I have long wanted Inside Adams to publish a post about Nannie Helen Burroughs. My colleague, Lynn Weinstein sort of beat me to the punch but, I thought there was still so much more to say.
Nannie Helen Burroughs was born in Virginia around 1880. She moved to Washington, D.C. with her mother, where she excelled in school and graduated from M Street High School (now Paul Laurence Dunbar High School). While in Washington, she met people like Anna J. Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, amazing Black women leading the way in the suffrage movement and civil rights.
For a time Burroughs lived in Louisville, KY and 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. She, along with Mary McLeod Bethune, founded and led the National Association of Wage Earners, a Black women’s labor organization. Other than Cooper, Terrell, and Bethune, Burroughs knew and worked with many of the Black leaders of the day, including Maggie L. Walker a business leader who gained prominence when she became the first woman to own a bank in the United States. 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.
For many years Burroughs had wanted to open her own school. Eventually she managed to gather enough money from smaller donations and the Women’s Auxiliary and National Baptist Convention making it possible for her to buy several acres of land in Washington, D.C. There, in 1909, she opened the National Training School for Women and Girls.
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.
By 1938/1939, the school was renamed as the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls. 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 ran the school until she died in 1961. Today, the Progressive National Baptist Convention occupies the building she built.
The Library has resources for anyone interested in researching this remarkable and determined woman. You can find many great photographs just by searching our website. We also have her papers including correspondence, financial records, speeches and writings, student records, and other papers relating primarily to the founding and management of the National Training School for Women and Girls. The collection also includes material related to the Woman’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention of the United States of America, the National League of Republican Colored Women, the National Association of Wage Earners, and the 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership.
I would also suggest searching Chronicling America* using the school’s name or hers (also use Nannie H as newspapers didn’t always use her full middle name) as it has a number of Black newspapers including The Broad Ax (Salt Lake City) and the Denver Star. An article from the November 18, 1911 issue of The Bee, provides an inspirational picture–its opening paragraph about her work is, I think, a good way to close the post:
Certainly the most creditable work that is being done by colored women any where in the world, is at Lincoln Heights, in this city. Creditable because it is a necessity; creditable because it is being well done; creditable because it is far reaching; creditable, because it was not inspired by an opportunity to secure educational aid through a beneficent outside gift; creditable because it has filled a niche in the educational world that no other school is filling; creditable because it shows what the women of the race can do.
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*The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Comments (2)
Hello! I’m researching a friend and contemporary of Nannie Helen Burroughs named Atholene Peyton and would love to know if you’ve come across any mention of her. She taught at the National Training School for Girls, was on the faculty of Louisville’s Central High School and authored the Peytonia Cook Book, dedicated to the Women’s Clubs of America and for which Miss Burroughs wrote the introduction.
Donna, I did not run across that name but I did a quick Advanced search on her name in //chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ and there were a few hits; none were detailed, but mostly indicating some of her travels. I haven’t worked with the papers for Nannie Helen Burroughs, but Manuscript does have a finding aid and they might have more to say or offer some insight into the collections so I would suggest you submit an Ask a Librarian to them. You might need to work with genealogical materials like those found in Ancestry.com as well as they will hit a totally different type of material and may be something that can nail down date/places.