Nannie Helen Burroughs - Civil Rights Contribution

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Nannie Helen Burroughs Date: 1992 From: Notable Black American Women Publisher: Gale Document Type: Biography Length: 2,582 words Content Level: (Level 4) Lexile Measure: 1290L

About this Person Born: c. 1878 in Orange, Virginia, United States Died: May 20, 1961 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States Nationality: American Occupation: Civil rights activist Other Names: Burroughs, Nannie H.; Burroughs, Nannie Updated:Dec. 20, 1992 Full Text: Nannie Helen Burroughs was a majestic, dark-skinned woman. Her voice was commanding, and she was a spell-binding, outspoken orator. She belonged to the network of southern black female activists who emerged regionally as the leaders and members of national organizations--groups that included Mary McLeod Bethune, Lugenia Burns Hope of Atlanta, Lucy Laney and Florence Hunt of Georgia, Nettie Napier and M. L. Crosthwait of Tennessee, Jennie Moton and Margaret Murray Washington of Alabama, Maggie Lena Walker of Virginia, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Mary Jackson McCrorey of North Carolina. William Pickens, a pioneer NAACP administrator and writer, stated: "No other person in America has so large a hold on the loyalty and esteem of the colored masses as Nannie H. Burroughs. She is regarded all over the broad land as a combination of brains, courage, and incorruptibleness" (Flyer, n.d.)

Nannie Helen Burroughs, educator, civil rights activist, feminist, and religious leader, was born in Orange, Virginia, May 2, 1879, the daughter of John Burroughs and Jennie (Poindexter) Burroughs. Her parents belonged to that small and fortunate class of ex-slaves whose energy and ability enabled them to start towards prosperity almost as soon as the war that freed them was over. Young Nannie moved with her mother to Washington, D.C., in 1883. She was educated through the high school level at the M Street High School in the nation's capital and graduated with honors in 1896. She studied business in 1902 and received an honorary A.M. degree from Eckstein-Norton University in Kentucky in 1907.

Burroughs was employed in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1898 to 1909 as bookkeeper and editorial secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention. While in Louisville, she organized the Women's Industrial Club, which conducted domestic science and secretarial courses. Nannie Burroughs was one of the founders of the Women's Convention, auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention USA, and served efficiently as its corresponding secretary for almost a half century (1900-1947). From 1948 until her death in 1961 she was president of the Women's Convention. The convention comprised the largest group of African-Americans in the world, and its auxiliary was a potent force in black religious groups.

Her childhood dream of establishing an industrial school for girls resulted in her mobilizing the initiative of the Women's Convention to underwrite such a venture. On October 19, 1901, the National Training School for Women and Girls opened at Fiftieth and Grant streets Northwest, Washington, D.C., with Nannie Burroughs as president. By the end of the first year the school had enrolled thirty- one students. Twenty-five years later it boasted of more than two thousand women trained at the secondary and junior college level. Housed in the campus dormitory, the girls came from all over the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean Basin. Burroughs placed great significance in training for spiritual values and thus dubbed her school the "School of the 3 B's--the Bible, bath, and broom." These were indispensable tools for racial progress. In 1934 the school was named the National Trades and Professional School for Women. The school was inactive for a period during the Great Depression of the 1930s; Burroughs reopened it and continued to direct the school until her death in 1961. In 1964 the board of trustees abandoned the old trade school curriculum and reestablished it as the Nannie Helen Burroughs School for students at the elementary school level.

Burroughs's sensitivity for the African-American working woman was expressed during her participation in the club movement among women of color during the late decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Black women

organized first on a local level and then nationally to shoulder educational, philanthropic, and welfare activities. Urbanization, the urgent needs of the poor in a period of rapid industrialization, and the presence of a sizeable group of educated women with leisure time led to the emergence of a national club movement. In the 1890s local clubs in a number of cities began almost simultaneously to form federations. In 1896 the newly formed National Association of Colored Women (NACW) united the three largest of these and more than a hundred local women's clubs.

In addition to her laudable contribution to the NACW, Burroughs also founded the National Association of Wage Earners in order to draw public attention to the dilemma of Negro women. Its national board included Nannie Burroughs as president, with well-known clubwomen Mary McLeod Bethune as vice-president and Richmond, Virginia, banker Maggie Lena Walker as treasurer. The women placed more significance on educational forums of public interest than on trade-union activities. Burroughs was a member of the Louisville, Kentucky, Ladies' Union Band; she was also a member of Saint Lukes, a fraternal order, Saturday Evening, and Daughters of the Round Table clubs.

Close examination of women's clubs in several communities suggests that the importance of their work has been seriously underestimated. Black American communities have a continuous record of self-help, institution-building, and strong organization, to which black women have made a continuous contribution. The stimulus for organizing arose wherever a compelling social need remained unmet. Most frequently, women's clubs were formed in order to provide caring facilities for black children. The virtual dearth of social welfare institutions in many southern communities and the recurrent exclusion of blacks from those that existed led black women to found orphanages, day-care facilities, homes for the aged, and similar services. The founding and support of educational institutions had been an unbroken activity in the black American community since the days of slavery, but the extent to which women contributed and often sustained them has yet to be recorded. In the case of the most prominent female founders of black educational institutions--Lucy Craft Laney, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Nannie Burroughs--the schools became centers for community organizations, women's activities, and a network of supporting institutions.

