- The girls’ basketball team, National Training School for Women and Girls, ca. 1915. In 1909 Nannie Helen Burroughs, with “Crumbs—nickels, dimes and quarters from Colored people themselves—a heroic self-help effort,” as she put it, founded this school for Black women in Washington, D.C. Burroughs offered a varied curriculum, from academics to manual and vocational training, to music and athletics. Her aim was “to turn out well-rounded women trained in intellect and disciplined in self-reliance.” Based on the principle that its students should “learn to earn and earn to learn,” the National Training School was the only institution established by a national organization of Black women (the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention of the Colored Church) and managed and almost wholly financed by Blacks. Of her nonsectarian school for Black women from Africa, North America, South America, and the Caribbean, Burroughs said, “We specialize in the wholly impossible .... The very building of the institution itself is symbolic of that spirit.”
|