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Denied a teaching job for being ‘too Black,’ she started her own school — and a movement

The problem was not her creden­tials. Nannie Helen Burroughs had graduated with honors from the prestigious M Street High School in the nation’s capital. Nor did being African American disqualify her; the administrators were hiring people of color to teach in the city’s segre­gated schools.

Still, Burroughs’s job application to a D.C. public school was rejected in the 1890s, likely because of the prejudice of colorism — a preference for lighter-skinned staff. Put simply, historians say, the Black people doing the hiring believed her to be “too Black.”

“An idea was struck out of the suffering of that disappointment — that I would some day have a school here in Washington that school politics had nothing to do with, and that would give all sorts of girls a fair chance,” Burroughs would later write. “It came to me like a flash of light, and I knew I was to do that thing when the time came.”

Burroughs decided that if she could not get a job as a teacher, she would start her own school. And that school was only the beginning of a long and illustrious career as an educator, orator, businesswoman, religious leader, and activist. She would build or lead nearly a dozen prominent organizations, winning her a place among luminaries of the time, rubbing elbows with Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Carter G. Woodson, and later spending time with a young Martin Luther King Jr. Burroughs was so well-known, that after she spoke out against President Woodrow Wilson’s inaction on the problem of lynching, the president had her placed under surveillance.