In 1909, Nannie Helen Burroughs, one of the most outspoken Black leaders of the twentieth century, announced to the National Baptist Convention (NBC) her ambitious labor agenda of organizing Black domestic workers through her National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS) in Washington, D.C.1 Her speech marked a momentous and hard-won occasion. As the corresponding secretary of the Woman's Convention (an auxiliary group to the NBC), it took Burroughs nine years to convince NBC's patriarchal leadership to approve building the NTS. While the school offered a variety of occupational training programs, Burroughs's primary motivation for establishing the school was to professionalize household employment (Harley 1996, 64; Higginbotham 1993, 212).2 She declared to the audience that the NTS had a unique curriculum to prepare “two-thirds of Negro women who earn their living in service” for race leadership and to “command respect and good living” in the service industry (Stewart 1909, 2). Within a few decades of her address, Burroughs had operationalized her educational vision into a historic, multi-scale national labor agenda that centered domestic workers in the Black freedom struggle for economic, social, and political equality.The audacious visionary from Orange, Virginia, championed Black women's labor rights before and long after establishing the NTS. She founded the Woman's Industrial Club of Louisville in 1900 to teach Black women skills she believed would grant them access to entrepreneurial and teaching opportunities and better paying jobs within and outside domestic service employment.3 Burroughs converted her local vision for the Kentucky-based club into a national trade school when she established the NTS in 1909. The NBC's patriarchal leadership refused to support the school until 1948, arguing that it would disrupt “natural” gender roles by preparing women to become breadwinners. Of course, this assumption negated the reality that most Black women were already major income earners. Still, Burroughs forged ahead in expanding her labor-centered educational mission into national and global labor initiatives as the founder and editor of The Worker in 1912, president of the National Association of Wage Earners in 1921, co-founder of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) in 1922, president of the National League of Republican Colored Women in 1924, co-chair of U.S. President Herbert Hoover's fact-finding commission on housing for African Americans in 1931, and co-founder and president of the Northeast Self-Help Cooperative (later Cooperative Industries of Washington, D.C.) in 1936 (Easter 1995, 4; Collier-Thomas 2010, 137).Our primary aim in tracing the early twentieth-century development of Burroughs's educational mission into unprecedented labor initiatives is to etch her into historical memory as a significant labor leader. Burroughs is known as a powerful orator, educator, and religious leader. She is not widely recognized for her significant contributions to the Black freedom struggle for labor rights like the men of her time, such as A. Phillip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King, Jr.4 Ahead of her time in advancing the philosophy that domestic workers were influential race leaders, Burroughs first articulated this idea in 1901, well before domestic worker-led unions and organizations became leading forces in the collective fight for civil rights from the 1930s to the 1970s.5 Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, however, remain known as the representatives of the two major schools of thought about race and labor.6We are also concerned with expanding public and academic discussions about the labor resistance nestled inside of Black women's educational institutions. These schools are not popularly remembered as critical labor organizing sites in the same way as the Tuskegee Institute, the Hampton Institute, and other historically Black institutions led by men. In this current era of heightened labor resistance, organizations and popular news sites often look to the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen's strike, the 1935 Domestic Workers’ Union in New York City, and Dorothy Bolden's 1968 National Domestic Workers Union of America as guides for political organizing today.7 We argue that Burroughs's early twentieth-century labor organizing of domestic workers through the NTS offers equally important lessons for resistance in the twenty-first century.Our inquiry into Burroughs's labor organizing is integral to a renewed push among scholars, independent researchers, and filmmakers to expand the existing literature by bringing Burroughs's multifaceted work and philosophies into broader awareness and study.8 The rich scholarship about Burroughs demonstrates her advocacy for the Black working class through her religious and educational philosophies; her racial uplift and respectability politics; her unconventional rhetorical strategies; her leadership in the Woman's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, Black clubwomen's movement, and Civil Rights Movement; and her significant role in establishing and leading the NTS and the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE) (see Higginbotham 1993; Harrison 1956; and Easter 1995). As Bettye Collier-Thomas (2010) notes, Burroughs was “adored by the masses” for “her willingness to champion issues and causes most important to the poor and working-classes” in her multiple leadership roles (132–133). Still, Burroughs is not generally acknowledged as a labor leader. Feminist scholars have also documented the institutions that Black clubwomen like Burroughs established to improve the working conditions of wage-earning Black women (White 1999, 148; Phillips-Cunningham 2020, 134–142). Their institutions and historically Black women's schools such as Spelman College and Bennett College remain publicly unrecognized as sites from which significant labor