A Praise song for Herstories: Reflecting on the Lessons of Black Women’s Leadership in Urgent Times

• In Event: Celebrating 15 years of Herstories: (Re)membering Black Women's Leadership Then and Now

Abstract

This presentation honors Black women and their long legacy of redefining leadership, education, and community transformation. Accordingly, this paper foregrounds Black women’s leadership not as an exception but as an enduring blueprint for justice, care, and progress. Tracing Black women's leadership innovation, often in the face of systemic erasure, we illuminate the transformative impact of their work not only across generations, but in its application to our contemporary moment. Well documented, Black women historically excluded from dominant narratives across fields, and especially within traditional leadership scholarship, are often left to document their own stories and achievements.

Addressing this, Alston & McClellan’ (2011) field-shifting work provides a corrective to the ways that leadership has often been (mis)understood through a white male lens. Circumventing this hegemonic understanding, they highlight the ways Black women’s leadership has manifested in three particular forms–transformational, social justice and servant leader. Examining the life of six Black women educators and activists Alston & McClellan (2011), showcase how these women illustrate new ways to theorize leadership, and to understand illuminate the unique yet underrecognized contributions of Black women. Highlighted as one of the Black women leaders within Herstories, Audre Lorde’s legacy and leadership both as a pedagogue as well as an activist for women’s equality and gay liberation provide important ways to understand and theorize leadership presently. In our paper, we turn our specific attention to Black lesbian women leadership. Audre Lorde, in her essay "A burst of light" states:
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it
becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. Caring for myself is not
self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare (2017, 130).
Meditating on what it means in this moment to “dare to be powerful” and to use our “strength in the service of [our] vision, we highlight the labor and leadership of Audre Lorde and Judy Alston.

While Lorde insists on difference, and self-definition as sources of political and educational transformation, Alston’s scholarship gives texture to these tools by documenting and embodying leadership orientations with these principles at the core. In writing about Black women superintendents Alston writes, “Black female school superintendents are indeed servant leaders; they are the tempered radicals who “seek the respite where it is,” choosing to be servants, stewards, and trustees in the public educational system. They seldom “look for the door as the way out.” They often stay and work” (Alston, 2005, 685). Alston and Lorde, though an ancestor, are Black women leaders who chose to stay and do the work. In the face of systems that seek to deny and flatten one’s complexity of self, both of these leaders foster leadership styles deeply attuned to multiplicity, integrity, and radical vision. By placing these two figures in dialogue, this paper highlights strategies of resistance and innovation that redefine what leadership can look like in schools, universities, and social movements, inspiring scholars and practitioners committed to justice-oriented leadership.

Authors

• Durell M. Callier, University of Delaware

• Dominique C. Hill, Colgate University