Nannie Helen Burroughs

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1921, twelve years after opening her National Training School for Women and Girls, Burroughs founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a national organization built to represent Black domestic workers, a documented labor institution distinct from the religious and educational base her first article traces through the Woman's Convention and the three Bs. She served as its president, with the educator Mary McLeod Bethune as vice president, a documented leadership pairing distinct from the denominational network her first article covers.

The association functioned much like a labor union for an occupation that had no formal union of its own, pressing for better wages and conditions for domestic workers while also operating as an employment agency and running its own small factory sewing work dresses, caps and aprons for its members to sell, a documented economic self-help apparatus distinct from the vocational classroom instruction her first article describes at the National Training School. It also ran a Domestic Service Practice House, training women for one of the few paid occupations then open to them, before the organization became inactive by the mid 1920s.

That the same woman remembered for a 1900 speech accusing her own denomination of sidelining its women went on, two decades later, to build a national labor organization for domestic workers with Mary McLeod Bethune at her side, marks the National Association of Wage Earners as a documented case where Burroughs extended an argument first made inside church politics into the wider economic lives of Black working women.