theorizing and resistance emerged.9Following the spirit of Burroughs's deep investment in the personal biographies of students in the NTS programs, we acknowledge that our own life histories inspired our interest in Burroughs (Easter 1995, 93). One of us grew up in a family of African American domestic workers and club-like women who resisted stereotypes and the systemic inequalities that impacted Black women's working lives in the U.S. South. The other co-author is a labor organizer from Chicago whose great-grandmother was a Polish immigrant who struggled to make a living while cleaning homes and office buildings throughout the city. We were inspired to map Burroughs's history of organizing domestic workers because of our shared insights into the politics of race and women's labors. Her story offers fruitful possibilities for ongoing discussions in community and scholarly circles about challenging ongoing labor exploitation at the intersections of race, class, and gender.Burroughs's personal background made her particularly sensitive to Black women's harsh working conditions in household employment. Her mother, Jennie Burroughs Bell, labored as a domestic worker, and her formerly enslaved grandmother, Marie Poindexter, taught her the social and economic value of racial pride and Black women's household labors (Graves 2019, xxii). Burroughs's special commitment to improving domestic workers’ working conditions through the NTS also stemmed from the large percentage of Black girls and young women in household employment. Black women were relegated to agricultural work and domestic service because of racial and gender discrimination in the U.S. labor sector (U.S. Labor Census Government Records, 1900–1930: 1904, 1914, 1923, 1933).10 Despite Washington, D.C.’s large Black population, most employed Black women labored as domestic workers between 1900 and 1920 (Clark-Lewis 1994, 5). In her groundbreaking study, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, an African American sociologist and Domestic Service Employment Secretary of the U.S. Employment Service between 1920–1922, documented in her groundbreaking study that 9,774 Black women fifteen years of age and older sought domestic service employment in Washington, D.C. between January 1920 and May 1922 (Haynes 1923, 392). They were part of the 81.4 percent of Black women who comprised domestic service employees across the nation.11 Household employment was unregulated and the lowest-paying occupation for women in the U.S. economy. African American women were often subjected to low wages and dangerous working conditions. They endured and resisted labor and sexual exploitation in the homes of white families while navigating and challenging racial segregation, racism, and sexual assault in their workplaces, limited educational opportunities, and racialized gender violence in the U.S. North and South.12Soon after Burroughs was elected to her position as corresponding secretary of the Women's Convention (WC) in 1900, she advocated for a trade school with the mission of professionalizing household employment in order to secure employment and improve the working conditions of Black domestic workers.13 She used the “Lifting As We Climb” motto of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) to describe what she saw as the potential leadership of domestic workers in the Black freedom movement. She proclaimed, “When young girls are organized, their vision becomes wider; they discover in themselves new possibilities; new spiritual, moral, and intellectual forces, and they lift others of their age, as they climb” (Burroughs 1913, 13–14). She and her NACWC colleagues argued that Black women were subjected to race, class, and gender discrimination, and that the entire race could advance through the socialization and education of working-class Black women.14 Unlike some of her colleagues, however, Burroughs believed that the greatest promise for justice for the Black race rested not only in the education but in the leadership of domestic workers.According to Burroughs, one important pathway to organizing domestic workers was through a curriculum based on Christian values, racial pride, and expertise in domestic science. As Evelyn Higginbotham explained in the premier history of Burroughs's life and influence in the Baptist church, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, the domestic science department at the NTS was the most “extensive and well-funded program.” Burroughs heavily invested in the domestic science program to create multiple forms of employment opportunities for graduates within the service industry. The department included courses in homemaking, housekeeping, household administration, interior decorating, laundering, home nursing, and management for matrons and directors of school dining rooms and dormitories (Higginbotham 1993, 214).Domestic labor had layered meanings of racial significance for Burroughs. Her goal was not for domestic science program graduates to become subservient laborers but rather to become productive laborers who would expect working conditions and wages that matched their actual skills, expertise, and racial pride in themselves and their work. While the primary aim of the curriculum was to create better job opportunities for domestic workers, Burroughs also designed it to prepare students to enter domestic science teaching and dormitory positions as well as take care of their own homes. She believed that women in any occupation needed to learn the “fine art of homemaking” because the “crux of the Negro problem is the home” (Burroughs 1929, 1).Her pedagogy was a complex amalgam of conservative and progressive ideologies. On the one hand, her approach was conservative because of its strict emphasis on labor organizing through Christianity and occupational training. The NTS was well known for its motto of the three B's—“Bible, bath and broom.” The Bible represented the school's focus on spirituality, and the