Nannie Helen Burroughs was an educator, Baptist leader, suffragist, and civil rights activist. She founded the National Training School for Women and Girls and was a part of numerous organizations such as the National Baptist Convention and the National Association of Colored Women. She wrote about the need for Black and White women to work together to achieve the right to vote. Nannie Helen Burroughs was born in Orange, Virginia May 2, 1879. By 1883, Burroughs and her mother relocated to Washington D.C. Burroughs was educated through to the high school level at the M Street High School.
It was here she organized the Harriet Beecher Stowe Literary Society, and studied business and domestic science. There she met her role models Anna J. Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who were active in the suffrage movement and civil rights. She graduated with honors in 1896. Because of her race, she could not get a job in any of the Washington D.C schools or the federal government. So she moved to Philadelphia and went to work as a secretary for the National Baptist Convention’s paper, the Christian Banner.
From 1898 to 1909, Ms. Burroughs was employed in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked for the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). She was a founder of the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention and served as its president for about 13 years. During that time Ms. Burroughs established the Women’s Industrial Club. The club offered reasonably priced lunches to area office workers and evening classes in typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and sewing for its members. The night courses became so popular that Burroughs ultimately hired teachers, releasing her to supervise the program.
Along with Mary McLeod Bethune, she founded and led the National Association of Wage Earners, a Black women’s labor organization to to draw public attention to the dilemma of Negro women. Other than Cooper, Terrell, and Bethune, Burroughs knew and worked with many of the Black leaders of the day. The women placed more significance on educational forums of public interest than on trade-union activities. She was also a member of Saint Lukes, a fraternal order, Saturday Evening, and Daughters of the Round Table clubs.
Burroughs was active in advocating for greater civil rights for Black women and in labor issues. She believed that women should be able to do more than domestic work; they should have the opportunity to receive an education and job training. After she was denied a D.C. teaching job she later wrote: ‘”An idea was struck out of the suffering of that disappointment — that I would someday have a school here in Washington that school politics had nothing to do with, and that would give all sorts of girls a fair chance….It came to me like a flash of light, and I knew I was to do that thing when the time came.’”
Among educated women before Burroughs, there had been little emphasis on "professionalizing" domestic work. Burroughs recommended her idea for a school to the National Baptist Convention (NBC). After years in the planning phase, the NBC purchased six-acres of land in Northeast Washington, D.C. She obtained money from within the Black community, but did not have united support. Racial pride, respectability, and work ethic were all key factors in training being offered by the National Training School and racial uplift ideology. These qualities were seen as extremely important for African-American women's success as fund-raisers, wage workers, and "race women".
All these gathered from the school would bring African-American women into the labor of public sphere including politics, uplifting racial aid, and the domestic sphere expanded. By understanding the uplift ideology of its grassroots nature, Burroughs had used it to promote her school. Many disagreed with Burroughs teaching women skills that did not directly apply to domestic housework. One of them was Virginia native, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington. He did not think the Black people of Washington would donate to the project while others opposed training women beyond domestic work.
Burroughs’ motivational speaking helped her raise enough money for the school. The National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls (later the Nannie Helen Burroughs School) school opened in 1909 with the twenty-six-year-old Burroughs as the first president. It was the country’s first school to offer vocational training for Black females. Burroughs thought Black women could become “self-sufficient wage earners….” Not only did the school teach domestic arts and secretarial skills, it also offered innovative courses for women like shoe repair, printing, barbering, and gardening.
Unlike most of her contemporaries, Burroughs believed that industrial and classical education were compatible. The school had an international student body and offered both academic and vocational courses. This included everything from cooking, sewing, laundering, printing, barbering, and shoe repair, to public speaking, music, and physical education. The school was quite successful and by 1920, there were over 100 students. By 1928, the Trades Hall, now a historic landmark, was built and its dedication in December 1928 featured many notable speakers including Mary McLeod Bethune.
She was a leader in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) which formed in 1896, the largest of any Black women's group and including more than 100 local women's clubs. Burroughs was president, with other well-known club women such as vice president Mary McLeod Bethune and treasurer Maggie Lena Walker. These women placed more emphasis on public interest educational forums than trade-union activities. Nannie Burroughs, along with several members of the network of clubwomen, believed that Black women should not take a passive position or one subordinate to men. She criticized those Black males who refused to support efforts toward equal rights.
She was a much sought-after speaker and writer. Nannie Helen Burroughs was considered one of the most stirring platform orators in the country and one of the pioneers in exalting the status of women. She, along with other clubwomen, labored resolutely to memorialize the home of Frederick Douglass in Anacostia, a section of the District of Columbia, that was officially dedicated by them on August 12, 1922. Burroughs served as secretary of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Association. Nannie was active in the anti-lynching campaign and supported federal intervention to prevent lynching and backed anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress.
She also became an early advocate of African American history, requiring each of her students to pass that course before graduation. Since this was not a topic that was discussed in regular historical curriculum, Burroughs found it necessary to teach African American women to be proud of their race. She was a life member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. When the association met at its twelfth annual conference in Pittsburgh in 1927, Burroughs shared the platform on the final day with the association's illustrious founder, Carter Goodwin Woodson, and the distinguished Howard University scholar and writer Alain LeRoy Locke.
Burroughs' also actively participated in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Burroughs believed that it was the right of all women, regardless of race, to have the right to vote. After passage of the 19th Amendment, she worked to register women in 1920. The school continued to look for ways to further enhance its program. It was still going strong in 1951, when it had a fundraising drive. Nannie Helen Burroughs lived an extraordinarily fruitful life dedicated to the advancement of Black women and the betterment of all African Americans. Her circle of friends was immense because of her women's club, religious, civil rights, and educational affiliations.