Equal Rights for Black Women Advocated

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, and criticized those black males who refused to support efforts toward equal rights. These reformers differed from their white sisters in that they did not define feminism as a response to black male exploitation. Black men were not held exclusively accountable for the sexual discrimination practiced by whites of both genders. Burroughs was a vocal supporter of racial and sexual consciousness.

Burroughs was an unyielding advocate of racial pride and African-American heritage, and 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 Godwin Woodson, and the distinguished Howard University scholar and writer Alain LeRoy Locke. Her paper, "The Social Value of Negro History," was described in the Journal of Negro History (January 1928): "By a forceful address Miss Nannie Burroughs emphasized the duty the Negro owes to himself to learn his own story and the duty the white man owes to himself to learn of the spiritual strivings ... of a despised but not an inferior person" (6).

Burroughs, 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 Burroughs was a steadfast supporter of the religious and secular program advanced by Walter Henderson Brooks and the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in the District of Columbia. Brooks was a prominent clergyman, scholar, and temperance advocator. He pastored the eminent Nineteenth Street Baptist Church for a number of years. He denounced not only drunkenness but gambling, fornication, and adultery. But he also preached and advocated the social gospel. The NACW was founded at his church in 1896. Brooks served as a trustee of Nannie Burrough's National Training School for Women and Girls. Burroughs was a devout and steadfast Baptist and worked for almost fifty years with the Baptist World Alliance; she attended the first meeting in London in 1905. And from 1950 to 1955 she was elected member-at-large of the Executive Committee. She addressed the 1950 alliance meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, on the subject "On Him Alone We Build." As a young woman she addressed the historic Negro Young People's Christian and Educational Congress held in Atlanta, Georgia, August 6-11, 1902. As the corresponding secretary of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, Burroughs's address was "The Colored Woman and Her Relation to the Domestic Problem." In the address she stressed:

The training of Negro women is absolutely necessary, not only for their own salvation and the salvation of the race, but because the hour in which we live demands it. If we lose sight of the demands of the hour we blight our hope of progress. The subject of domestic science has crowded itself upon us, and unless we receive it, master it and be wise, the next ten years will so revolutionize things that we find our women without the wherewith to support themselves (Penn, 324-29).

Burroughs was active in the antilynching campaign and supported federal intervention to prevent lynching and backed antilynching bills introduced in Congress. She was a member of the Women's Division of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) and disagreed with CIC's Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Burroughs met with representatives of the association in 1935 in Atlanta to resolve the question of the association's continued opposition to federal intervention. Burroughs noted that she expected the passage of antilynching laws whether the association lent its support or not.

She was a much sought-after speaker and writer. Burroughs was considered one of the most stirring platform orators in the country and one of the pioneers in exalting the status of women. The writings of Nannie Burroughs reflect both strong religious convictions

and the belief in racial self-help and self-reliance. In her article "Not Color but Character" (The Voice, July 1904, pp. 277-78), she castigates black women who failed to value their natural beauty. In an article in the Southern Workman (July 1927), "With All Thy Getting," Burroughs prophetically wrote, "No race is richer in soul quality and color than the Negro. Some day he will realize it and glorify them. He will popularize black" (301). She was highly influenced by a very deep belief in God and she felt that racial equality was an ethical priority--a spiritual mandate from heaven. She condemned segregation and also such concepts as individualism and race deliverers. In the article "Nannie Burroughs Says Hound Dogs are Kicked but Not Bulldogs" (Afro-American, 17 February 1934), she told her readers to use "ballots and dollars" to fight racism instead of "wasting time begging the white race for mercy." She noted the great moral, spiritual, and economic asset of the black woman. The black woman "carries the moral destiny of the two races in her hand," she said:

Had she not been the woman of unusual moral stamina that she is, the black race would have been made a great deal whiter, and the white race a great deal blacker during the past fifty years. She has been left a prey for the man of every race, but in spite of this, she has held the enemies of Negro female chastity at law (Burroughs, "Black Women and Reform," 187).

"Chloroform Uncle Tom" Mandate Issued

Speaking in Baltimore, Maryland, in December 1932, Burroughs secured a headline in the Pittsburgh Courier: "Fighting Woman Educator Tells What Race Needs." The article continued:

"Chloroform your Uncle Toms" said Miss Nannie H. Burroughs of the National Training School for Girls, Washington, D.C. to an applauding crowd of 2500 that overflowed the City-Wide Young People's Forum, at Bethel A.M.E. Church Friday night.

Speaking on the subject "What Must the Negro Do to Be Saved?" Miss Burroughs said, "The Negro must unload the leeches and parasitic leaders who are absolutely eating the life out of the struggling, desiring mass of people."

