Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961)
a reflection by Sharon Downs
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) was a pioneering educator, orator, and civil rights activist who created systems to lift Black women to heights she herself was initially denied. A fierce advocate for vocational training and suffrage, she left a legacy of courage that reshaped the 20th-century landscape for Black women in America.
Nannie Helen Burroughs was born to former slaves in 1879. Raised in Orange, Virginia, Nattie moved with her mother to Washington DC after her father died. Despite excelling in school, she was denied public school teaching positions due to colorism. Her alma mater said she was “too dark” to teach there. She then focused her life’s work on the racial uplift, economic independence, and vocational training of Black women, and for women’s suffrage.
In September of 1900, at the young age of 21, Burroughs spoke at the National Baptist Convention in Richmond, Virginia. Text from her paper, “How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping,” that was presented at the convention:
We come not to usurp thrones nor to sow discord, but to so organize and systematize the work that each church may help through a Woman’s Missionary Society and not be made poorer thereby….We realize that to allow these gems to lie unpolished longer means a loss to the denomination. For a number of years there has been a righteous discontent, a burning zeal to go forward in his name among the Baptist women of our churches and it will be the dynamic force in the religious campaign at the opening of the 20th century. It will be the spark that shall light the altar fire in the heathen lands….We unfurl our banner upon which is inscribed this motto, “The World for Christ. Woman, Arise, He calleth for Thee.” Will you as a pastor and friend of missions help by not hindering these women when they come among you to speak and to enlist the women of your church?
By the time she died at the age of 82 in 1961, she had established and helped run a school for black children for more than 50 years. The motto for the National Training School for Women and Girls was, “We specialize in the wholly impossible.” She helped establish the Women’s Convention (an auxiliary arm of the National Baptist Convention) in 1900. She served for 48 years on the Board, helping it become the largest organization for Black women in the United States at the time. The Women’s Convention of the NBC grew to represent over 1.5 million women under her influence.
When she was 77, she mentored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (age 27), who called her, “… the first leader of Negro women in America” in 1956, when he telegrammed her to speak at the first anniversary of the Montgomery Improvement Association to “… give hope to the thousands of women who are paying the price in our struggle…”
Burroughs and others like her were often excluded from the women’s suffrage movement (for being Black) and from the Black civil rights movement (for being female). She helped create organizations and systems to break down those barriers.
The concept of intersectionality is a fairly new one, but Burroughs embodied the term long before present-day discussions of the concept. She operated at the intersections of race, gender, and class, speaking out against colorism in the Black elite. She fought the “Jane Crow” constraints that left Black women in low-paying jobs with no opportunities to advance.
She was a prominent member of the National Baptist Convention and often spoke out against the injustices faced by Black Americans.
Burroughs was also a passionate advocate for women’s rights. She was a leader in the National Association of Colored Women and was a strong proponent of suffrage. Burroughs believed that it was the right of all women, regardless of race, to have the right to vote. She was a powerful voice in the fight for women’s suffrage, and her work is still relevant today.
Burroughs’ plea to “not hinder these women” echoed the 19th-century words of Sarah Grimké and foreshadowed the famous argument of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In her first oral argument before the Supreme Court in 1973, Ginsburg stated, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” The case, Frontiero v. Richardson, set a critical precedent for addressing gender-based discrimination that benefits all women to this day.
Learn More:
- National Park Service
- Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition
- Black Past.org
- “Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920” by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
- Archives of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.
- The Nannie Helen Burroughs Papers (Library of Congress)