Spiritual Weapons Black Female Principals

Journal of Educational Administration and HistoryVol. 42, No. 2, May 2010, 133–158

ISSN 0022-0620 print/ISSN 1478-7431 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/00220621003701296http://www.informaworld.com

Spiritual weapons: Black female principals and religio-spirituality

Noelle Witherspoon* and Dianne L. Taylor

Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice, College of Education, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USATaylor and FrancisCJEH_A_470651.sgm10.1080/00220621003701296Journal of Educational Administration and History0022-0620 (print)/1478-7431 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis422000000May 2010Dr. [email protected]

The historic connection of religion and spirituality to women, education,advocacy, and leadership is prevalent in Black American histories in general andthe role of the religion and spirit in promoting education and socialisation.Important in this history is the intersection of spirituality and leadership for BlackAmerican women. This research privileges woman and female agency inrearticulating gender and race in ways that are meaningful despite subjectivities.This study, informed by notions of religio-spirituality, is taken from a larger studyof the life narratives of four Black female principals. Through narrative analysis,the intersectionality of gender, race, and religio-spirituality highlighted therelationship of past and current religio-spiritual leadership understandings thatcontest the status quo in US schools. Our study highlights one example in whichthe historicity and analysis of gender and race contributes to reconceputalisingeducational administration by emphasising the voices of Black women principals,voices that provide alternative understandings of educational administration, stressthe importance of gendered and raced voices in administration, and questionformulaic models of leadership and the research that reifies them.

Keywords: spirituality; religio-spirituality; race; gender; principalship; women;leadership

Introduction: spiritual weapons

In 1982, Carol Gilligan wrote the influential book, In a Different Voice, to provide acounter perspective to the male-dominated field of social psychology. Gilliganproposed that women often ground their decision making on internal sensibilitiesrelated to context and relationships.1 Subsequently, feminists such as Nel Noddingsextended Gilligan’s premise by theorising an ethic of care.2 Joan Scott published‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, to which this issue of the Journalof Educational Administration and History is devoted, to argue that gender is ananalytic category historians can and should use.3 We agree with Scott and add thatgender as an analytic category is also useful to educational researchers. In this article,we combine gender with race to present the voices of four Black women who, as

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).2Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd ed.(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).3Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American HistoricalReview 91, no. 5 (1986): 1066.

134 N. Witherspoon and D.L. Taylor

principals, based their decision making not only on context and relationships, but onreligious and spiritual sensibilities as well.

As one part of her definition of gender, Scott described symbols (the Mary, motherof Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, accused of prostitution); normative concepts used tointerpret such symbols as binary opposites (virtue and vileness); politics and socialinstitutions (the family) and organisations (schools); and subjective identity (societalrole prescriptions and the extent to which individuals fulfil these expectations).4 Thesecond part of her definition is that ‘gender is a primary way of signifying relation-ships of power’.5 Scott described the first part of her definition as a ‘process ofconstructing … relationships’ and acknowledged that the process could be as aptlyapplied to race.6 Again, we agree and propose that intersectionality is one way tounderstand race and gender.

Before we discuss intersectionality, it seems wise to address first the title of ourarticle, which some may view as provocative. ‘Spiritual WEAPONS’ is not used as ameans to advocate religious violence (or any violence), nor is it used to suggest acontradiction in terms. Rather, WEAPONS is used as both metaphor and acronym. Asmetaphor, WEAPONS denotes pro-active and defensive strategies used by religio-spiritual Black women principals we studied. As advocates for the socially justtreatment of students at their respective schools, these principals confronted the neces-sity of challenging naïve, conservative, androcentric, business models of leadershipthat permeated their districts. As acronym, WEAPONS encompasses Word, Wisdom,and Witness; Ethic of Religio-spirituality; Armour and Activism; Perseverance andPrayer; Ontology and Epistemology; Naming; and Spiritual Fruit.7 The acronymoriginates in the words and their interpretation as described by these principals as theydiscussed their professional experiences in their school districts and certain aspects oftheir personal lives.8

The purpose of our article is two-fold. First, our research gives primacy to life-history narratives as a research method that examines educational administration asmore than the reductionist practice of recurrent androcentric, managerial frames ofleadership. We argue that life history narratives of women offer counter-narratives tothe master narratives of the field and disrupt taken-for-granted discourses. Feministand womanist histories challenge any one right way of doing administration andformulaic models of leadership, address issues of marginalisation and silence, andrestore voice to individuals who have been excluded from examinations of thepolitical and policy structures of schooling. During our research, we reflected onScott’s ideas and her vision that investigation of gender would yield a history thatprovides new perspectives to old questions.9 For these reasons, the second purpose ofthis article is to outline how we appropriate these ideas in our research as they relateto issues of gender and race and religio-spirituality as social justice in schools.

Our contribution, as we see it, for this special issue of the Journal of EducationalAdministration and History is in (re)appropriating Scott’s proposal of gendered

4Ibid., 1068.5Ibid., 1969.6Ibid.7Noelle Witherspoon, Ordinary Theologies: Spiritual Narratives of Black Female Principals(PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2008).8Ibid.9Scott, ‘Gender’, 1075.

Journal of Educational Administration and History 135

framework, explicitly adding the framework of intersectionality (such as race andreligion), and presenting the insights these frameworks offer through the lens of‘everyday’ histories of leadership based on experiences provided by African Americanfemale principals in the USA. Scott’s work remains relevant to our research andcurrent study in the field of educational administration. Many feminist and womanistresearchers promote the necessity of ‘writing women into history’10 by using genderand race as frameworks for analysing history and its place among the contemporary.

Kate Rousmaniere11 and others12 reminded us that there is little historical researchabout the American public school principal, thus leaving very little documentation orunderstanding about them. Notwithstanding this situation, we assert that life andprofessional histories of principals can offer significant texts that give insight toeducational leadership and administrative practice. Although Rousmaniere stated thatcertain studies are too specific or ‘overly hagiographic or overly sentimental’,13 ourresearch shows the importance of histories to knowledge production, to alternateinterpretations of educational leadership, and to understanding acts of social justice asleadership. We also regarded the insights that historical and current leadershiphistories offer the field of educational leadership and the importance of metaphor toconceptualising the principalship in the USA. In the original research on which thispaper is based, current narratives and histories of women in the African AmericanChurch served as analytical tools for examining education and leadership as it relatesto the ‘gender-raced’ nature of the principalship in the USA and to current construc-tions that persist in US schools such as equality, equity, marginalisation, and socialinjustice.14

Research often silences certain voices regardless of what these voices could teach.Rousmaniere aptly lamented that we know little ‘about the professional life and workchallenges, significances, and experiences of American school-building principals …or the role of the principal in student achievement … and leadership with staff andbroader school communities’.15 We learned much about these matters, though thislearning is delimited to the participants in our study. We present the often intersectingpersonal, professional, and social activities of Black women and the way theirreligious ‘beliefs and values reveal[ed] themselves within … [their] words, thoughts,and deeds’16 as they worked for social justice in their schools.

The next section gives a brief description of important concepts (womanism,intersectionality, and social justice) that provided core theoretical understandings forour research. The subsequent sections describe our research methods, the findingsregarding WEAPONS, gendered and raced conceptualisations of educational leader-ship, and finally conclusions concerning new histories and insights that bring us backto Scott’s influential work.

10Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nance Shrom Dye, in Scott, ‘Gender’, 1054.11Kate Rousmaniere, ‘School Principals in America: A Review of Three BiographicalStudies’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 40 (2008): 75–80.12Dianne L. Taylor, Paula A. Cordeiro, and Janet A. Chrispeels, ‘Pedagogy’, in Handbook ofResearch on the Education of School Leaders, ed. Michelle D. Young, Gary Crow, JosephMurphy, and Rodney Ogawa (London: Routledge, 2009), 319–69.13Rousmaniere, ‘School Principals’, 76.14Witherspoon, Ordinary Theologies.15Rousmaniere, ‘School Principals’, 76.16Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Mother Lode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Cleveland,OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 154.


