“My mother, Myrtle, was an avid tennis player and we lived near Druid Hill Park, so my three sisters and I grew up playing,” recalls Ann Koger. “She joined the Baltimore Tennis Club, whose history people should look up. They were doctors, lawyers, and educators who offered lessons and they put together a program to develop juniors and organized tournaments.”

In 1917, the club, originally called the Monumental City Tennis Club, hosted the first National Championship of the American Tennis Association, which remains the oldest Black sports association in the U.S. In 1924, the club again hosted the ATA National Championships in Druid Hill Park. In 1948, several club members, including Koger’s mother, protested the segregation of the park’s popular clay courts and, despite arrests, got the city to open the courts.

Eventually, the Baltimore Tennis Club played host to U.S. Open and Wimbledon champions Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe—as well as Koger, who would go on to a groundbreaking career at then-Morgan College, where she starred on the men’s team, and as one of the first two Black women, with former Morgan teammate Bonnie Logan, to play on the Virginia Slims professional circuit. (Koger was on hand when Billie Jean King routed Bobby Riggs in the famed “Battle of the Sexes” match at the Houston Astrodome in 1973.)

Not that discrimination on Baltimore’s tennis courts had ended when she began playing as a girl in the late ’50s. Black players could only use Druid Hill Park’s clay courts after white players had first crack. At public-court tournaments, the Black players were all put into the same bracket to prevent more than one from reaching the finals. Other tournaments were held at private white clubs, which maintained the city’s only grass courts.

“The first time I played on grass was at a national tournament in Illinois,” Koger says. “To prepare for the speed, I practiced indoors on a basketball court.” Then, there was the cheating by some white opponents, which was ignored by officials. “I told one girl that I was going keep playing until I met her again, and I was going beat her,” Koger says. “She looked at me like I was a crazy. Being 12, I’d sit down under a tree and cry.”

After her pro career, Koger coached at Haverford College for 35 years, once pulling the team from a South Carolina event as part of a boycott around the state capitol’s Confederate flag. She also found time to officiate college basketball and was the first women to referee a Division I men’s game in the ’80s. Still, her time at Morgan, where she lettered in seven sports from 1968-1972—an era loaded with Baltimore talent—remains memorable for many reasons.

“I taught [future NBA first-round pick] Marvin Webster his hook shot,” she laughs. “In a pick-up game, I once got sandwiched under the boards between [future Pro Bowl tight end] Ray Chester and another football player and got knocked out.

“Everyone always comments about my hair when they see those photos from Morgan,” Koger continues, with another laugh. “On campus, the police would stop me because they thought I was Angela Davis, who was then a fugitive wanted by the FBI. I don’t think I even look like Angela Davis. I did like the hairstyle. No fuss, which was perfect because I went from one sport to the next in those days.”

Not Angela Davis. But a revolutionary with a racquet.

After attending a lecture featuring a guest speaker who shared her experiences growing up in a Jim Crow-era Baltimore, assistant professor Gary Homana at Towson University was captivated by the power in her story. The guest speaker, Evelyn Chatmon, the first African-American female assistant superintendent in Baltimore County, would become the impetus and feature of Homana’s Voices of Baltimore: Life Under Segregation.

The hour-long documentary, debuting on February 16 in Stephens Hall Theatre at Towson University, will feature accounts from seven individuals who lived in Baltimore during a time when segregation was still pervasive even after the historic 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

“These are colorful stories that needed to be preserved and archived,” said Homana, who teaches classes in elementary education. “Not only for the individual, but for the community. This is recognition of those who came before and their struggles for rights as human beings.”

Following the premiere, there will be a panel discussion with the subjects featured in the film, including Chatmon, Chief Justice Robert Bell, Morgan State University dean of education Patricia Welch, and Treopia Green Washington, who is the sister of Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine.

Homana, along with fellow Towson faculty Franklin Campbell Jones and Morna McDermott McNulty, produced and directed the film over the past two years with the question in mind, “Where have we been, and where are we going?” The professors combed through historical archives, contacted local media, and conducted lengthy interviews with each subject.

“These stories speak volumes about how our nation, and its people, can become a more tolerant society,” Homana said. “Our society has become more ethnically and racially diverse, and yet inequalities persist—including a return to increased school segregation and poverty.” 

Among the many issues the documentary explores is housing segregation and “redlining” —a practice in which the government determined which neighborhoods are worthy of mortgage lending—as a way to restrict blacks to certain neighborhoods, specifically excluding blacks from home ownership in newly built suburbs. This fostered the city’s segregation and poverty during the Jim Crow era.

In addition to the Towson screening, the film will also be a shown at Bowie State University in honor of Black History Month on February 21. Homana has also been approached by the University of Maryland, College Park, and Brandeis and Tufts Universities in Massachusetts to host screenings as well. 

“The willingness of other schools to show the film is great,” he said. “These partnerships will promote thoughtful discussions about issues surrounding segregation and how they exist in society today.”