She didn’t walk into the ring. She exploded into it—barefoot and barreling, like a comet that never learned how to land softly. Ethel Johnson was 115 pounds of defiance wrapped in satin and speed. In a sport that had little room for women and even less for Black women, she kicked down the door, dropkicked through the ceiling, and then climbed back in the ring just to do it again.
Born Ethel Blanche Wingo on May 14, 1935, in Decatur, Georgia, she came into the world under the weight of Jim Crow laws and Depression dust. The kind of America that didn’t just discourage Black dreams—it choked them in their cradle. But Ethel had a mother named Gladys and a sister named Betty (you’d know her as Babs Wingo), and together they decided the world wasn’t going to tell them how high they could fly.
By 1952, at just 16, Ethel was already making noise—big noise. Not the kind you hear in a stadium, but the kind that shakes the foundation of a system. She was trained under Mildred Burke’s guidance and signed to Billy Wolfe’s traveling wrestling circus—part promotion, part sideshow, all uphill battle. Ethel wasn’t just the youngest; she was the flash. The heartbeat. A gymnast in a world of lumberjacks. Her dropkick didn’t just knock teeth loose—it snapped prejudices in half.
She was dubbed “the biggest attraction to hit girl wrestling since girl wrestling began.” Hyperbole? Maybe. But on certain nights, in smoky arenas filled with drunk men and the faint hope of progress, Ethel Johnson was the main event.
She was fast—too fast for the camera, too fast for the era. One night in Kansas City, she and her sister drew 9,000 fans. That’s not a typo. Nine thousand for two Black women in 1954, trading headlocks and heartbreak, billed alongside Gorgeous George in a business that rarely put melanin anywhere near the marquee.
You want metaphors? Ethel Johnson was jazz in a polka world. She was poetry in a business built on bruises and bad faith. Her flying headscissors weren’t just maneuvers—they were acts of rebellion, of artistry, of sheer velocity screaming through the air in defiance of gravity and history.
Her Latin American tours gave her a new name—Rita Valdez—and a new stage, because America still didn’t quite know what to do with a Black woman who could outdraw half the men. She fought the best of them: June Byers, Penny Banner, and even Mildred Burke herself. She wrestled in Stu Hart’s Big Time Wrestling and the Capitol Wrestling Corporation—precursors to today’s wrestling titans. And when the AWA called in her twilight years, she answered the bell with her sister Marva Scott for one last match in 1976.
The final bell came not in the ring, but in a quiet corner of Columbus, Ohio. Heart disease claimed her in 2018 at age 83. There was no massive tribute package. No hall of fame speech. Just silence, as if the world forgot who she was.
But how do you forget the first Black woman to hold a championship in a sport that still clings to its old ghosts?
How do you forget the woman who invented the style half the locker room would later mimic?
How do you forget Ethel Johnson?
In 2021, WWE inducted her into their Hall of Fame—posthumously, of course. Too late for her to hear the cheers. Too late to fix what was broken. Too late to undo the erasure. But necessary, nonetheless. She also joined the inaugural class of the Women’s Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2023. A few drops of justice in an ocean of oversight.
Her career wasn’t made in Madison Square Garden—because women weren’t allowed to wrestle there during her prime. Let that marinate. The biggest stage in the world barred her kind. Still, Ethel didn’t whine. She worked. She barnstormed the country, built a career from the bottom of the card to the top, and never once got the credit she deserved while she was still breathing.
She won the Colored Women’s World Title three times. Held tag gold with her sister Marva in Ohio and with June Byers under the NWA banner. She made headlines, made history, and then made peace with a business that took far more than it gave.
But let’s be clear: she didn’t need anyone’s permission to be great. She was greatness, in motion, long before hashtags and documentaries tried to reclaim her name. You don’t create a legacy like Ethel Johnson’s. You earn it—with sweat, speed, and steel will.
She didn’t get action figures or magazine covers or main-event WrestleManias. What she got was pain, perseverance, and the power to change the game without ever being told she could.
She wasn’t here to be a symbol. She was here to fight.
And God, did she fight.
Ethel Johnson was the blueprint. The unsung pioneer. The woman who ran so every Sasha Banks, Bianca Belair, and Naomi could fly.
No ring was ever big enough for her.
And no history book will ever be complete without her.
