Nannie Helen Burroughs, the Bible, the Bath and the Broom

When the National Baptist Convention met in Richmond in 1900, Nannie Helen Burroughs, then twenty one, delivered an address titled How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping that made an argument the Convention's male leadership had not been forced to answer directly before: Black Baptist women funded a large share of the church's missionary and charitable work while being systematically excluded from its decision-making bodies. The speech was received well enough to launch her into national denominational leadership, and she went on to found and lead the Convention's Woman's Convention, which became the largest Black women's organization in the United States and remained the institutional base for most of her public career. Burroughs put the argument into practice nine years later, opening the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington in 1909 on land and with funds she raised herself rather than through white philanthropic boards, a deliberate choice meant to keep the school's curriculum and discipline under Black women's own control. The school taught vocational trades alongside academics, and Burroughs summarized its practical philosophy as the three Bs, the Bible, the bath and the broom, a phrase meant to link religious formation, personal dignity and self-sufficient household competence as equally serious goals rather than to trivialize any of them. She remained the school's president for the rest of her life while continuing to organize nationally against lynching and for Black women's voting rights, treating education, religious institution-building and civil rights advocacy as one continuous project rather than separate causes.