North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2019
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
196
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
Text preceding or following the note
2019
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry study was to examine the transformative leadership of Ida B. Wells-Barnett during her anti-lynching crusade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although distinguished scholars such as Paula J. Giddings, John Hope Franklin, and Trudier Harris have written about her life and literary production, Wells-Barnett had never been studied from a leadership perspective. Wells-Barnett was the focus of this study; therefore, she is a part of what Yin (2003) calls the "dead past" (p. 7), meaning that all pertinent individuals are dead and thus incapable of recounting events. Ostensibly, the researcher depended upon documents and texts as the principal evidentiary data sources. The selection consisted of primary and secondary documents that were the most salient or relevant for this study as they amplified her voice and her words and contained narrative elements. In conducting the data analysis, the researcher used different colored highlighters to code the a priori codes-(a) perseverance in leadership; (b) interaction with followers; (c) personal challenges; and (d) financial challenges. The a priori codes were developed based upon the research questions in tandem with the existing literature in Chapter 2. Moreover, the researcher (a) looked for commonalities in the coded data to create the themes; (b) looked for ways to give the similarities names; (c) reduced and synthesized the coded data into themes; (d) reduced the four a priori coded data into three emergent themes (combined them); and (e) aligned the three emergent themes with three transformative leadership tenets. Furthermore, the researcher aligned the results with the research questions (anti-lynching activities, material realities or disparities, tenets of transformative leadership), summarized the results related to the research questions, and explained the connections to the literature in Chapter 2. A narrative inquiry design was chosen because it allowed the researcher to acquire a deeper, thicker, and richer understanding of a single individual's life using documents and texts as data sources. Moreover, unlike other designs, this approach required the researcher to re-story Wells-Barnett's transformative leadership of her anti-lynching crusade (Creswell, 2012, 2014; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Three major themes emerged through the analysis of data which was conducted using a priori codes. These a priori codes included (a) perseverance in leadership, (b) interaction with followers, (c) personal challenges, and (d) financial challenges. Three major themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) perseverance in leadership, (b) investigative reporting and research, and (c) interpersonal relations and challenges. Findings suggest that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, by waging her anti-lynching crusade, took on the most dangerous, vituperative, and engrained vestige of racism-lynching of African American. In order to combat this horrible practice, she utilized different strategies and tactics: investigative research and journalism, went to sites of lynchings, organized African American women's groups, and traveled around the North and England giving speeches about the atrocities of lynching. After she returned home from England, governors, new media, senators, representatives, and church officials were compelled and pressured to concede that the extra-legal lynching and burning alive of Black males was unbridled and widespread within the southern quadrant of the United States. The three tenets that aligned with the emergent themes were (a) liberation, emancipation, democracy, equity, and justice; (b) deconstruction and reconstruction of sociocultural knowledge framework that generate inequities; and (c) demonstrating moral courage and activism. This study is significant because it benefits (a) practitioners such as history teachers, journalists, and social justice activists; (b) policymakers; and (c) scholars in a variety of fields (including leadership studies, women's studies, and African American studies).