Womanist theory, intersectionality, and social justice

Not wanting our analysis to merely focus on ‘description rather than theory’,17 ourresearch drew heavily from what writer Alice Walker termed womanist theory in herbook, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Walker described thestandpoint and experiences of women of colour who wanted ‘to know more and ingreater depth’.18 Walker’s four-part definition of womanism formed a critical andmethodological framework for various disciplines exploring the lives of Blackwomen, including theology.

Womanism entered the theological arena as a gender-based movement in the1980s.19 Womanist theologians appropriated Walker’s definition to examine Biblicalscholarship, Christology, ecumenics, and Christian practice.20 In addition, womanisttheologians have applied womanist hermeneutics to challenge oppressive societaltraditions, patriarchy, notions of sexuality, and other marginalising constructions insociety.21 In concert with womanist theory, womanist theology offers a way (1) toexamine women’s religious meanings and epistemologies, (2) to learn how womenstrived to contest and eradicate oppression, and (3) to inform social justice in USsociety and education past, present, and future. Both womanist theory and womanisttheology build on feminist ‘insights into the relationship between power, and theconstruction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection ofpatterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination’.22 Woman-ist thought critically engages traditional hierarchies associated with race and class.23

In this way, womanist theory makes salient the values of Black people, particularlyBlack women, and provides a lucid illustration of education and leadership born outof protest and social justice. Womanist theology offers a way to ‘consider how theDivine became and becomes manifested in the everyday experience of women …women who are and have been left out of society’s discourses’.24

The concept of intersectionality suggests that there are interlinking, overlappingconnections among various forms of oppression and gender, race, class, sexualpreference, religion, and disability.25 Intersectionality can be used to ‘think though allsocial institutions, organizational structures, patterns of social interaction and othersocial practices on all levels’.26 Single category frameworks, such as race-only orgender-only frameworks, can be rather sterile; however, these discrete categories can

17Scott, ‘Gender’, 1055.18Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1983).19Dolores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk (NewYork: Orbis Books, 1993).20Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Womanist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002).21See Ibid.; Cheryl T. Gilkes, ‘The Loves and Troubles of African-American Women’sBodies’, in Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. E.M.Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).22Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York:New York University Press, 2001), 5.23Walker, Our Mother’s Gardens.24Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Mother Lode, 8.25See Kimberle W. Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, andViolence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99.26Patricia H. Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 205.


be de-sterilised and unified through the lens of intersectionality. Doing so permittedus to derive a deeper understanding of the interplay between the experiences of reli-gio-spiritual Black female principals and the larger historical, socio-cultural, reli-gious, and institutional contexts in which they lived. Studied in this way, the collectiveexperiences of these women were not essentialised as the gendered and raced stand-point of the mythical universal Black female. Rather, intersectionality allowed us tostudy the individual and the group without losing the uniqueness of either.

Our use of intersectionality links strongly to William Tate’s assertion that scholarsof education should look to moral and spiritual texts to interrogate the workings ofgender, race, and other forms of marginalisation in schools.27 While Tate did notdescribe ways in which this moral and spiritual grounding is made manifest, thewomen in our study located themselves within a religio-spiritual worldview throughwhich they sought social justice in schools. Rather than attempting to find broadagreements, we carefully interpret what a religious or spiritual tradition meant to andwhat its import was for these women. This interpretation includes critiquing religionfrom the inside by those who hold these views, exploring tensions of faith, andexamining resources that an individual’s religio-spirituality can offer to education andleadership.

In our study, the concept of social justice became important and was a centralstrand in our findings. A desire to eradicate school realities of injustice were interwo-ven into the narrative of each woman we interviewed. As the educational leadershipliterature moves toward a social justice framework, administrative practices focus onan analysis of how administrators actually engage in the process of social justice. Forour participants, spirituality was not neutral in matters of social justice and leadershipin schools. Our analysis revealed that social justice and the spiritual were closelyrelated and often intertwined. For the participants, to be spiritual was to be sociallyjust.

The Black Church, women, and education

Historical examinations can serve to enlarge the scope of modern-day protest and tore-appropriate the potential found therein.28 However, any attempt to discern themeaning of African American women’s faith and action would be incomplete withoutreflection upon ‘The Black Church’.29 While there is no single body of doctrine thatdefines the religious identity of Black people in the USA, there is a common religiousexperience that stems from the formation of the Black Church. Williams explainedthis experience, noting that ‘the Black Church is the heart of hope in the Blackcommunity’s experience of oppression, survival struggle and historic efforts towardcomplete liberation’.30 Although symbolic, the Black Church refers to the social andreligious collective realities that African Americans experience. From this hermeneu-tical and epistemological reference, one can study Black spirituality without apology.

27William Tate, ‘Ethics, Engineering, and the Challenge of Race Reform’, Race, Ethnicity andEducation 8 (2005): 121–7.28Carolyn C. Denard, ‘Retrieving and Reappropriating the Values of Black Church Tradition’,in The Stones that Builders Rejected: The Development of Ethical Leadership from the BlackChurch Tradition, ed. Walter E. Fluker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1998).29Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 204.30Ibid., 205.


The Church remains a pillar in the Black community and represents more than a placeof worship. Lincoln explained that ‘to understand the power of the Black Church, itmust first be understood that there is no distinction between the Black Church and theBlack community. The Church is the spiritual face of the Black subculture’.31 Histor-ically, the Black Church was a place of political, religious, social, educational, andcultural activity.32 It remains so today.

In her book, If It Wasn’t for the Women, Gilkes discussed the historic role Blackwomen have played in their church and community.33 Work within the Church oftencentred on poor women and children and included ‘mothering’ activities such asproviding food, clothing, child care, and housing.34 Included as well were Biblicalinstruction, meeting community needs, and support and promotion of education.

The role organised religion plays in cultural, racial, ethical, moral, and philo-sophical understandings, politics, and activism cannot be trivialised. Churches in theBlack community have been central to the ‘project of seeking change’.35 For thehistoric Black Church, ‘social justice [and] religion seemed inseparable’.36 From itsbeginnings, the Black Church symbolised to Black people that they could managethe structures of civil society despite their exclusion from the dominant Whiteculture in the USA.37 Opportunities for leadership, not available elsewhere in societybecause of deeply entrenched racist beliefs which were so culturally pervasive thatthey were embodied in law, were available in the Black Church. There, emergingleaders found not only opportunity but also affirmation for service and the demon-stration of ability.

After the US Civil War in the mid-1800s, women played an important role inbuilding Black denominations. Like men, women were recognised as ‘elocutionists,lecturers, field secretaries for the Women’s Conventions, missionary workers, teach-ers, writers, … school directors, and orators’.38 Church women were active in‘practicing their religious lives, yet at the same time … expanded their concern fortheir moral development to their families, and ultimately [took] their concerns to thelarger society through … reform activities’.39 Black women’s overtly religio-spiritualenactments reflected a historical posture of the Black Church: education as missionand ministry. ‘If any one ministry could be identified as central … it would be

31C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hilland Wang, 1999), 96.32See Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988).33See Cheryl T. Gilkes, It if Wasn’t for the Women (Maryknoll, NJ: Orbis Books, 2001).34See Donald Warran, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (New York:Macmillan, 1989).35Mary R. Sawyer, ‘The Black Church and Black Politics’, in Down by the Riverside: Read-ings in African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2000).36Albert J. Raboteau, ‘In Search of the Promised Land’, in Down by the Riverside: Readingsin African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: New York University Press,2000).37See Ed Murphy, Handbook for Spiritual Warfare, revised ed. (Nashville, TN: Thomas NelsonPublishers, 1996).38Delores C. Carpenter, ‘Black Women in Religious Institutions’, in Down by the Riverside:Readings in African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2000), 101.39Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993),81–2.


education … Black people defined education as a central task of the Christianmission’.40 African Americans have long been proponents of formal education.Education was of chief importance in the moral and social advancement of the Blackcommunity. The tradition of the Black Church, womanism, womanist theology, andhistoriographic texts are tools used in this study to explain the intersection of Blackwomen and educational leadership.

