ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the black Baptist women's movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially on the leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs. In 1900 in Richmond, Virginia, Nannie Burroughs launched her long and illustrious career as a nationally acclaimed religious leader when she delivered the speech 'How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping' at the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). Like the church, the study of politics, too, has been narrowly defined as male, and thus any discussion of the relationship between religion and politics has served to reinforce the invisibility of women. In 1901 Elias Camp Morris, president of the NBC, hailed the work of the woman's auxiliary, particularly that of its corresponding secretary, Nannie Burroughs. Submission to the Jim Crow laws, she asserted, denied blacks civil equality, but never human dignity: Men and women are not made on trains and on streetcars.
