One hashtag we’ve seen frequently during this primary season, which was also predictive in 2018, when Democrats took back the House, is #VoteLikeBlackWomen. A key discussion taking place now focuses on the prevalence of the black vote for Joe Biden, especially the votes of black women. An ugly side to all of this is the typecasting of black voters as “low-information.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Part of the problem, other than outright racism, is the people who are not part of, or intimately familiar with, the social formations, political organizations, and networks within the black community, and their long history. These outsiders tend to make assumptions and draw conclusions based on their own limited frame of reference for black people.
Since the contributions of many of the historical groups within our community, such as in the fight for the vote, are not “common knowledge” (meaning white folks are ignorant of them), and the leadership exercised by black women rarely gets included alongside that of their white suffragist counterparts, I am not surprised by the stereotypes, even though I find them personally offensive. Hence my efforts this Women’s History Month to highlight some of the women and organizations that have helped shape political activism and consciousness in our community.
Meet Nannie Helen Burroughs.
I love this photograph of Burroughs, from the Library of Congress, in which she is pictured with an unknown friend.
Around the time this photograph was taken, when she was about 21, Nannie Helen Burroughs (left) had established herself as a national leader within the Woman’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, many of whose members supported women’s suffrage.
Born to emancipated formerly enslaved parents in Orange County, Virginia, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C., with her mother after her father’s death. She attended the M Street School, one of the first high schools in the nation for black students, and graduated with honors.
The Muncie-Delaware Indiana, League of Women Voters’ series Forgotten Foremothers speaks of the impact of colorism in Burroughs’ life, and of her youthful audacity.
In the late 1890s, Nannie Helen Burroughs was unable to find a teaching position in the District of Columbia Public Schools, despite her thorough education and preparation. While the school system did hire black teachers at the time, it preferred light-skinned ones. Burroughs, she was told, was “too dark.” By 1909, Burroughs had founded The National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls, Inc., a vocational school catering specifically to African-American women who were denied other opportunities.
Burroughs’ zeal to “beat and ignore until death” the restrictions society presented to her burned throughout her life. A devout Baptist, Burroughs gained significant attention for her address at the National Baptist Convention in 1900. Her speech, titled “How the Sisters are Hindered from Helping,” launched the fight for women to have a greater say in the decision-making of the church. This demand for change was not entirely well-received.
“Who’s that young girl?” a man in the audience is quoted as saying. “Why don’t she sit down? She’s always talking. She’s just an upstart.”
Burroughs had a ready answer for him. “I might be an upstart, but I am just starting up.”
When I first saw the extent of the Library of Congress’ holdings of Burroughs’ papers, I was amazed. How was it possible that more researchers and historians hadn’t mined this treasure trove? Thankfully, that is beginning to change, starting with the publication of a collection of her work, edited by Kelisha B. Graves. The Fayetteville Observer reported last year,
Graves suggests that Burroughs has earned a place alongside some of the great thought leaders on Civil Rights. Her wide circle of acquaintances included everyone from famous educator Mary McLeod Bethune to Martin Luther King Jr., whose parents she knew well from her extensive work with the National Baptist Convention. Burroughs in her writings synthesized views from leaders often cast as rivals, Graves says.
“If you can think about her this way, she has the cultural, radical consciousness of a Marcus Garvey, in terms of ideas of black uplift, in terms of black nationhood,” she says. “She has the economic urgency of a Booker T. Washington, in terms of black people generating capital that can help uplift the community. But then she has the intellectual prowess of someone like a W.E.B. Du Bois, who’s concerned about elevating black folks on an intellectual level, going into those areas of philosophy, literature and English. “All of those ideas resonate full-blown in her.”
Burroughs had a sharp pen, and her fire and wit were on display for decades as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper. In one column from 1934, she dismissed a poem where black Americans were cast as asking mercy from a larger white society when it came to how they were treated. “The following self-pitying, sycophantic, poetic, prattle appeared in one of our papers last week,” Burroughs wrote before reproducing the poem in full. Her column’s title summed up her feelings on the issue, “Ballot and Dollar Needed to Make Progress, Not Pity.”
Graves’ book was published in 2019: Billed as an anthology, Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959 presents Burroughs' work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad ways that her career resisted definition. Notes the book’s publisher, Notre Dame Press,
Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs' life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs' life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table.
Exploring her feisty writing has been an eye-opener for me. I have to admit that one of my favorites is “12 Things White People Must Stop Doing to the Negro,” which includes admonitions that are still applicable today.
STOP penalizing Negroes for not being white. Color is not character. It is only a badge of distinction.
STOP making social excursions into the Negro race, depositing white offspring and then crying out against social equality.
STOP teaching basic untruths about race.
STOP making unjust discriminatory laws, molding social sentiment against respect for human personality, building up customs, continuing outmoded attitudes in an effort to prove that the Negro is inferior. In any race, only those are inferior who do inferior things.
STOP making laws to protect the legal and civil rights of all citizens and when the rights of the Negro are involved, allow white citizens to put themselves above the law and not only deny Negroes their legal rights but persecute and lynch them. Such acts express vicious race prejudice. Out of such acts and attitudes America can never build a Christian democracy.
I grinned when I saw a point targeting politicians.
STOP using Negroes as political mud sills and stepping stones, to get whites in power, politically, and then deny Negroes full citizenship rights and equal opportunities, through education and employment, to secure their own rightful place in the labor world and enjoy full citizenship rights, responsibilities, rewards and privileges.
Burroughs, who was a devout black Baptist, directed some of her scorn at “Christians.” I would love to send one “Thing” to Vice President Mike Pence.