Educational research has not studied historical texts to understand how religionand spirituality shape the leadership of Black women in actively resisting the statusquo in schools. Such an omission is puzzling given that, historically, Black spiritualityhas been located in resistance.41 Many historians, archivists, and womanist andfeminist scholars cite the inherent political importance of religion and spirituality tothe life and work of females. Sociological studies of the history of the AfricanAmerican woman in religion highlight their leadership and personal, institutional, andstructural creation and transformation. In theorising history, researchers have exploredover-feminisations in the Church, home, and community, challenged the essentialBlack churchwoman, examined the role of religio-spirituality in naming oppressionand seeking its abolition, and critiqued the erotic/exoticisation of the female religiousexperience.42

Reading women in history: the need for narrative

Robert Starratt stated, ‘Administration is autobiography … We write our history … inour work’.43 The premise of our research rests in the application of a womanist theo-retical and methodological approach grounded in the experience of African Americanwomen, culture, and narrative. Research seems to need what the autobiographicalnature of narrative has to offer: an ability to name oneself in narrative while applyingtheoretical and identity frameworks that allow African American women to become apart of the greater religious, spiritual, professional, political, and other socio-culturalnarratives of society.

Our goal of studying Black women’s spiritual narratives is to offer one way tounderstand how religion and spirituality are read into life’s private and public stories,through an intersecting (gender, race) hermeneutic. Our research claims theimportance of privileging the sense-making processes of women, our participants’leadership processes and identity claims, the ways they used spirituality for social

40Jualynne E. Dodson and Cheryl T. Gilkes, ‘Something Within: Social Change andCollective Endurance in the Sacred World of Black Christian Women’, in vol. 3 of Womenand Religion in America: 1900–1968, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary S. Keller (SanFrancisco: Harper and Rowe, 1987), 84.41Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, eds., African American Religious Thought (Louisville,KY: John Knox Press, 2003).42See Mitchem, Womanist Theology; Jocelyn Moody, Sentimental Confessions: SpiritualNarratives of Nineteenth-century African American Women (Athens: University of GeorgiaPress, 2003); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, ‘Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminismand Abolition’, in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in NineteenthCentury America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York and London: Oxford University Press,1992); Audrey Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: CrossingPress, 1984); and Hazel Carby, ‘The Multicultural Wars’, in Black Popular Culture: A Projectby Michelle Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (New York: New Press, 1998).43See Robert J. Starratt, Leaders with Vision: The Quest for School Renewal (Thousand Oaks,CA: Corwin Press, 1995).


justice, and how spirituality was (re)appropriated and restorative work in theireducational leadership practice. Using data from Witherspoon’s44 study, we demon-strate the prominent connection between religion and spirituality in the lives andprofessional practice of Black women who were public school principals.

Sampling

Four Black women who held or had held principalships were selected through purpo-sive, intensity sampling.45 These principals lived and worked in various regions of aUS southern state, were at different career stages, led schools at the elementary andsecondary organisational levels, and held either bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoraldegrees in education. Three criteria were established for participant inclusion in thestudy. First, because religion and spirituality are considered by some to be private,participants had to be willing to discuss their religious and spiritual beliefs and theinfluence of each on their practice as principals.46 Second, participants had to bewilling to discuss the marginalisation experiences they had encountered in theirrespective principalships. Finally, participants had to be willing to discuss the alter-nate ways they interpreted and implemented policy in their schools, whether or nottheir interpretation and/or implementation were consistent with district intentions.

To maintain anonymity participants were given pseudonyms. Collectively, theyhad 75 years experience as educators and 14 years experience as school administra-tors. Bobbie was in her 32nd year in education. Her career was unique in that shehad been an assistant principal for three years, a principal for two, and had transi-tioned back in to an assistant principal position. Pattie was in her 16th year in educa-tion and in her sixth year as a school principal. Toni was in her 13th year ineducation and in her first year as a principal. Her school was an elementary magnetschool (a school with a specific curriculum that enrolls students from throughout thedistrict). Avery was in her 14th year in education and was a second-year principal.Two participants, Bobbie and Pattie, were in the same district. Toni and Averyworked in other districts.

School contexts

All of the principals worked in schools classified as ‘urban schools’ with a majorityof students who were poor and of colour. Because Toni led a magnet school, studentsat her school who were poor were approximately the same in number as those whowere not. Pattie, Bobbie, and Avery each indicated that students at their schools hadlow standardised test scores, with the majority of those scores belonging to studentsof colour and students classified at the poverty level. While students at Toni’s schoolwere considered average to high-performing, students of colour comprised the largestpercentage of the student body.

44Witherspoon, Ordinary Theologies.45Michael Q. Patton, Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (London: Sage, 2002).46See Elizabeth V. Lei and Bonnie L. Kyburz, Negotiation Religious Faith in the CompositionClassroom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005).


Data collection and analysis

Multiple open-ended, in-depth interviews47 were conducted over the course of oneacademic year. Because of geographic proximity, one of the interviews was conductedjointly with Bobbie and Pattie. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed andranged from a minimum of three hours to a maximum of seven hours. In addition tointerviews, data were collected through journaling by the first author to document‘anything that transpires’ and to permit reflection on the research process.48

Data analysis was ongoing, open-ended, deductive, and included multiple strate-gies.49 After transcription, the data were analysed to uncover broad themes. Throughwomanist theological and theoretical lenses, ways in which religion and spiritualitywere salient in the lives and work of the participants and the ways in which theypromoted social justice and initiated social activism in their schools were discovered.These lenses were subsequently used as a means to interrogate marginality as itemerged from the data.

The womanist method of ‘theming’ served as an important analytic technique forthis study.50 African Americans often use ‘topic associative’ stories to bear witness totheir experience, so special attention was paid to those stories.51 What resulted fromthe interviews was the creation of spiritual narratives that demonstrated how religiousand spiritual values and beliefs influenced the experiences of these principals. Thelarger study upon which this paper is based provides an analysis of each principal’sindividual narrative. In that study, key life events and professional and personal narra-tives were analysed to unpack any relationships among age and spirituality, leadershiptraining and socialisation, spirituality, and the impact of family and religio-spiritualityand other intersections with religio-spirituality and leadership. This manuscript repre-sents another wave of analysis that highlights metaphors of leadership, positioninganalysis, and stories of identity.52

Positioning analysis and stories of identity focus on the identities people constructfor themselves as they engage in narratives. That is, in storytelling, individuals oftenhighlight ways in which they behave that are counter to pre-established selves orbehaviours. In this re-analysis, we isolated large narrative units in the transcripts toidentify themes that emphasise ways in which the participants constructed themselvesas religio-spiritual, Black female principals, while countering and resisting status quoarticulations of leadership.

WEAPONS: interrogating and contesting the status quo

The historicity of religious belief and practice is not merely idiomatic to Blackreligious experiences, but also underscores social praxis. The findings presented speak

47Grant McCracken, The Long Interview (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988).48E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Re-spectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 117.49Catherine K. Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).50See Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Mother Lode.51See Sarah Michaels, ‘Sharing Time: Children’s Narrative Styles and Differential Access toLiteracy’, Language and Society 10 (1981): 423–42.52Michael Baumberg, ‘Positioning with Davie Hogan – Stories, Tellings, and Identities’, inNarrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society, ed. Colette Daiute andCynthia Lightfoot (London: Sage, 2003) and William Labov, Language in the Inner City:Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).


to educational leadership and capture the themes of spiritual WEAPONS inherent inthe participants’ experiences such that their religio-spirituality, which was founda-tional to their social justice enterprise for both students and themselves, is highlighted.

Each principal intersected religio-spirituality and leadership in their descriptionsof their leadership practices and administrative roles. Even more telling was the inter-section of race and gender in their professional storytelling and the interrelatedness ofrace/gender with religio-spirituality, leadership, and social justice. This researchexposed how they experienced their principalships in a gendered and raced way thatis important for understanding the principalship. Moreover, the participants’ narra-tives opened a window on their conceptions of their responsibilities toward students,especially Black students, which intersected with their own experiences of race,gender, and class oppression.

