In 1909, Nannie Helen Burroughs, one of the most outspoken Black leaders of the twentieth century, announced to the National Baptist Convention (NBC) her ambitious labor agenda of organizing Black domestic workers through her National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS) in Washington, D.C.1 Her speech marked a momentous and hard-won occasion. As the corresponding secretary of the Woman's Convention (an auxiliary group to the NBC), it took Burroughs nine years to convince NBC's patriarchal leadership to approve building the NTS. While the school offered a variety of occupational training programs, Burroughs's primary motivation for establishing the school was to professionalize household employment (Harley 1996, 64; Higginbotham 1993, 212).2 She declared to the audience that the NTS had a unique curriculum to prepare “two-thirds of Negro women who earn their living in service” for race leadership and to “command respect and good living” in the...
Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls
DANIELLE PHILLIPS-CUNNINGHAM will begin her appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University in January 2023. She is author of the award-winning book Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Her forthcoming labor history “A Tower of Strength in the Labor World”: Nannie Helen Burroughs and her National Training School for Women and Girls is under contract with Georgetown University Press.
VERONICA POPP is a visiting professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Chicagoland. Popp has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Peitho, Bitch Media, Films for the Feminst Classroom, Gender Forum, and The Last Line. Her creative dissertation, Sick, was longlisted for the New Welsh Review (NWR) AmeriCymru Prize. She served as the graduate assistant for the Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership and Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, Suffrage in Texas Expanded (SITE). Outside academia, Popp worked as an organizer for the Chicago Metro Project in higher education constituencies at DePaul University, University of Chicago, and Northwestern University, as well as for Service Employees International (SEIU).
Danielle Taylor Phillips-Cunningham, Veronica Popp; Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls. Women, Gender, and Families of Color 1 April 2022; 10 (1): 9–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/23260947.10.1.02
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