Racial Uplift Is Not Enough: Nannie Helen Boroughs and “Gender Uplift”

Throughout the Progressive Era, the most prominent movement within the black community was for racial uplift. Empowered by the Second Great Awakening benevolence ministries, many black women organized for various causes within the greater theme of racial uplift. Across the country, women organized at the local and national levels to oppose lynching and other forms of racism, advocate women's suffrage, and promote the general well-being of African Americans. Nannie Helen Boroughs played a pivotal role in forming the National Baptist Convention Women's Auxiliary and later founding the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., which offered vocational training and Christian liberal arts education for women so that black women could support themselves. Boroughs combated resistance against greater societal discrimination toward black women and black male resistance against the education of women and her continued leadership over the school. Why should she expect the country to grant her a voice when her denomination also disenfranchised her? Boroughs faced such obstacles with fierce determination and carved many inroads for women's education and leadership roles not only in the larger society but in the black church. This study of Nannie Helen Boroughs's National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. examines the external and internal forces oppressing black women and highlights Boroughs's early recognition that racial uplift could never be fully realized without gender uplift.