Nannie Helen Burroughs

Nannie Helen Burroughs was born on the second of May 1879 at Orange, Virginia, the elder of two daughters of John Burroughs — a Baptist preacher and itinerant farm labourer — and Jennie Poindexter Burroughs, a domestic worker. Her father died of complications of pneumonia when she was five. Her mother moved with the two daughters to Washington in 1884 in search of better schools. She was educated at the M Street High School of Washington under the principalship of Anna Julia Cooper (placed in this archive), graduating with honors in 1896.

She applied at seventeen for a position as a domestic-science instructor in the Washington public schools and was refused on grounds — given to her informally by the white principal — that her skin was too dark for the institution. She moved to Philadelphia in 1898 and worked there as a stenographer in the editorial offices of the Christian Banner. In 1900 she accepted the post of secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention at Louisville, Kentucky.

She delivered at the September 1900 National Baptist Convention assembly at Richmond, Virginia, the speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping" — the address that produced the founding of the Women's Convention auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention. The Women's Convention under her thirty-eight-year leadership as corresponding secretary became the largest organisation of African American women in the United States — with a membership at its peak in the 1930s of over one and a half million.

Her decisive institutional creation was the National Training School for Women and Girls — opened by her in October 1909 at Lincoln Heights, Washington, with eight enrolled students and a borrowed building. The school grew across the following half-century into an institution providing secondary, normal and vocational education to African American women from across the United States and the Caribbean. The motto she chose for the school — "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible" — entered the African American women's-clubs movement vocabulary of the early twentieth century.

She published the Worker — the National Baptist Convention women's quarterly — from 1934 to her death and the Baptist publication School News from 1912 to her death. She was a regular columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier and the Washington Tribune through the 1920s and 1930s.

She declined three offers of the federal civil service from the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations on grounds that her work at the National Training School could not be left.

She died at Washington on the twentieth of May 1961, at eighty-two.

She is honored here as the founder of the National Training School.