Religio-spirituality as culture

Because religio-spirituality is central to our study, it is necessary to explain how theparticipants identified this for themselves. For these women, religio-spirituality wasalso religio-cultural. Each woman made reference to her faith as being family- andcommunity-centred, but rooted in race, culture, and gender. This was prominent in theintersection of religio-spirituality and their discussions of the Civil Rights movement,experience with racism and sexism, and other forms of oppression. Marginalisingexperiences are especially important to African American people and the AfricanAmerican culture writ large. Exposing unjust practices and fighting against them in asociety that both created and continues to support such practices is, for AfricanAmerican women, what White called ‘Black counterdiscourses’. White stated thatthese counterdiscourses

Expose the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and class categories intertwine andtransform each other. Categories such as race and gender are created to help the worldmake sense to us. These categories do not exist ‘out there’ in the world. Rather, they areanalytical categories that are always structured hierarchically and that have real conse-quences for real people.53

Each participant had a strong connection to her church. The Church was vital to howeach woman viewed religio-spirituality and to how each saw herself culturally. Just astheir religio-spirituality was a mixture of influences, their identities were just ascomplex. Their womanhood was inseparably related to both their race and religio-spirituality. Indeed, these women did not separate their Black experience from thelarger Black Christian experience; rather, they described parallels between their ownstruggles and those of Black people historically and currently.

In a horrific example, Avery and Toni discussed in detail their experiences of themurders of their mothers due to domestic violence. In recounting these events, Averydiscussed the prevalence of domestic violence in the Black community and the silenceof the Black community on this issue. Often oppressed people internalise and comportwith the views and behaviours of the oppressor. Instances of White violence againstBlack people are common in the USA. The Rodney King beating by White LosAngeles police officers several years ago and the subsequent acquittal of the officers

53White, Dark Continent, 15.


who beat him is a case in point. Pattie and her husband considered themselves studentsof African American history and often referenced domestic violence in Black familiesduring conversations. Involvement in their current church, Pattie believed, enabledthem to do ‘what God wants them to do’. They believed strongly that part of God’swill for them specifically involved ministering to the Black community. Similarly,Bobbie frequently referred to the Civil Rights movement and saw her life and work asa continuation of that struggle. All of the women discussed specific instances ofracism encountered by themselves, their family, friends, and students. Inherent in theirbelief system was the obligation to fight against racism on behalf of themselves, theircommunities and workplaces, and for Black people as a whole.

One of our most interesting findings was the unique way in which the participantsconstructed themselves as individuals. Their narratives spoke to multiple identitiesand roles in a way that provided a view on how they identified themselves. Their rolesincluded being Black women, principals, mothers, Christians, daughters, Churchmembers, friends, wives, employees, and so on. However, the unifying identities foreach were being a Christian and a Black woman in that order. When asked how theyviewed themselves, they used terms such as ‘believer’, ‘child of God’, ‘Christian’, and‘saved’. They repeatedly spoke of their religio-spirituality as a holistic frame of refer-ence for their identities, their lives, and how they viewed and portrayed themselves.On more than one occasion, their religio-spiritual view of themselves was linked totheir Blackness and their predominately Black churches. Each woman was acutelyaware of being Black, which was a unifier for some of the understandings they heldof their religio-spirituality. When they spoke of being Black women, interestingly, thisidentity was a single characterisation. That is, in discussions of identity, they did notseparate their race from their gender. Rather than holding a fragmented sense of self,the principals integrated their private faith and public practice in much the same waythat they saw their Blackness and their womanhood as one. Patti described thisintegration of self.

It’s not just that I have belief. My belief is who I am. I have no choice but to have myfaith show up in school. To me, it’s the same as being Black and a woman. Can’t donothin’ ’bout that either.

Impact of the church

The Church offered deliverance, but it also buttressed practices that could be inter-preted as patriarchal and oppressive. For instance, all of the participants admitted towillingly following traditional gender roles promoted by the Church. Each womanheld leadership positions in her church, and each also followed the doctrine of theChurch that women not ‘be the head of the man’ or hold the position of pastor in theChurch. Because of the importance of the Church in their lives, two principals openlyproselytised students, which is illegal in the USA. The mitigating circumstances theyasserted were that proselytisation occurred in relationship to the community in whichthe students lived or with individual students and that their placement at theirparticular schools was because they were Black spiritual women. They rationalisedthat the challenges faced by students in their school called for a ‘special person to beat our type of schools’ (Toni). Also enabling these principals to promote religiousbeliefs at school was that they enjoyed a camaraderie with the large number of AfricanAmerican female administrators in their districts.


While these religio-spiritual undertakings can be viewed as troubling, they areconsistent with historical themes of protest, deliverance, and freedom inherent inBlack religio-spirituality.54 These issues notwithstanding, our aim is not to focus thesepractices or to identify what institutionalised religion meant to the participants or howthey acquiesced to what many would view as oppressive practices of the Church.Rather, this article explores the participants’ re-framing of their spiritual practices asprofessional ‘tool kits’ of strategies for action. The participants’ standpoints offercounternarratives to traditional ideations of the Black, religio-spiritual woman assimply a servant leader or mother figure. In telling parts of their stories, we illuminatehow these activist principals used cultural and epistemological tools to achieve anti-oppressive outcomes for themselves and their students. Like other activists, theseparticipants’ acts have been transgressive of parameters set by others.55

Word, wisdom, and witness

For the participants, Word represented the Bible. It was the first word and the lastword when difficulties arose; it was the source of wisdom for them, and in the AfricanAmerican religious tradition, was a critical tool in making decisions in or related totheir schools.56 By their own declaration, their school districts were set up asmasculinist, policy-driven, and often oppressive to certain students and principals.Implementing stringent, inflexible policies that adversely affected students were notconsidered appropriate witness for these principals; their personal beliefs determinedhow they handled policy. While policy is usually interpreted as corporatist, rational,and modernist, the behaviours of these principals reflected a post-masculinist responseto leadership and leadership diversity. Obediently implementing policy was not whatthese women believed to be most important to effective leadership. Patti said,

Real leadership wisdom lies in the Word. It is the basis of my decisions. We keep beingtold to ‘follow policy, follow policy.’ Since when did policy create what is best forstudents? If policy had its way, I probably wouldn’t be the principal!

Witnessing involved maintaining what they believed were religio-spiritual and justbehaviours. Some of these behaviours included being consistent with what theyviewed as the mission of the principalship. While it is rare to find individuals who,when interviewed separately, use the same term to describe a particular phenomenon,each participant used the word mission or the phrase mission field in describing herprincipalship. What exactly was their mission? When asked, the participants found ithard to give specifics, but each one was passionate about the overall need to makethings better for the students that they served. Their mission was closely tied to theiridea of social justice. In their words:

54Cornel West, Prophecy, Deliverance! (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,1982).55Jill Blackmore, ‘Social Justice and the Study and Practice of Leadership in Education: AFeminist History’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 38, no. 2 (2006): 185–200.56Gilkes, If it Wasn’t for the Women, 127.


Social justice is making sure my kids have everything that everyone else has. Sometimesit may mean giving my kids more than you give other people who already ‘have’. It maynot be fair, but life hasn’t been fair to my kids. (Avery)

Every child deserves the best that we can give them. (Toni)

I understand that we can’t do everything for children, but I am tired of seeing White folksbe the only one with a chance. (Pattie)

Thus, while these principals did not call social justice by name until specificallyasked, their understandings about schooling and the principalship encompassed whatthey believed were fairness, equality, and equity.

Ethic of religio-spirituality

For our participants, morality and ethics were not seen as separate. Likewise, religionand spirituality were not separate from ethics and morality. Their views have someconsistency with the profound effect ethics and spirituality are having on the field ofeducational leadership.57 Hence, another contribution our study makes is to accentu-ate an ‘ethic of spirituality’. As Pattie noted,

So much of who I am as a Black woman means living with integrity. God valuesintegrity. I try to live my personal life with integrity. I definitely try to run my schoolwith integrity.

As researchers, we wondered what it meant to ‘run a school with integrity’. Toni elab-orated, saying, ‘It means not standing by and watching the wrong things get done’.Much like a pastor, these women not only believed in ensuring the academic well-being of their students, but also in providing holistic care of mind, body, and spirit.The care these principals engaged in sought to address interlocking systems ofmaterial realities, community realities, and spiritual realities. The depth of their caringcomes through in their words.