bath and broom emphasized the importance of personal and spatial cleanliness (Wolcott 1997, 93–94). As a deeply spiritual woman, Burroughs believed everyone should strive for clean living on all fronts—including personal hygiene, healthy eating, and sanitation and organization of the home. On the other hand, occupational training defied the racist myth that Black women were naturally suited for domestic service because they instinctively knew how to cook and clean homes. Similar to other Black leading educators of her time, Burroughs held the strong conviction that cleanliness and decorum were the most powerful assertions of Black citizenship. She insisted that NTS students make the most of the resources that slaveholders had denied their ancestors in a strategic attempt to degrade them to the status of animals.15 As she once declared of her domestic science practice house, “Our table linen will be as white as that used in the Executive Mansion. If we eat out of tin plates and drink from tin cups, they will be as clean and shining as the finest china and cut glass, and we will serve with as much grace as those who have the best” (Higginbotham 1993, 213).Burroughs and NTS teachers designed the domestic science curriculum to prepare students for race leadership through rigorous instruction about nutrition and food composition. Bettie B. Henderson, who taught an introductory domestic science course at the NTS, expected students to provide detailed answers to final exam questions such as: (1)How many elements enter into the body through the food that we eat?(2)From what species of shrub is tea grown?(A)From what is black tea made?(B)How is green tea made?(3)Name and describe the different types of sugar and the countries that produce each.(4)By what is the vegetable life influenced?16Burroughs considered it vital that students become domestic science experts with a competitive advantage over white immigrant domestic workers, whom employers often preferred to hire because of their race. Domestic workers were the Black community's economic backbone, and there were few other occupations that Black women dominated. Burroughs argued that Black women would be unable to support themselves and their families if pushed out of the service industry, which would have a detrimental impact on the entire Black community.NTS domestic science courses also emphasized the importance of achieving personal and community health for racial survival. Caring for one's personal health is a form of resistance that stretches back to enslavement: “From the era of slavery onward, black people have attempted physically to strengthen themselves in order to fight the degradations of structural racism that aimed to injure black bodies and, later, to ready themselves for the rigors of the variously construed duties of post-emancipation citizenship” (Wallach 2019, 5). Similar to food justice activists and public health experts today, Burroughs argued that Black communities’ disproportionate rates of chronic illnesses and infant mortality stemmed from a lack of access to nutritious and affordable foods (Jackson 2015, 58). NTS teachers were determined to equip domestic science students with scientific knowledge to address systemic injustices without it taking a toll on their health and physical well-being. They taught lessons about how to prepare well-balanced and affordable meals for themselves and potential employers. A domestic science student named Dolores Felds wrote in her final term paper about her eagerness to apply her newly acquired skill when she returned home. She asserted, “I learned how to plan my menu and balance my diet,” “cut expenses,” and “make my family healthy.”17 The curriculum also stressed the importance of protecting one's own body in the kitchen. In Bettie Henderson's class, students were quizzed on how to operate kitchen ranges to prevent combustion and the exact number of minutes it took for a person's hands to burn when reaching into an oven or over a boiling pot.18The Black history course requirement supplemented the domestic science curriculum's focus on racial survival and progress. Burroughs's close working relationship with her longtime friend and ally Dr. Carter G. Woodson, also known as the “Father of Negro History Month,” influenced her decision to include the course in the curriculum. The books for the course were authored by Dr. Woodson, and he helped raise money for the NTS when it was in danger of closing due to limited funds. The NTS was one of few Black schools with a Black history course and oral and written examination graduation requirements. Burroughs believed that Black history was so important that even white people needed to learn it (McCluskey 1997, 420; Johnson 2000, 93).The Burdett Model Home was erected in 1911 on the NTS campus as a space for students to exhibit racial pride by putting their domestic science knowledge into practice to prepare for demanding higher wages and seeking a variety of service industry jobs. Burroughs was uninterested in reproducing the social order, but rather in organizing a class of skilled workers. Dr. Woodson communicated this aim in his article in the Afro American to garner Black support and funding for the NTS. He detailed his visit to the practice home where a student from Arkansas served him a meal “cooked according to scientific methods . . . with a domestic touch seldom found in public places.” He concluded that “Miss Burroughs had given her [the student] the fundamentals in catering” (Woodson n.d.). The practice-oriented lessons taught students how to meet the needs of the families that employed them as well as those of their own households. The Burdett Home included four bedrooms, a dining room, a pantry kitchen, a fireplace, and a veranda. Students also learned how to furnish their own homes without going into debt by avoiding stores that exploited Black communities with overpriced installment plans (Jackson 2015, 59).Burroughs fully understood that