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Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959
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2020
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Critical Race TheoryColonialismBlack ExperienceAfrican American HistorySocial SciencesBlack Feminist ThoughtGender StudiesAfrican American StudiesBlack WomenCivil RightsCultural HistoryWomen StudiesNannie Helen BurroughsBlack Feminist TheoryFeminist ScholarshipIntersectionalityBlack RadicalismDocumentary PortraitVisual CultureFeminist TheoryWomanist EthicsAnti-racismFeminist PhilosophyBlack ProtestHumanitiesHistorical AnalysisBlack PoliticsBlack Women’s StudiesAfrican American SlaverySociologyPublic CareerBlack FeminismAfrocentricitySocial Justice
In a public career that spanned six decades, the educator and civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs was a leading voice in the African American community. She founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909 and was a key figure in the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Church. In this collection of documents, the historian Kelisha B. Graves focuses on Burroughs's published writings on race and racism, women's rights, and social justice. Burroughs first became involved with national women's issues with the campaign to give women the right to vote in the second decade of the twentieth century, where she attempted, unsuccessfully, to make the white women's movement interracial. She was a vocal opponent of lynching and Jim Crow laws and practices, particularly those that denied blacks equal access to education and employment. At the same time, she fought against the chauvinistic attitudes and practices of male black Baptist religious leaders. A charismatic speaker, Burroughs was in demand on college campuses and at national gatherings of African American organizations from the early twentieth century to the late 1950s.