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Nannie Helen Burroughs Organizes Black Domestic Workers Nationally

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Nannie Helen Burroughs Organizes Black Domestic Workers Nationally

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1921, twelve years after opening her National Training School for Women and Girls, Burroughs founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a national organization built to represent Black domestic workers, a documented labor institution distinct from the religious and educational base her first article traces through the Woman's Convention and the three Bs. She served as its president, with the educator Mary McLeod Bethune as vice president, a documented leadership pairing distinct from the denominational network her first article covers.

The association functioned much like a labor union for an occupation that had no formal union of its own, pressing for better wages and conditions for domestic workers while also operating as an employment agency and running its own small factory sewing work dresses, caps and aprons for its members to sell, a documented economic self-help apparatus distinct from the vocational classroom instruction her first article describes at the National Training School. It also ran a Domestic Service Practice House, training women for one of the few paid occupations then open to them, before the organization became inactive by the mid 1920s.

That the same woman remembered for a 1900 speech accusing her own denomination of sidelining its women went on, two decades later, to build a national labor organization for domestic workers with Mary McLeod Bethune at her side, marks the National Association of Wage Earners as a documented case where Burroughs extended an argument first made inside church politics into the wider economic lives of Black working women.

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Encyclopaedia Britannica: Verified Biographies (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2026View the Source
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