The Afro-American, a Washington, D.C., weekly newspaper, in the week of April 14, 1934, carried an article written by Burroughs concerning "Eating in Public Places." She stated:

There is confusion on Capitol Hill! A Congressman for North Carolina does not know the difference between public, social rights and private social equality. Admission to eating, or patronizing public places, operated under license or franchise, is a public privilege--a legal or civil right for which the taxpayer and patrons pay.

In 1934 the intrepid Nannie Burroughs took W. E. B. Du Bois of the NAACP to task. The headline in the Afro-American, April 28, 1934, screamed "Nannie Burroughs Says the Doctor is Tired, Fought a Good Fight, but Did Not Keep the Faith on the Segregation Issue." Du Bois had suggested to black Americans that they submit to segregation. Burroughs stated, "You would think that the world is coming to an end because one man `does not choose to fight' segregation any longer ... . Any man who is hired can quit when he pleases. A person who is getting paid to solve the Negro problem is no exception to the rule... . Du Bois is at least or at last honest. He could have kept his mouth shut and continued to draw his decreasing stipend from the NAACP... . Dr. Du Bois is tired. He has fought a good fight. It is too bad that he did not keep the faith and finish his course."

Self-Help Project Launched

Nannie Burroughs in July 1934 launched Washington's first "Negro self-help project." A laundry, formerly owned by the training school, was turned over to the federal government by Burroughs. The Federal Emergency Relief Authority renovated the building, which included a laundry and dry-cleaning plant, a barber shop, a sewing and canning center, a commissary, a garment-making and upholstery shop, and a shoe-repair shop. Nationwide interest was kindled in the project as it performed as a model for other projects that were inaugurated during the Great Depression in other parts of the United States.

In 1944 the Baptist Woman's Auxiliary initiated a quarterly journal, The Worker, under the editorship of Nannie Burroughs. She also wrote works of a religious nature: Grow: A Handy Guide for Progressive Church Women (n.d.), Making Your Community Christian (n.d.), and Words of Light and Life Found Here and There (1948). For a number of years she wrote a syndicated column, "Nannie Burroughs Says," which was carried by several black newspapers in a prominent position. In a lighter vein, she authored The Slabtown District Convention: A Comedy in One Act, which had a number of editions (the 11th dated 1942). It was a popular church fund-raiser similar to "Tom Thumb Wedding" and "Battle of the Roses" efforts.

Nannie Helen Burroughs died of natural causes in Washington, D.C., in May 1961. Funeral rites were held in the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church with interment in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, Suitland, Maryland. There were no immediate survivors.

A photograph of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Nannie Helen Burroughs is on view at the Brown historic site in Sedalia, North Carolina. Her circle of friends was immense because of her women's club, religious, civil rights, and educational affiliations. Burroughs carried the virtues of Victorian America to the masses and taught them to the young black women in Washington, D.C.

FURTHER READINGS: Afro-American (28 April 1934). Includes photograph. Barnett, Evelyn Brooks. "Nannie Helen Burroughs." Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Eds. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston. New York: Norton, 1982.

------. "Nannie Helen Burroughs and the Education of Black Women." In The Afro-American Woman. Eds. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978. Burroughs, Nannie Helen. "Black Women and Reform." In "Votes for Women." Crisis 10 (August 1915): 187. Photograph, p. 182. ------. "Eating in Public Places." Washington Afro-American (14 April 1934). ------. "Not Color but Character." The Voice of the Negro 1 (July 1904): 277-78. ------. "With All Thy Getting." Southern Workman 56 (July 1927): 301. Daniels, Sadie I. Women Builders. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1931. "Fighting Woman Educator Tells What Race Needs." Pittsburgh Courier (23 December 1932). Harrison, Earl L. The Dream and the Dreamer. Washington, D.C.: Nannie H. Burroughs Literary Foundation, 1956. Mather, Frank Lincoln. Who's Who of the Colored Race. Chicago: Mather, 1915. "Nannie Helen Burroughs Says Hound Dogs are Kicked but Not Bulldogs." Afro-American (17 February 1934). Includes photograph. Obituary. Washington Post (21 May 1961), (22 May 1961). Penn, I. Garland, ed. The United Negro: His Problems and His Progress. Atlanta: D. E. Luther, 1902. Pickens, William. Nannie Burroughs and the School of the 3B's. n.p., 1921. Who's Who in Colored America. 7th ed. Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Christian Burckel, 1950.

Collections

A comprehensive collection of materials related to her life and activities can be found in the Nannie H. Burroughs Papers in the Library of Congress.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Nannie Helen Burroughs." Notable Black American Women, Gale, 1992. Gale In Context: U.S. History, https://link-gale-

com.ezproxy.umgc.edu/apps/doc/K1623000050/UHIC?u=umd_umuc&sid=UHIC&xid=939300c6. Accessed 21 July 2020. Gale Document Number: GALE|K1623000050