It was a good thing that I was there, you know, for the children, because they neededsomeone who was compassionate and who cared about them. (Bobbie)

At the end of the day, there is not a person in this building or outside this building whocan say I don’t care about these kids. You can say whatever you want, but at the end ofthe day, there is not a person here who could question my passion and my desire to helpthese kids. (Toni)

Some of these parents don’t take care of these babies. When they are here, they are mybabies, and I gotta make sure they have what they need. They need some Jesus, too, andI do the best I can without getting fired. (Pattie)

I’ve got kids whose parents are on drugs. Ninety-eight per cent of them live in poverty.Some are under that care of DHR [Department of Human Resources] because they areneglected. I honestly don’t believe we can do it without God. (Avery)

57Carolyn Shields, ‘Liberating Discourses: Spirituality and Educational Leadership’, Journalof School Leadership 15 (2005): 608–23.


The participants saw themselves as a part of ‘God’s active care for the disposed’.58 Ineach of their narratives, there was an expressed belief that they were an extension ofGod’s care for their students. God was seen as actively involved in the affairs of theschool and the lives of its students. It this relationship, or lack of it, that spiritual histo-rians believe would have the greatest impact on the lives of students. It was this rela-tionship that these women sought to introduce or nurture in the lives of their students.

Armour and activism

Another theme that emerged from the narratives was that of armour and protection.The phrase ‘putting on the armour of God’ comes from Ephesians 6: 14. Theseprincipals viewed the principalship as a harsh occupation and their schools as harshenvironments. In both circumstances, they expressed a need to guard themselves.Bobbie felt that

You have to be on guard. You know, the Lord tells us the same thing. There are definitelywolves out there. They have their own agendas. It felt like I had to guard myself fromeveryone – parents, teachers, folks at central office.

Bobbie’s words made clear that parents, district and state administrators, teachers, andcommunity members were sometimes individuals against whom they had to guardthemselves.

Because schools were viewed as harsh environments, maintaining their religio-spirituality by engaging in acts of social justice were cast as subversive by the ‘wolvesout there’. Although their discussion of social justice was not exhaustive, these prin-cipals believed that schooling should teach students about opportunities for materialrealities and provide the material realities that students may not have. The majority ofstudents at each principal’s schools were considered impoverished. As principals,these women wanted to diminish the effects of poverty on their students.

I want my students to have everything that everyone else has. The school can’t do every-thing but it can do something. School is a ministry within itself. (Avery).

I am always on the side of the kid. They should have opportunities. (Toni)

Some of my kids don’t have shoes. I need to be worried about that just like everythingelse. (Pattie)

I was always fighting to get things in school that the kids did not have at home. Likecomputers. None of my kids had these at home. I fought for a lab at school. My schoolneeded it more than the rich school they were trying to give it to. (Bobbie)

Bobbie’s comments exemplify ways these principals’ religio-spirituality undergirdedtheir enactments of social justice and active resistance to district decisions that kepttheir students at the margins of school district largesse.

Recognising the often detrimental effects of school policies on the lives andeducational opportunities of children, the principals engaged in acts of creative

58See Larry G. Murphy, “All Things to All People”, in Down by the Riverside: Readings inAfrican American Religion, ed. L. G. Murphy (New York: New York University Press, 2000),133–137.


insubordination to obstruct these detrimental effects and to insure the well-being oftheir students. Pattie stated,

I don’t have to say anything necessarily to get something done. I simply do what I do. Iactually get more done by not getting in someone’s face every five minutes. That justputs you on the radar. You don’t say anything; you can’t get accused of anything. Iaccomplish plenty for my kids by doing what I do.

As Patti conveyed, acts of social justice sometimes took the form of ‘tweaking’policies or procedures and at other times reinterpreting them to the benefit of thestudents. Examples of creative insubordination principals cited were interpretingretention policies, curriculum mandates, and suspension policies in ways thatprovided opportunities for children to succeed. The African American female princi-pals described in this paper employed alternative practices considered as ‘transgres-sive’ and ‘subversive’.59

Perseverance and prayer

For all of the participants, perseverance was related to what they called the daily stres-sors of the principalship. Among the stressors were lack of autonomy in managingtheir schools, large amounts of paperwork, increasing pressure to raise studentachievement scores, lack of resources, student poverty and underachievement, and theemotional and physical energy required to accomplish the job. According to Avery,

This job is hard, but I will stay until He tells me to do something else. He never promisedus this life would not be hard. I knew this job was deep when I took it. So did He. If Hesaw fit to give me the position, then He thinks I can handle it. He doesn’t give us morethan we can handle.

Job-related stressors were also encountered at a personal level. Each woman told ofovercoming encounters with racism and sexism. As Toni summarised,

I have been discriminated against in every sense of the word and yet I am still here. Iwould have quit a long time ago if I did not pray and have God.

As can be inferred, prayer was an essential part of each principal’s professional life.Prayer for these women was among the rituals employed at the beginning of thedecision-making process, especially when decisions were major or difficult. Prayeralso served as a reflective process at the end. Avery explained the significance ofprayer for her.

Every morning as I’m coming to work I say a prayer, ‘God help me to make gooddecisions and do what’s best for these kids’. At night, I often think about all that I havedone that day and make sure that I have done all I can do.

The women often cited being in prayer daily about their schools. They indicated thatprayer had the power to truly effect change by moving God to act in their lives and intheir schools.

59See bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York:Routledge, 1994).


Underlying each woman’s philosophy was the experience of racism. Eradicatingracial injustice was interwoven into each narrative. Each principal stated a belief thatthe biggest problems she had to overcome were inequities rooted in race or racism. Indiscussing issues affecting schooling, such as test scores, poverty or wealth, commu-nity tensions, or students’ households, race or racism was integral. It was clear fromthe participants’ responses that race and class issues were entwined with one anotherand called for social justice. Although the participants saw some inequities in schoolsas rooted in other socio-cultural issues, they also saw them as spiritual issues thatneeded to be overcome.

My belief is that all of this stuff is rooted in the devil. Besides, God still runs this … thisworld, I mean. At the end of day, I don’t take this stuff home with me because He is stillthe one in control. I have to do my part with that. (Pattie)

Prayer is the thing. You can’t fight something as big as this with flesh and blood. Youare in a spiritual battle for these kids. (Bobbie)

I take some of my students home with me. I take care of them. That is the Christian thingto do. I know that this is a part of educating them. This thing is spiritual. (Avery)

Sometimes I am just plain tired. I deal with issues all week. But I keep coming back tomy faith. (Toni)

For these women it was clear that their religio-spirituality was what informed theireducational and leadership philosophies and that these formed a mission of socialjustice. In each narrative, social justice and spirituality overlapped in a significantway.

Ontology and epistemology

‘One of the reasons why religio-spirituality presents epistemological challenges … isthat it is inseparable from ontological positions. In other words, how we come to knowis embedded in who we are and how we choose to live our lives’.60 Each womanapplied her specialised way of knowing in the decision-making process and dailypractice of the principalship. For each, in the synapse between problem and solution,idea and decision, the transmitters were religion, spirituality, and experience. Prayerand communing with God, consulting the Bible or other religious resources, reflectingupon past experiences, and using their religio-spiritual views influenced what theyconsidered as knowledge and how they applied that knowledge to the principalship.

We believe that the women in our study, through their unique religio-spiritual wayof leading, problematise knowledge claims and the prescriptive roles and behavioursthat dominant claims prescribe. This study adds to the field through our ability tovalue all ways of knowing and ways of being in every sphere of life, particularly thoseof religio-spiritual African American women. This study ascribed value to the broadspectrum of knowledge (historical, theological, spiritual, professional, personal,collective, and individual). Regardless from whence the knowledge emerged, whatmattered was the way it worked and impacted the individual’s life. The collectivestruggle of Black female principals to work toward social justice is deeply embedded

60See Shields, ‘Liberating Discourses’, 609.


in a set of cultural practices and lived experiences that privilege epistemic andontological claims of spirituality as a guiding force. What they know and how theyknow and who they perceive themselves to be informed their practice.

Through the participants’ narratives, this research gives primacy to Blackwomen’s religio-spiritual experience in matters of educational leadership. Rather thanwholly relying upon policy, other administrators, dictates of stakeholders, or formalleadership training to inform their decision-making, the participants relied on howthey defined themselves and interpreted their own experience and knowledge to guidetheir actions. As Pattie noted,

I think about all the courses I took in college to get to where I am today. Some things Iuse, but I just don’t think a classroom prepares you for what you really have to do whenyou become a principal. You have many demands for everyone around you, and believeme, a whole list of rules that people tell you to follow. But more often than not, you haveto go with what you know.

