N Nannie Helen Burroughs
Nannie Helen Burroughs, by Rotograph Co., New York City, 1909
Nannie Helen Burroughs, (May 2, 1879 – May 20, 1961) was an African-American educator, orator, religious leader, civil rights activist, feminist and businesswoman in the United States. Her speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," at the 1900 National Baptist Convention in Virginia, instantly won her fame and recognition. In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. She continued to work there until her death in 1961. In 1964, it was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in her honor and began operating as a co-ed elementary school. Constructed in 1927-1928, its Trades Hall has a National Historic Landmark designation.
1 Early life and education
3 Training school and racial uplift
4 Death and legacy
Early life and education
Nannie H. Burroughs born on May 2, 1879, in Orange, Virginia. She is considered to be the eldest of the daughters of John and Jennie Burroughs. Around the time she was 5 years old, her youngest sister died in utero and her father, who was a farmer and Baptist preacher, died a few years later. Her mother and father belonged to a small and fortunate class of ex-slaves whose energy and ability enabled them to start toward prosperity by the time the war ended and freed them. She had a grandfather known as Lija the carpenter, during the slave era. He was capable of buying his way out to freedom.
By 1883, Burroughs and her mother relocated to D.C. and stayed with Cordelia Mercer, Nannie Burroughs' aunt and older sister of Jennie Burroughs. In D.C., there were better opportunities for employment and education. She attended 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.
Burroughs expected to work as a teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools. She was told she was "too dark" — they preferred lighter-complexioned black teachers. Her skin color and social status had thwarted her for the appointment she was chosen for. Burroughs said "the die was cast [to] beat and ignore both until death." This zeal opened a door to the profession for low-income and social status black women. This is what led Burroughs to establish a training school for women and girls.
Burroughs holding Woman's National Baptist Convention banner.
From 1898 to 1909, Burroughs was employed in Louisville, Kentucky, as an editorial secretary and bookkeeper of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention. In her time in Louisville, the Women's Industrial Club had formed. Here they held domestic science and management courses. One of the founders of the Women's Convention was Nannie Burroughs, providing additional help to the National Baptist Convention and serving from 1900 to 1947: nearly half a century. She was president for 13 years in the Women's Convention. This convention had the largest form [attendance?] of African-Americans ever seen, and help from this convention was highly important for black religious groups thanks to the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) which formed in 1896, the largest of three and including more than 100 local women's clubs. Because of her contribution to the NACW, the National Association of Wage Earners was founded to draw the public's attention to the dilemma of Negro women. Nannie 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. Burroughs' other memberships included Ladies' Union Band, Saint Lukes, Saturday Evening, and Daughters of the Round Table Clubs.
By 1928 Burroughs was working in the system. She was appointed to committee chairwoman by the administration of Herbert Hoover, which was associated with Negro housing, for the White House Conference of 1931 Home Building and Ownership, straight from the stock market crash of 1929 just as the Great Depression began. Burroughs spoke at the Virginia Women's Missionary Union at Richmond with the address "How White and Colored Women Can Cooperate in Building a Christian Civilization." in 1933 
Training school and racial uplift
During the first 40 years of the 20th century, young African-American women were being prepared by the National Training School to "uplift the race" and obtain a livelihood. With the incorporation of industrial education into training in morality, religion, and cleanliness, Nannie Helen Burroughs and her staff needed to resolve a conflict central to many African-American women: "wage laborer" was their main role of the service occupations of the ghetto, as well as their biggest role model as guardians for "the race" of the community. The dominant culture of African-Americans' immoral image had to be challenged by the National Training School, training African-American women from a young age to become efficient wage workers as well as community activists, reinforcing the ideal of respectability, as it is extremely important to "racial uplift." 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.
Death and legacy
On May 20, 1961 she was found dead in Washington D.C. of natural causes. She had died alone; she never married because she had dedicated her life to the National Trade and Professional School. She was buried at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church where she was a member.
Three years after her death the institution was renamed the Nannie Burroughs School and has remained that way since. Even though more than fifty years has passed since her death, her history and legacy continue to motivate modern African-American women. The Manuscript Division in The Library of Congress holds 110,000 items in her papers.
Nannie Burroughs, 1913.
1907, she received an honorary M.A. from Eckstein Norton University, a historically black college in Cane Spring, Bullitt County, Kentucky. (It merged with Simpson University in 1912.)
1975, Mayor Walter E. Washington declares May 10 Nannie Helen Burroughs Day.
In 1976, the school that Burroughs had founded in 1909 as the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in her honor. Its Trades Hall has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.
Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE, a street in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, DC, is named for her.
In 1997 the National Women's History Project honored Burroughs during Women's History Month.