrill lived together during a period of time when female partnerships--two or more women living together in adulthood-- was considered socially acceptable and not a sign of homosexuality. Slowe and Burrill employed this concept to publicly hide their relationship but to their communities and friends, the two women where always romantic partners, not roommates. One of the many exceptional things about Burril and Slowe relationship is that we know it existed. While it is likely many African American women participated in such romantic partnerships, the vast majority of recorded cases are of white women.  

Burrill and Slowe’s queerness is just one part of these women’s exceptional lives, but its also the part most forgotten when they are remembered today. When this house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020 it was cited as once the home of “the most prominent female same-sex couple in Washington.” The home Slowe and Burrill offers a place to remember the multilayer nature of identity and to recognize the long history of queer people who called the district home. 

Reflection Question:

What place from your life would you like to save to tell future about your life?