Burroughs (seated center) and the first cohort of teachers at her school circa 1909. Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
“[White women] will oppose any movement that will, in the end, prevent them from keeping their cooks and house servants in the kitchen twelve or fifteen hours a day and storing them away in cellars, up over garages, or in attics…The only possible way for the Domestic Workers to get what others will demand and finally get, is to organize their own unions.” Nannie Helen Burroughs made this radical statement in Indianapolis at the 1920 meeting of the Women’s Convention, the largest Black Baptist women’s organization in the United States. The following year, in 1921, Burroughs established the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE) in Washington, DC.
The NAWE was the first national labor organization of the twentieth century dedicated to changing the working conditions of Black domestic workers. While Burroughs’ primary goal was to unionize Black domestic workers, she had an expansive vision that included all non-unionized Black workers. When interviewed by the Pittsburgh Courier, she asserted, “This is an organization for women–high, or low, servant or secretary, college president or field hand…Through this movement they will become a tower of strength in the labor world.” Within five years, Burroughs and her co-organizers recruited over three thousand people to the organization from domestic workers and teachers to beauticians and pullman porters. Their collective action against labor exploitation in household employment increased the standard wage for all domestic workers in the nation’s capital.
Burroughs’ bold declaration of her ambitious labor agenda inspired the title of my new book "Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World." My book is the first book-length study about Burroughs. It also establishes her as one of the most influential labor leaders and philosophers in the overlapping labor, civil, and women’s rights movements of the twentieth century. Burroughs was such a daring and effective labor organizer that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed her on his federal surveillance list labeling her as one of the most dangerous Black women in America. Hoover considered Burroughs a national threat because she established a school and several organizations to fundamentally restructure the US political economy.
From emancipation to the second half of the twentieth century most Black women and Black girls as young as ten years old were denied jobs outside of domestic service and sharecropping–two of the lowest wage and most dangerous occupations in the country. Burroughs made it her life’s mission to improve working conditions for Black women and girls in agricultural and household employment, while forging pathways for employment in occupations reserved for men, white immigrant women, and white American women. There were limited opportunities for Black people to engage in collective action through unionization. Some union locals denied Black people union membership and most national labor union leaders argued that addressing racial and gender discrimination would weaken the labor movement. When Burroughs and other Black women could not organize in union halls, they worked with each other and men and white women allies to establish their own schools, organizations, businesses, and periodicals, and conduct their own studies to transform Black women’s and girls’ working and living conditions.
Group of students at the National Training School for Women and Girls circa 1910s. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
My book calls on us not only to learn about Burroughs’ remarkable story, but to expand who we think about as labor organizers and how we define organizing work itself. So often Black clubwomen like Burroughs are absent from classroom syllabi and public discussions about labor movements. Burroughs, for example, is often described in a pristine, white gloved, and middle-class way as an accomplished educator and church woman. By situating Burroughs’ work in labor movement history, I make visible the dirt under her and her comrades’ fingernails to create, as she put it, “lives of opportunity” for Black women and girl wage-earners.
I also reveal how her collaborative work with people such as Margaret Murray Washington, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, and Mary McLeod Bethune challenges us to also consider who they were as labor scholars and strategists.
Burroughs was so busy working to improve other people’s lives that she rarely talked about her own. Part I of the book “An Emerging Labor Leader” tells the story of Burroughs’ family, teachers, and employment hardships. This part unveils who she was as a worker and why she became, in her words, “a friend of the working woman,” to address the failed economic and political promises of the Reconstruction era. This part also discusses her fight against sexism as she became a national leader and outspoken advocate for church women as workers and financial experts. In Part II, “The Only School Ever Founded by an Organization of Negro Women,” I discuss how Burroughs worked collaboratively with faculty to build a combined liberal arts and trade curriculum at her school. Their goals were to change working conditions in household employment and sharecropping; forge pathways in occupations reserved for men and white women; and create entrepreneurial opportunities for Black women and girls. The section in Part II titled “The National Training School for Women and Girls Will Materialize: A Timeline of Patriarchy, Land, and Ambition” discusses the backlash Burroughs received from powerful businessmen who opposed the mission of her school.
In addition to curriculum and institution-building, Burroughs experimented with several other organizing methods. Part III, “The Energy of Ten Hands and A Radical Vision,” maps how she organized for Black women and girl workers’ needs and desires through research, writing, entrepreneurship, politics, the arts, and her National Association of Wage Earners, while managing and expanding her school. Along the way, Burroughs became a woman of many firsts. Just to name a few examples, she established The Worker, the first Black American women’s international labor periodical; chaired a research committee that produced Report of the Committee on Negro Housing, the first federal study of racial and gender disparities in wages, housing, and health; established Cooperative Industries of Washington, DC, Incorporated, the first cooperative farm, clinic, laundry, and store co-owned by Black women and girls in Washington, DC; and co-founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World, the first transnational Black women’s organization of the twentieth century. Council members defined the African Diaspora expansively to include Southeast Asia. They worked with women across the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia to improve schools and working and living conditions for women and their children.
Student member-owner of Cooperative Industries of Washington, DC, Incorporated. Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
There is much to learn about worker power and collective action from Burroughs’s philosophies and methods as we organize against serious efforts to dismantle labor unions and workplace protections today. Voting data from the 2024 presidential election was a glaring reminder of the ever-present and deeply historical race and gender problems in this country. Most people, even some labor union members, decided it was more important to vote against a Black woman rather than for their own economic interests and survival. And everyone, except for the wealthy, is paying the price for it. True worker justice is impossible without collective action against racial and gender inequalities in the economy and beyond.
That is precisely what Burroughs and her co-organizers did. It is thereby useful to ask ourselves: How did Black women organize after Congress dismantled the political and economic progress of Reconstruction? How did Black women work at improving workers’ lives by trying to reconstruct an economy controlled by oligarchs such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts? How did they keep organizing in a country that repeatedly disappointed them and devalued their work?
Burroughs’s story teaches us the power of identifying overlapping interests to build coalitions that advance worker justice against tremendous odds. She did not always agree with white women labor reformers, but her work with Mary Anderson, Ethel Smith, and Belle Case La Follette is a blueprint for how white women can work with Black women to organize against racial and gender discrimination in labor through political advocacy, voting, and research. Burroughs did not fully trust white philanthropists and she publicly criticized W.E.B. Du Bois’ scholarship and personality, yet she advanced her labor agenda by working with Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr. and Du Bois on expanding her school, promoting her worker justice stage play “When Truth Gets a Hearing,” and establishing civil rights legislation.
Burroughs delivering her speech “Woman’s Work” to a crowd of people at a world Baptist convention in London in 1905. Photograph courtesy of the People’s Archive, Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Washington, DC.
Lastly, we can learn from Burroughs’s story the importance of building worker power in spaces outside of labor unions and with workers who are not unionized due to Jim Crow era right-to-work state laws. Burroughs’ life prompts questions such as: How can we re-engage churches and other religious institutions in labor organizing? How can we collaborate with teachers like Burroughs who were not unionized but who are committed to addressing workers’ issues? While Burroughs passed into history before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights, and the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, her expansive, yet practical organizing laid a foundation for these significant advancements in labor. We should consider Burroughs and other Black women’s ideas and methods as we face oligarchs and politicians who insist on dismantling every single inch of this progress.
"Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World" is available through Georgetown University Press.
