However, she moved to Chicago when she was young where she lived and worked for much of her life. A graduate of Englewood High School, Margaret attended earned a teaching certification from Chicago Normal College. She also earned a BA and an MA from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Burroughs is noted for her global impact on the African American artistic and educational communities. Her most impactful work included helping to found South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), which served as a communal gathering space for artists and scholars such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett (her roommate for a time) who were at the forefront of Black consciousness during critically important periods in history such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts, movement and the Civil Rights movement.

Her efforts are credited with paving the way for artists who worked in conjunction with the Works Progress Administration and those that were in need of studio or exhibition space. South Side was a haven for Burroughs’ contemporaries; it provided them with the opportunity to engage in political discourse about the issues of the day. Elizabeth Catlett, Burroughs’ friend and former roommate, was on of her most ardent supporters. She and Burroughs sojourned to Mexico City in the 1950s as guest of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop), an artists' printmaking collective in Mexico City. Burrough’s biographer writes of Bouroughs “Un-American activities,” and the toll that it exacted on her activism.

“After the 1938 establishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),” Cain writes, “the persistent efforts during the Popular and Negro People’s Fronts to work across color and other identity lines [were] met with more and more resistance.” But it was Burroughs’ reported communist “sympathies,” that raised the ire of government officials. “Charles Burroughs, her second husband, who completed his schooling in the Soviet Union, was reportedly, at one time a lecturer at a Russian chapter of the International Workers Order where Burroughs is said to have ushered.”

Like, her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Elizabeth Catlett, Burrough’s berated the federal government for its excessive malignment of civil rights activists and arts organizations in the Black community. Burroughs’ work and legacy were not diminished because of her maltreatment and she was held in high esteem until the time of her death.