Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

8. The Shocking Morality of Nannie Helen Burroughs

129 X 8 The Shocking Morality of Nannie Helen Burroughs Sandra L. Robinson Nannie Helen Burroughs, race worker and founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls, adopted for the school’s motto the promise that “We specialize in the wholly impossible.” Reflecting Burroughs’s own recognition of the enormous obstacles facing her students, this motto also signifies the complexities and contradictions inherent in being black and female in America during the first decades of the twentieth century. The notion of specializing in impossibility denotes a profound paradox: How could black women believe in their own agency despite the virulent forces of racism? How could they overcome disempowerment as white and black men stripped them of power, authority, and influence? All black women faced the daunting challenge of countering the effects of scurrilous representations and multifaceted oppressions that resulted from entrenched American racism. Burroughs’s response to this exigency was to fly in the face of adversity, go against the grain of conventional wisdom, and establish a shocking platform for agency: the moral superiority of the Negro girl and woman. While contemporary readers have found her difficult— political activist Angela Davis, for instance, called Burroughs’s remarks on Negro woman superiority “glaring”—the rhetorical strategies she used to build this platform for agency introduced a new paradigm within Negro discourse for women that uniquely responded to the Sandra L. Robinson 130 failure of political action in the wake of World War I and continuing intraracial and interracial oppression of black women. Burroughs’s three key strategies are rhetorical linchpins that link religion, politics, education, and gender into a seamless discourse: • She consciously acted as a “moral entrepreneur” (Gilkes 146), using the opportunities created by her roles as corresponding secretary of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention and founder of the Nannie Helen Burroughs Press to “market” her strategies for racial uplift. • She asserted that Negro virtue resided in the Negro woman; therefore, she elevated Negro women and girls to a morally superior status, consciously counterpoising the interests of Negro women to those of Negro men while emphasizing the importance for women of policing their own behavior. • She used strategic violations of decorum to draw attention to her arguments and to make them more emphatic. Becoming a Moral Entrepreneur Nannie Helen Burroughs was born 2 May 1879 in Orange, Virginia, to former slaves who purchased farmland just after the Civil War. She received her education at the M Street School in Washington, D.C., a four-year colored high school known for its academic excellence. Administrators included social and political activist Mary Church Terrell ; Anna Julia Cooper, who became principal in 1902 and was at the time one of only four black women who held a PhD; and Francis Lewis Cardozo, who won scholarships in Latin and Greek and studied at the University of Glasgow and in Edinburgh before going on to the London School of Theology. Not surprisingly, M Street School offered a college preparatory classical arts curriculum. A business major, Burroughs excelled academically and, according to Lolita Perkins, “develop[ed] her oratory skills” (231) as a founding member of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Literary Society. In 1896, she graduated with honors as class valedictorian. Despite her qualifications, however, Burroughs encountered the same intraracial discrimination based on class and skin tone that Coretta Pittman, in her essay in this collection, finds illustrated in Bessie Smith’s lyrics. The African American newspaper Washington Bee poignantly wrote that the administrators and teachers of the District of Columbia’s Colored schools “constituted a self-conscious elite that held itself aloof from Negroes outside its charmed circle” The Shocking Morality of Nannie Helen Burroughs 131 (K. Johnson 56). Education and personal excellence were not enough to allow her the earned privilege of meaningful employment, and this incident transformed Burroughs’s future. According to biographer Aurelia Downey, “Nannie’s disappointment became God’s appointment for her life” (4). Burroughs, stung by the racial disdain of her own community, proceeded to reinvent herself as someone who would never be overlooked again and who could overcome the ontological impossibility of her skin color. She invented an alternate career path, becoming an organizational genius, a prolific writer, a civil rights activist , and a dynamic orator, as well as school founder. For race activists, this nadir of American race relations early in the twentieth century was a competitive arena, dominated by...