PHENOMENAL NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS

PHENOMENAL NANNIE! “To speak about Nannie Helen Burroughs as a theologian is to raise questions about the ways in which she thought about God, Christian life, society, and the church. In extending the discourse on Burroughs from a social history analysis to an intellectual history analysis , my goal is to provide a broad overview of Burroughs’s religious thought and demonstrate the way in which Christian theology served as the dominant infrastructure through which she articulated every other major idea in her life... “Throughout her life, Burroughs upheld the ‘holy grail’ of finer womanhood. Her ideals of pious , clean, and godly Christian womanhood reflected the nineteenth century emphasis on ‘true womanhood.’ The cult of true womanhood was the prevailing ideology of the time, tying a woman’s virtue to piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Central to the cult of true womanhood was the home and the pews, while the sphere of manhood was the public arena, politics, and the pulpit.... According to Anna Julia Cooper, these separate spheres gave symmetry to society: ‘There is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth ; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse , not as weaker and stronger, but as complements... in one necessary and symmetric whole.’... “As Chanta Haywood notes, early black religious women such as Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Maria Stewart, and Frances Gaudet legitimated their right to public work (or the male sphere) by taking cues from Biblical passages, particularly Joel 2:28-29: ‘I shall pour out my spirit on all mankind: your sons and your daughters will prophecy...I shall pour out my spirit in those days even on slaves and slave-girls.’ Like her foremothers in the faith , Burroughs interpreted Christianity as empowerment for service. She validated her right to the public sphere by drawing upon the example of biblical men and women...Nannie knew her voice belonged to God and she considered her ideas to be divinely inspired. With this awareness she burst upon the public scene in 1900 as ‘prophesying daughter ‘ in the prophetic tradition of John the Baptist. Hers was a female voice crying in the wilderness ... Burroughs saw herself as a prophet of uplift, an evangelist to her race, challenging black people to forsake the sacrilege of unbelief in God’s plan and to live out righteousness.” P. xxvii-xxix. “In her 1927 article ‘With All Thy Getting,” Burroughs wrote: “‘The Negro must not , therefore , contribute to [America’s] doom, but must ransom her...The Negro...has gifts of greater value. The most valuable contribution which he can make to American civilization must be made out of his spiritual endowment. He must do it in self-defense and in defense of America. She needs it. Without it she will never dispense justice and will be consumed by her own folly and wrath. The Negro has saved America physically several times. He must make a larger contribution to her spiritual salvation. Who knows but that the divine purpose for bringing him into this country was that , in due time , he might make just such a contribution .’” P. xxxi. “Burroughs’s framing of African Americans as the ‘valuable byproducts’ of slavery reflects not only how she optimistically interpreted the African American experience but also how she 1) conceptualized black suffering as a theodicean saga that sought to make sense of the evil committed against the race; and 2) achieved an axiological renovation of history by reclaiming the corporate negative experience of enslavement and handing it back to black folks as a positive resource from which to draw cultural and spiritual value. She wrote: ‘That’s why Negroes can hold up their heads and ‘strut’ in rags, that’s why their songs begin in trouble and end in hallelujahs. The Negro has a future in America. He feels it in his bones. Burroughs spiritualized the African American historical experience by transforming a history of suffering into an evangelical narrative of hope... P.xxxiii. “Burroughs was realistic enough to admit that a large percent of any race belongs to the laboring class. As she understood it , even if history assigned blacks to the bottom , this position was only temporary until such a time as they lifted themselves up through dignified labor. ‘We must realize,’ she maintained, ‘that we have to begin at the bottom; that if we would develop a full grown race we would begin low...The black race is God’s race and I believe whatever we ask He will give us.’ Burroughs did not consider the bottom to be a position of defeat, rather she saw it as platform for opportunity. She was deeply critical of ‘educated parasites and satisfied mendicants’ who sought what she called ‘ready-made jobs’. She believed that black people should put their ‘brains to work ,’ and call on ‘courage , industry , ingenuity, initiative, dogged determination ... and put up a fight for life .’ ... P. xxxv-xxxvi. “According to Burroughs, ‘Negro philosophy ‘ was precisely the set of values that allowed black people to thrive despite the assaults upon their humanity. What were these cultural values? Burroughs listed them as the ability to ‘forgive and forget’, ‘wear the world as a loose garment,’ ‘smile and grin; giggle and laugh and sing amidst our greatest tragedies ,’ and have the capacity for misery and happiness.’..The collective dignity of black people could never be nullified as long as these cultural values were sustained... “Burroughs’s formerly enslaved grandmother, Maria Poindexter, ...from whom Burroughs absorbed the folk wisdom of her people...reflects the kind of ‘world’ valuing and dignified self-evaluation that was present among black people even during enslavement. Poindexter told her granddaughter: “‘Yes, honey , I was in slavery, but I wasn’t no slave. I was just in it, that’s all. They never made me hold my head down and there was a whole parcel of Negroes just like me; we just couldn’t be broke . We obeyed our masters and mistresses and did our work, but we kept on saying ‘deliverance will come.’ We ain’t no hung-down-head race; we are poor but proud.’.. P. xxxviii-xxxix. “As Alana Murray notes, DuBois and Carter G. Woodson worked in collaboration with Burroughs and [Anna] Cooper to ‘create an alternative black curriculum that would support the the intellectual growth of African American children. As the principal of a school that primarily drew its financial support from the black community, Burroughs ‘had the freedom to implement a school vision that used black history to support and develop the identity of African American girls without fear of reprisals . The efforts, though, to endow black children with historical awareness earned Burroughs and others the attention of the Military Intelligence Division (MID), a branch of the U. S. Army and a precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1917, the MID ‘considered the study of black history potentially anti-American ‘ and began monitoring the executive council of the ASNLH and the organization’s ‘Journal of Negro History .’ P. xlii. “Introduction, God Will Give Us Credit for Trying,” NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS edited and annotated by Dr. Kelisha B. Graves (2019)