In Memoriam

Margaret Taylor Burroughs (1915-2010)

Margaret T. Burroughs, an artist, poet, educator, and co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago, died late last month in Chicago. She was 95 years old.

Burroughs was born in Louisiana, but at a young age moved to Chicago with her family. She studied at what is now Chicago State University before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Burroughs taught in the Chicago public school system for 20 years. In 1961 she and her husband Charles Burroughs founded the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art in their home. In 1968 the museum was renamed to honor Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first black settler of Chicago. In the early 1970s the museum moved to a city-owned building near the campus of the University of Chicago.

Burroughs taught at Elmhurst College and for a decade was a professor of humanities at Kennedy-King College.

Copyright © 2010. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.