Brummet stated, ‘Spiritualities are systems of explanation … Spirituality undergirdsa system of knowledge and tells people how to draw conclusions and truths fromcertain experiences’.61 Undeniably, the participants’ interpretation of situations anddecisions in school were drawn from their religio-spiritual belief. The whole of theiridentity as religio-spiritual, Black women expressed itself in their principalshippractices.

Naming

The participants frequently engaged in behaviour that was not considered traditionalleadership behaviour. They had the courage to name and rename traditional concep-tualisations of leadership behaviour by the practice in which they engaged. Forinstance, Pattie said,

The nice thing about this job is that I have found a way to lead that fits for me. Sure thereis a lot of oversight all the time, but I have found a way that is best for me and the folksin my school.

The women’s narratives noticeably revealed that practising their religio-spiritualitydid not mean ‘that one disregards the organizational context in which they wereembedded’.62 Much like their historic foremothers, the participants took the uniquepositionality, experience, and practice of African American religio-spiritual womenand critically applied them as ‘normal’ institutional practice.

In the USA, leaders often de-legitimise religio-spiritual practice and overempha-sise technocratic, managerial, and policy-driven skills. These principals’ beliefs andactions moved religion and spirituality from the margins and made it central to theirpractice. Refusing to couch spirituality as a secularised endeavour to make it moreacceptable, our participants named spirituality as religion and made clear the ways

61Barry Brummett, ‘Rhetorical Epistemology and Rhetorical Spirituality’, in The Academy andPossibility of Belief: Essays on Intellectual and Spiritual Life, ed. Mary L. Buley-Meissner,Mary M. Thompson and Elizabeth B. Tan (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000), 123.62Robert J. Starratt, ‘Prologue’, in Inspiring Practice: Spirituality and Educational Leader-ship, ed. Carolyn M. Shields, Mark Edwards and Anish Sayani (Lancaster, PA: Pro-ActivePublications, 2005), 70.


that it informed their practice through working for social justice. By identifying andnaming their educational practice as religio-spiritual in quality, their performance ofthe principalship became de-normed.

The principals’ narratives also highlighted how their lives and practice named,confrontationally or non-confrontationally, acts of injustice in schools and ways inwhich they attempted to ‘do justly’63 in schools and society. Bobbie clarified,

I work with a lot of people who don’t say anything about what they see wrong in schools.I think if you have been given this job, then you have no choice. I think that God gaveme my job, and part of my job is get mad at the same things He gets mad at. You havecall things out for what they are.

The willingness to name, to ‘call things out for what they are’, are inherent in thetheoretical perspective that considers the experiences of Black women as normal andnot as a deviation or variation.64

Spiritual fruit

The participants constantly reiterated being compelled toward right behaviour in theprincipalship. The difficulty this involved needed to produce results to sustain theeffort required. Avery wanted to see the fruits of her labour.

I want to bear fruit. How hard I work should bear fruit. God tells us that we will beknown by the fruit we bear. I mean, if I am running around barking at people all the time,that won’t bear fruit. I might ‘fruit’ my way on outta here! But the things I work towardsshould help not hurt.

While their actions varied, their leadership behaviours were ones of partnering withGod as their leader, and they, in turn, provided leadership to their schools. Often theirdiscussion centred on their principalship practice as social justice and for that practiceto ‘bear fruit’. Spiritual fruit is one way that spiritual historians represent social justicein schools. For the principals in our study, creating a just environment for students wasrooted in their religio-spiritual mission to provide equitable ‘fruit’ for their students.In some instances, this ‘fruit’ seemed mundane, but nonetheless important, such asassuring improvements to and maintenance of the physical plant. But the ‘fruit’ alsoincluded substantive things such as securing resources received by schools withwealthier student bodies, closing the achievement gap for their students, and rejectingthe deficit model when it was applied to their schools.

At Toni’s school, a magnet, more students were achieving at acceptable levels thanwere students at the other three schools. Bobbie and Pattie were principals of low-performing schools that were placed in ‘school improvement’ by the state, a categor-isation that signifies a school is doing poorly in educating its students. Avery’s schoolhad been in school improvement, but at the time of the interview, had been releasedfrom this category. Still, Avery explained that

63Micah 6: 8.64Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, ‘A Movement Against and Beyond Boundaries: “PoliticallyRelevant Teaching” Among African American Teachers’, Teachers College Record 100(1999): 702–23.


My kids may never be top achievers by somebody else’s scale. And I do believe thateducation is key. But without that exposure to a different life, they are not going to under-stand it. These kids are trying to survive. It’s like, you want so badly for them to some-how see that there is something else out there, outside of these walls and what they seeeveryday out there. (Avery)

These kids are smart. I am tired of people worrying about what the kids don’t have andthink about what they bring to the table. They can’t help who their parents are. (Pattie)

When I stopped focusing so much on achievement at my school, our test scores increasedby 19%. The purpose of school is not just about scores. I realised that. (Toni)

These poignant words of the participants demonstrate not only their desire for theirwork to bear ‘fruit’ for the students, but also the genuine care each felt for the studentsat their schools.

In addition to the other things the principals did to achieve results for theirstudents, each also shared an intense belief that fulfilling the schools’ mission requiredgarnering community support. In their own ways, each set about nurturing thatsupport.

I tried to become a part of the life that they lived. I even stopped going to my beauticianand I got a beautician on the west side, and I still go there now. I don’t think I will everleave her because back there in that beauty parlour, the kids came back through there; theparents come through there. They got to see me; they got to know me. They go to talk tome and they go to see I’m just like y’all. (Bobbie; ‘y’all’ is a colloquialism for ‘you all’)

A lot of my students in my school are a part of my community and even attend mychurch. (Toni)

You’ve got to know your community to serve it. (Pattie)

I understand this community and they trust me. I couldn’t do what I do if the communitywasn’t behind me. Not every parent agrees with me, but for the most part they do.(Avery)

Presence, availability, and trust were essential in the view of these principals tosecuing community support.

Gender-racing leadership

Gender-roles and expectations influenced the moral, ethical, social, and psychologicaldevelopment of the participants. The women shared a distinctive worldview encom-passing strong spiritual influences and a clear identification of what it means to beAfrican American and female. They knew, as Claudia Tate stated in DomesticAllegories of Political Desire, that ‘In a racist and sexist society, the concept of aBlack woman empowered by God is doubly radical’.65 The participants in our studyrepresent many intersections; spirituality, leadership, race, and gender are but a few.In the telling of their histories and experiences as principals of schools attended bylow-income, African American children, it became clear that their leadership and spir-

65Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turnof the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 152.


ituality was gender-raced. Being African American and women was central to theways they experienced their spirituality, their personal and professional roles andidentities, and their activism in schools.

The structure of school itself was foundational to ways our participants perceivedgender and race as race-ing their professional experiences. This structure createdtensions between schooling and spiritual leadership enacted as social justice, tensionsthat further marginalised the principals as they advocated on behalf of their children.One participant commented,

I know what they call strong, Black women behind their backs. I have been called a bitchand I have seen other people get promoted over me when I was the first of few to obtaina doctorate degree. Every time I speak up about my school, everyone gets this, ‘Oh no,here she goes again’, look on their faces.

For two of the participants, their unique perspective of leadership was viewed asammunition to be used against them, since ‘they don’t want Black women at the topanyway’ (Bobbie). For the other two participants, their spirituality resulted in anincrease in cultural capital and voice in their positions as principals. Nevertheless,each participant experienced being excluded from certain conversations and districtdecisions because they were African American female principals. For example, thedistrict in which one participant worked allocated additional funding to most elemen-tary schools over several years, but excluded her school on each occasion. Each timeshe inquired about the unequal treatment, district administrators would remind her thatshe ‘had all those churches in her neighbourhood and she could ask them’. Paradoxi-cally, the role of religio-spirituality was regarded by district administrators as an assetfor schools in African American communities to tap into, yet the personal faiths ofthese principals was often seen as exotic or emotional by the same administrators.