the work of Black women domestics was not exclusively about cleaning, cooking, and ironing. In her early years of presiding over the NTS, Burroughs asserted that domestic workers were uniquely positioned to lead the Black movement for full citizenship rights because of the economic importance of their labors and their proximity to white Americans. In a 1915 Washington Post article, “The Negro Woman's Opportunity,” Burroughs proclaimed that “we do not stop to think what a tremendous influence 900,000 women, who cook the food, keep the houses, wash the clothes, nurse the children, and make the garments for at least 10,000,000 people can exert. . . . the attitude of the whole American people toward the Negro can be changed by the servant class” (Burroughs 1915, R19). Burroughs espoused Black clubwomen's racial uplift, which held that social justice for the Black community could only be achieved through the education and socialization of working-class Black women. Unlike some of her colleagues, however, Burroughs also believed that the greatest promise for justice for the Black race rested on the leadership of domestic workers. She explained that domestic workers “can do more to create an atmosphere of respect and to change the mental attitude of the world toward their race than all of the self-appointed leaders and orators” because they were the class of laborers who had the closest contact with white Americans (Burroughs 1915, R19).By the 1920s, Burroughs had expanded her initial vision of organizing domestic workers through the NTS curriculum into a mission to prepare Black women for a broader range of occupations as more job opportunities became available to them in the wartime industries. By 1926, the NTS had enrolled students from 23 states, the District of Columbia, Liberia, and Puerto Rico. The school maintained its domestic science department while also offering courses in Business; Beauty Culture; Power Machine Operation; Salvaging; Poultry Raising; Horticulture; Tailoring; Millinery; Nursing and Public Health; Laundering; Interior Decorating; Social Service; and Printing (including linotype operation and proofreading) (Easter 1995, 65–66; McCluskey 1997, 420). Still, Burroughs never lost sight of her original goal of centering domestic workers in the Black freedom struggle, even as the NTS grew in student enrollment and programs. After all, she had firmly integrated the NTS founding mission into multiple dimensions of her school, including the printing department.Burroughs deepened her mission of developing a Black labor movement centered on domestic workers through the columns of The Worker, the NTS monthly publication.19 She began producing the paper in 1912 and housed it in the printing department of the school after it opened in 1916. Department students gained practical trade experience and earned income to help pay their tuition fees by printing monthly editions of The Worker as well as filling paper production orders from the local D.C. community. In historical scholarship, the paper is known mostly for its dissemination of information about NTS programs and student missionary trips to Africa (Robinson 2007, 123; Easter 1995, 38). We argue that during the early years of production, Burroughs used the paper to inspire Black labor organizing on the local and national levels. It was not until the 1930s that she published mostly stories about missionary travels.20The Worker was distinct from other early twentieth-century Black publications, such as the Southern Workman, in that it promoted a national labor movement grounded in resistance to the systemic inequalities impacting domestic workers.21As the paper's editor, Burroughs wrote articles that described how a strong Black labor movement could be formed through a primary focus on attaining labor rights for domestic workers. Integrating her educational praxis and labor organizing goals, Burroughs purposely crafted The Worker as an accessible teaching and informational resource for the masses. To reach public audiences, she deployed the writing strategies that she had learned as the former editor of The Banner, a Baptist publication based in Philadelphia, and as an author of the Woman's Convention's short publications (Easter 1995, 26–27; 33–34; 38). Her stories in The Worker could be read aloud so that people could hear the information, even if they could not read it for themselves. She wrote short yet engaging columns informing readers about the labor-organizing strategies she had learned from her trips down South and urged readers to fight for legal protections for domestic workers. Early issues conveyed Burroughs's assertions that a labor movement in the service of domestic workers must be rooted in the particular struggles and resistance strategies of Black laborers in the South, even in the North's cities.Burroughs appeared to draw inspiration from the South in her advocacy for domestic workers in Washington, D.C. She saw the South as a significant touchstone for labor resistance from which all Black laborers and community leaders could learn. In her article “A Trip South,” Burroughs wrote about traveling throughout the South from January through February 1921, meeting with local leaders about the labor issues confronting their communities. Rather than traveling to the South to instruct Black people on how to better their lives, like some of her Northern contemporaries, Burroughs wanted to “see, hear, understand, and consider thoughtfully and constructively what she saw, felt, and heard” about the question of race and labor. In this sense, she considered African Americans in the South to be an important source of knowledge for labor resistance: “If anybody feels that the American Negro is not doing his own thinking in these days of readjustment, let him go with me on a trip down into the land of the Klan and he will come back with a new thought.”22 She also wrote that Black people in the South were “thinking, planning, organizing, and