2/28/2021 Denied a Teaching Job for Being ‘Too Black,’ She Started Her Own School — And a Movement Historians in the News 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.”