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This volume brings together the writings of Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator, civil rights activist, and leading voice in the African American community during the first half of the twentieth century.
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a "race woman") female activist, educator, and intellectual. This book represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table.
"This is a tremendous scholarly reintroduction of Nannie Helen Burroughs as a black thinker, a civil rights activist, and a race woman. It not only makes a substantial contribution to black intellectual history, but provides invaluable resources to black historians and black political theorists looking to theorize black women anew." —Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh
Nannie Helen Burroughs, born in 1879 in Orange, Virginia, was an African American educator and activist. In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. She continued to work there until her death in 1961.
Kelisha B. Graves is the chief research, education, and programs officer at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and a higher education educator. Her research focuses on the global Africana experience with specific interest in education, intellectual history, and philosophy.