getting ready for a long campaign against ignorance and injustice. . . . The South is trying his soul in the fire. The efficient will survive. The persecutors [read: whites] will die from a moral breakdown.”23 After describing the resilience of the Black Southerners she met during her travels, Burroughs then encouraged subscribers to The Worker to engage in similar kinds of labor organizing as African Americans were doing in the South.Eight months later, Burroughs took on this charge herself by using The Worker to fight for labor protections for Black domestic workers and Black wage-earning women in general. Her 1920–1921 article “A Trip South” seemed to inspire her subsequent 1922 article, “Colored Women Pass Up Tubs for Steam Laundries.” In the latter article, she asserted that labor rights for domestic workers meant labor protections for all Black women workers. She urged local D.C. leaders to protect the jobs of the “picturesque colored washerwoman” in danger of losing customers to steam laundries. Burroughs was sensitive to the practical constraints and familial responsibilities of working Black women; millions of women in the trade could not leave their homes during the day “for the reason that they have little children who need mothering.”24 She also believed in the value and dignity of the labors that household workers rendered for the larger Black community. Her philosophical beliefs shaped her proposal that Black leaders should support laundresses not in leaving their jobs but by resisting the forces of racism, industrialization, and European immigration that significantly curtailed their clientele and hindered the occupational possibilities for all Black workers.Similar to her approach to the domestic science curriculum, Burroughs argued that education about racial, class, and gender inequities in the U.S. economy was critical to community organizing. She urged Black leaders who wanted to help “the colored woman . . . hold onto what she has in the labor world,” to “push a campaign of education” that informed laborers about capitalist and racist encroachments on their jobs; what was happening to Black washerwomen, she argued, impacted all African Americans.25 As she put it, “We cannot afford to lose a single job . . . Our leaders sat down and watched the passing of our whitewashing jobs, our shoe shining industry, our barber trade from the hands of Negro men, and now they are sitting down watching the passing of our laundry business into the hands of big corporations without realizing the economic and moral loss we will sustain thereby.”26 Burroughs had been sounding the alarm since 1902 that community leaders needed to intervene in the “supplanting of Negro servants by Irish, Dagoes, and English” who uprooted Black women “from the places we have held for over two centuries” (Burroughs 1902, 325–326).27 By 1922, Burroughs had created a national publication and a school that amplified her concerns about the displacement of Black women from domestic service jobs.Burroughs also asserted through The Worker that formal education was essential for protection against labor exploitation in household service. She promoted the NTS domestic science department through stories about student experiences after completing the program. The November 1922 issue of The Worker featured a story about Beatrice Oger, a recent graduate of the NTS domestic science program, who had attained a live-in position in Philadelphia. Coincidentally, Burroughs saw Oger while they were traveling on the same train to the City of Brotherly Love. Oger thanked Burroughs for the domestic science education that she had received at the NTS and told her that she talked so much about the school to her former employer “until she thought it was the only place on earth.”28The curriculum's emphasis on domestic science expertise, racial pride, and community survival helped instill a sense of mobility when jobs did not meet Oger's needs.29 After quitting her live-in job in D.C., Oger was traveling to Philadelphia for a new live-in position. Faithful to the twentieth-century Black tradition of duty and obligation, Oger promised to send Burroughs a letter after settling into her new job to confirm whether her living conditions were satisfactory. Burroughs reported that Oger later wrote she was “very happy” in Philadelphia. Burroughs made a special note that “God will bless this girl [Beatrice] because she is not forgetful of her duty to her overburdened mother who had borne seven children” (Lewis 1994, 147–148). According to Burroughs, Oger had sought live-in positions after graduation to save money to send home to her mother. Burroughs's stories of domestic science program graduates signaled her view that the NTS and The Worker were necessary for improving the working conditions of Southern Black migrant girls in Northern cities as well as the living conditions of poor working mothers who remained in the South. In this sense, Burroughs stressed to her readers that the NTS domestic science curriculum met the practical needs of Black girls and their families. It is likely that Burroughs emphasized Oger's mobility and position to help her mother as a “selling point” for prospective students or their parents reading the paper.Nevertheless, Burroughs was well aware that domestic science courses could not fully alter the experience of domestic workers. The Worker provided a space to expound upon her educational approach to labor-organizing strategies beyond the walls of NTS classrooms and the practice home. She often educated the larger public on statistical data, exposing glaring racial and gender inequalities in the economy. In “Colored Women Pass Up Tubs,” she used the case of laundresses to expose systemic divides in the Washington, D.C. labor sector: “Regardless of the fact that Washington justly boasts of more educated Negroes than any other city in the world, in the tabulation of laundry occupations, the report shows that not a Negro is liste