Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World by Rutgers University associate professor Danielle Phillips-Cunningham reveals powerful lessons that still resonate today.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- "Phillips-Cunningham's book is a tremendous achievement. Well-written, exhaustively researched, and provocatively framed, it will recast historical understandings of the history of US education, the Black women's club movement, labor, the Black Baptist church, the Black Arts movement, and Black women's friendships and relationships outside of nuclear families through the first half of the 20th century. It is biography at its best—intimate, moving, and yet never losing sight of the larger context in which it is set."
—Annelise Orleck, author of Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Black women and girls faced a harsh career landscape. In response to these circumstances, Nannie Helen Burroughs, the pioneering Black American educator and civil rights leader, established the National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS) in Washington, DC. Nannie Helen Burroughs by Danielle Phillips-Cunningham tells the story of the powerful labor movement that resulted from the work of a tower of strength in the labor movement.
Burroughs was among the first labor leaders to declare that economic justice meant living in a world free of racial violence and gender and class discrimination as much as it meant earning a living wage. In this book, Phillips-Cunningham tells the story of Burroughs's lifelong commitment to labor justice and of the steps she took to advance her bold vision for change. She canvasses the scope of Burroughs's influence and the evolution of her labor philosophies and projects. This book also demonstrates how Black women at the time established their own labor movement by organizing for a new political economy and social order through their schools, churches, writings, organizations, businesses, and the performing arts.
Powerful and incisive, this book shines a light on an oft-overlooked giant in the early 20th century labor movement. Nannie Helen Burroughs reveals the powerful lessons the work and ideas of one pivotal labor leader still offer for America's laborers, labor organizers, scholars, and women's rights and racial justice activists today.
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She is the recipient of the National Women's Studies Association's Sara A. Whaley Book Prize for Putting Their Hands on Race (2020)
February 3, 2025
Paperback 9781647125288 $29.95
Ebook 9781647125295 $29.95
352 pages. 1 color photo. 48 b&w photos. 6 x 9.
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SOURCE Georgetown University Press
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