Disparate treatment from district administrators did not diminish the belief eachprincipal had in her headship at her school. All four participants spoke about feelingsingularly responsible for their schools, declared their authority, and made clear thatthey had the ‘last word’ over every facet of the school. Each principal set up the organ-isational structure of the school, placing herself at the top of the organisational chart.Not surprisingly, each one encountered challenges to her authority. When challengescame, the participants attributed them either to resistance to a Black woman leader orto the lack of shared vision with those making the challenge. Consistent with theircommon belief that they were solely responsible for their schools, each principalwillingly risked stakeholder dissatisfaction to make decisions she believed were inthe best interest of the students. As noted, important decisions were not madecapriciously, but rather with the guidance that came through their religio-spiritualityand prayer. One participant explained,

My school is my responsibility, and don’t get me wrong, I have folks that don’t want totake orders from a Black woman. Even though I’d like to have everyone’s support, I goon despite it. I believe that this is my calling. When all is said and done, I have to answerto the school board and to God!

Although each woman experienced gender-racing leadership in their principalships,each one also experienced it outside school and district settings. They accepted tradi-tional female roles in their families and churches. In their homes, three of the womensaid they believed in the convention of the man as head of the household. Similarly,


all four women actively supported both the traditional roles of women in the Churchand the male hierarchy of Church leadership. All four served in one or more rolestraditionally held by women in the Church, such as a Sunday school teacher, deacon-ess, head of a Christian Education department, or member or chair of Church commit-tees such as the hospitality or benevolence committees. Likewise, these womenbelieved that a man should be pastor of the Church. Although these compliantdemeanors seem inconsistent with the assertive behaviours the women enacted at theschool, this coin has another side. Often males from the participants’ families servedin leadership roles in the Church and therefore were perceived as holding high posi-tion in the Church hierarchy and were recipients of the prestige associated with theposition.

The conflicted nature of our participants’ responses concerning gendered roles inprofessional and private spaces provides valuable insight into why women’s leader-ship has become a focus of research and scholarship. Nonetheless, much remains tobe done to incorporate African American and spiritual perspectives into the dialogue.This research moves the field in that direction. It is not intended to offer a formula forbecoming a spiritual leader nor is it intended to generalise what it means to be a Blackfemale school principal. There is a danger in essentialising notions of feminist leader-ship. In fact, an unexpected outcome of this research was the discovery of a disconnectbetween our participants’ metaphors concerning leadership and traditional ones oftenapplied to Black female leaders. Traditional metaphors such as ‘other mothers’ and‘servant leaders’ contrast with the findings of our study and demonstrate the ‘burden’these other metaphors create through their accompanying role and behaviour expecta-tions. ‘Burden’ emerged from this study as a new metaphor that calls into question theother oft-assumed roles of the Black female principal. In this regard, one participantconfessed,

I feel sometimes that I should be doing more, especially for the Black kids. But it feelslike that is always what I am supposed to do. I feel sorry for some of these kids and reallywant to help them, but I am burned out. I guess I feel like God understands.

These women eschewed gendered and raced norms ascribe to being a Black femaleprincipal and their narratives revealed these norms as too simplistic.

Through the gender-raced womanist theoretical framework, this research exploredspirituality as a way to enlarge histories of educational leadership to include Blackspiritual women’s experiences and to recognise, create, and explain that which ismeaningful for them in the principalship. Although these principals experienced theirspirituality as gender-raced, we do not attempt to derive another ‘prescriptive, norma-tive ethic’66 for women in leadership. Too often, research concerning women ineducational leadership has been uncomfortable with the ambiguity and situationalnature of the principalship. To gain female perspectives, researchers must avoidbecoming too narrow in understanding of women’s ways of leading or too quick toapply labels. This study does not promote the participants as brave social activists (asliterary historians do) or as exemplary nurturing Christians (as womanist theo-ethi-cists do). Rather, the study gives voice to the participants as religio-spiritual leaders.When a Black woman declares herself as spiritual or grounded in her own way ofknowing, the dangers of reduction to sentimentality and dismissive labelling as overly

66Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 5.


subjective and emotional and as acting too ‘feminine’ should be named and avoidedby researchers and practitioners alike.

New narratives: writing Black females into educational leadership history

The masculine enterprise of leadership shunts women into prescribed roles associatedwith femininity whether as school leaders or as other professionals.67 According toBlackmore, ‘leadership is treated … as a set of generic competencies rather thanholistically; the social … [and] ethical … dimensions of leadership are leached out’.68

Mining the histories of the leadership of African American women through ourresearch foregrounded these concerns as we sought to deconstruct normative episte-mologies, descriptors, and enactments of leadership and administration. The researchon females leading in education is slim, and our knowledge of women of colour lead-ing is even thinner. The voices of administrators of colour are silenced in educationalleadership history. It is in this silence that that our research and the narratives of theparticipants are situated. Emerging literature on leaders of colour teaches us that ‘theirways of leading may be as diverse as their gendered and cultural heritages but all risefrom their own complex social and cultural histories’.69

Past and current research regularly identifies ‘leadership’ or ‘administration’ asmale in spite of evidence that women often use different leadership styles than men70

and do so effectively.

When the annals of Eurocentric history generally define leaders as male and of non-African descent, and when the annals of … history focus mostly on white women lead-ers, what are we to make of the (in)adequacy of scholarship, research, and instructiondevoted to Black women leaders … in society? And what are the methodologicalimplications for … traditional categories of constructed leadership behaviors to beassessed in light of complex nature of Black women’s lives and history?71

New paradigmatic research must be undertaken that challenges the current descriptivecriteria, conceptual categories, and taxonomies and advances counter-narratives (i.e.gendered, contextual, political, social, etc.) that make our understanding of educa-tional leadership more authentic. In our case, gender and intersectionality giveprofound meaning to organisational and educational leadership and should be engagedin future scholarship. Research that mines historical texts and narratives can yield a

67Jill Blackmore, ‘In the Shadow of Men: The Historical Construction of Administration as aMasculinist Enterprise’, in Gender Matters in Educational Administration and Policy: AFeminist Introduction, ed. J. Blackmore and J. Kenway (Bristol, PA: Falmer Press, 1993).68Jill Blackmore, Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership, and Educational Change(Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1999).69Manette K. Ah Nee-Benham and Joanne E. Cooper, Let My Spirit Soar! Narratives ofDiverse Women in School Leadership (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 1998), 40.70Blackmore, Troubling Women and Carol Shakeshaft, ‘Organizational Theory and Women:Where Are We?’ (paper presented at an annual meeting of the American Educational Re-search Association, Washington, DC, April, 1987).71Clarice J. Martin, ‘Normative Biblical Motifs in African-American Women Leaders’ MoralDiscourse: Maria Stewart’s Autobiography as a Resource for Nurturing Leadership from theBlack Church Tradition’, in The Stone that the Builders Rejected: the Development of EthicalLeadership from the Black Church Tradition, ed. Walter E. Fluker (Harrisburg, PA: TrinityPress International, 1998), 56.


richness that is currently missing and can add historically marginalised and silencedvoices to the body of educational leadership knowledge. ‘The development andcritical analysis of histories of and with those who have been silenced and deniedaccess in education and … in society … represent ways of … wrestling with newquestions, resisting, contesting inequities, and propounding change’.72 Such develop-ments will yield new perspectives on how women leaders view their life circum-stances and connect to both organisational life and the world at-large, and they willallow for critical examination of these interpretations. By so doing, we are enabled tounderstand in fundamentally new ways both ourselves and those who, historically,have been treated as invisible.73

There is no right way to do administration; hence we must be sceptical of formu-laic models of leadership and research that reifies them. In this article, we presentedresearch that challenges such models by examining ways in which our participants‘enact, think about and interpret leadership differently from traditional models’.74

Our research contributes to the importance of understanding religio-spiritual influ-ences on Black women who practise educational leadership as social justice. We hopeour study gives increased importance to examining historic and contemporary textsand metaphors to give greater depth to the study and practice of educational adminis-tration. Among the questions the field of educational administration must answer is:What metaphors do women use to describe and enact their leadership and administra-tion? Well over a decade ago, Thomas Sergiovanni protested that ‘The basic theoriesand root metaphors of the field currently center on organization, whose assumptionsinclude legitimacy, hierarchy, and self-interest’.75 Our study and others like it providealternate metaphors that illustrate Black women principals as transgressing certainmasculine and feminine conceptions of leadership. Our participants resisted andro-centric ideals of the principalship by being intensely student-focused, subverting hier-archical expectations when they deemed it necessary, and employing an educationalworldview that embodied care and social justice. These women contested the sociallyconstructed Black feminine ideal that exalts servanthood but ignores the difficultenactments of socially just leadership, especially in racist, sexist environments. Thesewomen and their foremothers demonstrated a situational response to social justice tiedto the specific realities they encountered. The metaphors that emerged from ourparticipants’ narratives concerned meaning-making and enactments of administrationbased more on their educational philosophies, religio-spiritual grounding, andpersonal experiences than on organisational theory or the content of educationaladministration courses. Thus, their stories expose the myth that educational adminis-tration is a set of objective competencies that one ‘puts on’, and propounds insteadthat educational administration is an inner processing of personal ideals, values, andbeliefs that ‘come out’.

