Denied a teaching job for being ‘too Black,’ she started her own school and a movement Jess McHugh A portrait of Nannie Helen Burroughs, born in 1879. (Library of Congress) The problem was not her credentials. Nannie Helen Burroughs had graduated with honors from the prestigious M Street High School in the nation’s capital. Nor did being African American disqualify her; the administrators were hiring people of color to teach in the city’s segregated schools. Still, Burroughs’s job application to a D.C. public school was rejected in the 1890s, likely because of the prejudice of colorism a preference for lighter-skinned staff. Put simply, historians say, the Black people doing the hiring believed her to be “too Black.”
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