STOP calling this land “Christian” and the government thereof a democracy. The fact is brotherhood and fellowship are not the practice in many American churches. In the majority of them, Negroes are only welcome or tolerated on specially arranged occasions, and this arrangement is not for long nor frequent. Most white Christian churches and organizations export their religion through missionaries. They do keep a spurious brand for home consumption. Americanism and the attitudes of most whites are intended to “keep the Negro in his place” – give him an inferior complex and do injury to his mind, spirit and soul, and thus make him a second class citizen.
Several videos explore more of Burroughs’ historical impact.
First, a short clip from the National Museum of American History.
Urban Odyssey was a 1991 public-access TV series produced by the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. It included an entire episode about Burroughs.
In another short clip, TJ Boisseau, then an assistant professor of history in Ohio, but now the director of women's studies at Purdue University, shares her thoughts on Burroughs, black women, and suffrage, and reads an excerpt of the suffragist’s writing.
Transcript:
I have an interesting document, actually, about why black women need the vote. Black women are also using a kind of argument from expediency after 1900. By “expediency” I mean pragmatism, practical reasons. They’re not only arguing from justice—that this is what is right—although they retain that as well.
And I think that Nannie H. Burroughs’s article, that is short and something that students could easily read, makes a profound point. Nannie Burroughs, whose mother was an emancipated slave, was one of the founders of the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, which is a very important locale for the Southern black women’s movement. She was a black women’s club leader.
The clubs that women organized at the turn of the century are more than recreational and more than philanthropic even; and certainly for black women even when they’re philanthropic, it’s about uplifting the race. The National Association of Colored Women’s motto becomes by the 1920s “Lifting as we Climb.” And so there’s an idea that anyone who achieves a certain level of middle-class respectability or economic stability in the black community has a responsibility to the entire black community. Women really took that message to heart and really saw their role change by 1900.
I would read this just to make sure that students take note of the particularities here. So this isn’t a visual source, but it is a powerful textual source. It reads,
“When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written. Because the black man does not know the value of the ballot, and has bartered and sold his most valuable possession, it is no evidence that the Negro woman will do the same.”
And here what she’s referring to is the common practice—or at least not uncommon practice—of black men who otherwise would have been beaten and possibly killed for voting, pragmatically taking money in order to vote for the Democratic party, the party of the South, the party of the Confederacy for a long time. She’s critical of black men for that. I think as historians and as contemporary people we need to put that in some context, she’s using this as a point of contention in order to draw a very different picture for black women. But I wouldn’t want students to take away her criticism of black men, without understanding the context for it.
In 1996, Sharon Harley, an associate professor and former chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, published “Nannie Helen Burroughs: 'The Black Goddess of Liberty'” in The Journal of Negro History. Harley points not only to Burroughs’ historical erasure, but also to the educator’s important understanding of the linkages between class, gender, and race that are so much a part of today’s intersectional feminist analyses.
As an educator, institution and organization-builder, and major figure in the black church and secular feminist movements, Nannie Helen Burroughs was one of the best known and well-respected African-Americans of the early twentieth century. Yet, except for a few biographical entries and an essay or two, she is absent from most contemporary studies of African-American leaders and intellectuals. Quite possibly had she discussed her life and writings in an autobiographical work or had she been male, she would be more widely known to historians and, thus, to more black folk today. Her popularity during her lifetime and the availability of her manuscript collection at the Library of Congress should have afforded her a more central role in subsequent histories of African-American life in the twentieth century. How was it possible for a woman, who was a major figure on the black political, economic, and social landscape for the first six decades of this century, and whose views foretold some of the most compelling intellectual and ideological debates of the last four decades, not to have been given fuller consideration by scholars? Why is it that she is not more widely known by most Americans, let alone, African-Americans? To tell the story of Nannie Helen Burroughs' life as an intellectual is also to reveal how members of black communities and external forces and groups designate who were the black intellectuals and race leaders, and how class, gender, and even skin color influence leadership designations at specific historical moments.
In her life and writings Burroughs both embodied and commented upon many of the class, race, and gender tensions confronting members of the black community in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of these tensions continue to haunt us today in no small order because we either did not heed or were largely unaware of Burroughs' voice, which was too often drowned out (and, more recently, silenced) by our preoccupation with the lives and thoughts of a few notable twentieth century middle-class male figures, such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, (more recently) Marcus Garvey, and occasionally such female notables as Ida Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. To be marginalized in this way is quite ironic, considering that her ideas and public life were an eclectic mix of Washington (she was sometimes referred to as "Mrs. Booker T. Washington"), Du Bois, and Garvey. Moreover, she exhibited the courage and principled positions of Wells-Barnett, including her style of hard-hitting criticisms. Like Terrell, who headed a major women's organization, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Burroughs became president of the much larger Women's Convention (WC) Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention.
Burroughs was part of a key Washington, D.C., network of African American women suffragists, which included Coralie Franklin Cook, Anna Julia Cooper, Angelina Weld Grimké, Lucy Diggs Slowe, and Mary Church Terrell. I look forward to covering their stories in the future.
I’ll close with two of Burroughs’ quotes, which, like “12 Things,” still resonate today.
"Education and justice are democracy's only life insurance."
"Anything that is as old as racism is in the blood line of the nation. It's not any superficial thing—that attitude is in the blood and we have to educate about it."
I hope that this brief introduction has piqued your interest in Burroughs’ life and work, and that perhaps some scholar reading this will be inspired to unearth more. Please join me next Sunday as I continue to explore the black women of our past who have helped shape our present.
