IThings at Dorothy Height’s legacy – The National Congress of Negro Women Headquarters on Pennsylvania Ave., NW
In Memory of Nannie Helen Burroughs
Nannie Helen Burroughs
(May 2, 1879 – May 20, 1961)
was an African American educator, orator, religious leader, and businesswoman. She gained national recognition for her 1900 speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," at the National Baptist Convention.
Burroughs created a creed of racial self-help through her program of the three Bs-the Bible, the bath, and the broom. The Bible, the bath, and the broom stood for a clean life, a clean body, and a clean house. She believed domestic work should be professionalized and even unionized.
Burroughs trained her students to become respectable employees by becoming pious, pure, and domestic, but not submissive. She emphasized the importance of being proud black women to all students, by teaching African-American history and culture through a required course in the Department of Negro History.