Born May 2, 1879 in Orange, Virginia, Nannie Helen Burroughs was the daughter of ex-slaves John Burroughs - a farmer and baptist preacher and Jennie Burroughs - a cook.  At the age of 5 when Nannie's father passed, her mother moved her and her sister to Washington, DC in pursuit of a better life and better education for her daughters.

Ms. Burroughs has led a very colorful life and is remembered as a Black educator, orator, businesswoman and religious leader.  In 1896, she graduated with honors in business and domestic science from the Colored High School on M Street (now Dunbar High School) and helped to establish the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) the same year.  In 1900, Ms. Burroughs moved to Louisville, Kentucky to work with the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention.  In 1907, she received an honorary M.A. degree from Eckstein-Norton University in Kentucky, and two years later in 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, which was later renamed in her honor as "The Nannie Helen Buroughs School" after her death in 1961. 

Ms. Burroughs created a creed of racial self-help through her program of the three b's: the Bible, the bath and the broom. The Bible, the bath, and the broom stood for a clean life, a clean body and a clean house. She believed domestic work should be professionalized and even unionized. Ms. Burroughs trained her students to become respectable employees by becoming pious, pure and domestic, but not submissive. She emphasized the importance of being proud black women to all students, by teaching African-American history and culture through a required course in the Department of Negro History.

Today, the Nannie Helen Burroughs School is a National Historic Landmark, many of us are familiar with and drive on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue, and even more of us participated in the Nannie Helen Burroughs Parade in 2009, paying tribute to the legend.