Through this research, a perspective on the dilemma of attracting and retainingfemale administrators, especially Black females, emerges. With an increasing numberof studies pointing out the overwhelming duties associated with the principalship,

72Ibid.73Dani McLaughlin, ‘Coda’, in Naming Silenced Lives: Personal Narratives and the Processof Change, ed. Dani McLaughlin and William G. Tierney (New York: Routledge, 1993), 238.74Adrianna Kezar, ‘Pluralistic Leadership’, Journal of Higher Education 71 (2000): 723.75Thomas J. Sergiovanni, ‘Organizations or Community? Changing the Metaphor Changes theTheory’, Educational Administration Quarterly 30 (1994): 214.


retention of effective principals is not an issue to be scoffed at. At the same time, thescant research on African American female educational leadership has not received itsdue recognition. However, various intersections of religion, spirituality, race, gender,and leadership are frequent themes in this research.76 Additional research exploringthese intersectionalities will contribute a much needed knowledge base for investigat-ing and privileging the historicity of religion, spirituality, and women in educationaladministration.

While Blackmore reminded us that ‘Feminist histories illustrate the messiness ofthe categories of race and gender … and certainly gendered analyses in education …admit no easy solution’,77 these histories point out the multiplicity of knowledges thatconstitute women’s ways of knowing and leading that can yield fruit for educationaladministration. Embedded in the challenges that Scott78 proposed was that investiga-tion of gender and its intersections could yield new, more accurate, more deeplyelaborated accounts of history from which we could learn, and by learning, improvecurrent ways of thinking and acting.

Exploring the history of Black women and the African American Church are legit-imate ways to conceptualise and frame leadership. Carolyn Shields posits spiritualityas a valid epistemology to be considered in educational leadership79 along with otherepistemological stances such as women’s ways of knowing, indigenous perspectives,and the host of ‘endarkened’ epistemologies of people of colour.80 Rather than treat-ing spiritual or religious epistemologies as ways of not knowing, we treat them aspowerful counter-narratives to traditional knowledges in educational leadership,schools, and society.

The experiences of the participants consistently served as a foundation for socialjustice in schools, appeared as a source of resiliency and protest amidst sexism andracism, and added new narratives to the field of leadership. We found that their beliefsabout faith and their spiritual discourses afforded both shelter from and a foundationfor advocacy in often hostile environments. Their stories countered male hegemonicideals by demonstrating that there are no viable fixed, unitary ideas in performance,research, or agency within the field of educational leadership. It is difficult to separatesocial justice from religio-spirituality for these principals; one stemmed from theother. And, while the principals, themselves, had no particular definition of eitherterm, they all engaged in the work of social justice, equating it with their religio-spirituality sensibilities. Ultimately, their goal was to emulate Christ whose work iswidely considered the work of justice.

76Sharyn N. Jones, ‘The Praxis of Black Female of Black Female Educational Leadershipfrom a Systems Thinking Perspective’ (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, OH,2003); Khuala Murtada and Daud M. Watts, ‘Linking the Struggle for Education and SocialJustice: Historical Perspectives of African American Leadership in Schools’, EducationalAdministration Quarterly 41 (2005): 591–608.77Blackmore, Troubling Women, 5.78Scott, ‘Gender’,79Shields, ‘Liberating Discourses’.80Cynthia B. Dillard, ‘The Substance of Things Hoped for, the Evidence of Things not Seen:Examining an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research and Leadership’,Qualitative Studies in Education 13 (2000): 661–81; Mary F. Belenky, Blythe Clincy, NancyGoldberger, and Jill Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986); LindaT. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999).


Importantly, religio-spirituality became a nexus of inspiration, motivation, andmeaning-making in the lives of these women.81 They spoke of the difficulties of theprincipalship, but their religio-spirituality was not a source of strength to which theyturned only in times of stress. Religio-spirituality narrated their lives, both personallyand professionally. It established and stimulated their sense of equity and composedtheir notions of calling, mission, and purpose. They participated in areas of adminis-tration that were harmonious with their religio-spiritual views but, when necessary,were creatively insubordinate in interpreting policy to promote social justice.82 Theirreligio-spiritual belief systems enabled them to pursue living authentically, unifyingtheir identities, making congruent their personal and professional character, and bring-ing all they knew to bear upon their lives. While there is no one way to enact or definesocial justice, womanist theology demands no single definition; rather it inspects andcritiques multiple ways justice is lived in the ordinary lives of women. For these prin-cipals, it was simply ‘righting wrongs’.

There is reason to write about Black women’s religious spirituality. It intersectswith and broadens the scholarship, scope, and understandings of educational leader-ship theory and is a valuable lens through which to interpret educational administra-tion. Noted scholar Nellie McKay makes a strong argument for including blackwomen’s spiritual writings to scholarly activity by stating that these writings were away to ‘express female identity … pride … self-respect and control’.83 Tate stated, ‘Ina racist and sexist society, the concept of a woman empowered by God is doublyradical’.84

In the case of our research, we are reminded that professional histories oftensubsume and consume the religious and neuters and fragments professional and spir-itual sensibilities and in the process dismisses what is significant to women about theirown lives. Fixed notions of religious spirituality and educational leadership snub theimportance of reframing leadership narratives to include religion, spirituality, andenacting social justice in school and society.

While there has been research on the silencing of Black women in education,educational research has not examined how religion and spirituality have influencedBlack women in actively resisting the status quo in schools despite the fact that,historically, Black spirituality has been central to resistance to oppression.85

Scott reminds us that theories of patriarchy and oppression (such as those oftenpresent in educational administration) structure all other inequalities and therefore mustbe examined. Educational administration research must continue to build on Scott’simportant work and continue to unpack and interrogate how gender works in societyand how gendered and raced constructs give or erase meaning in organisations andinstitutions. Because of the intersection of contexts, identities, and the master narratives

81Michael E. Dantley, ‘Critical Spirituality: Enhancing Transformative Leadership ThroughCritical Theory and African American Prophetic Spirituality’, International Journal of Lead-ership in Education 6 (2003): 3–17.82Kofi Lomotey, African-American Principals: School Leadership and Success (New York:Greenwood Press, 1989).83Nellie McKay, ‘Nineteenth-century Black Women’s Spiritual Autobiographies: ReligiousFaith and Self-empowerment’, in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and PersonalNarratives, ed. The Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1989), 152.84Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 24.85West and Glaude, African American Religious Thought.


of society, it is important for the future of educational leadership to explore the inter-section of these socio-cultural narratives and multilayered meaning systems (gender,religion, race, educational leadership, social justice, and schooling) through the lens ofthe spiritual narratives of Black female principals. Doing so would be a useful responseto Scott’s proposition that gender is ‘a useful category of … analysis’.86

Notes on contributorsNoelle Witherspoon, PhD, is an assistant professor of Education Leadership in Department ofEducational Theory, Policy, and Practice at Louisiana State University.

Dianne L. Taylor, PhD, is an associate professor of Educational Leadership in the Departmentof Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice at Louisiana State University.

86Scott, ‘Gender’, 1053.

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Spiritual Weapons Black Female Principals

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