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Authenticity and authentic leadership are garnering increased emphasis in the workplace. This study explored authentic leadership and authentic leadership development through the lens of African American women leaders working in dominant culture organizations. Research demonstrates that African American women leaders experience unique challenges in their leadership roles and often employ cultural adaptation strategies such as biculturalism to navigate dominant culture organizations. This qualitative study used a transcendental phenomenological approach to examine how African American women leaders achieved personal and leadership authenticity in the workplace. Using a lifestories conceptualization of authentic leadership development, the experiences of 12 African American women leaders were examined to determine how their life-stories informed their leadership perspectives and journey to authentic leadership development. The research findings showed that participants' responses to historical trigger events and to personal difficulties were significant to their self-concept formation and authentic leadership development journey. Further, the research suggested that participants consistently conceptualized authenticity as either being true to self or true to their core values, and results associated a positive values orientation with the authentic leadership construct. Finally, the research findings demonstrated that workplace authenticity emerged for the 12 women leaders from the intersection of their personal essence as African American women with their leadership identity to create the authentic self they were comfortable sharing in the workplace.

This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining the experience of Tennessee’s black Union army soldiers and veterans from the 1860s through the early twentieth century. Today historians almost reflexively agree that the black military experience took on an “ever larger meaning” in American society, but few scholars have given sustained attention to black soldiers’ lives in the postwar South. My dissertation finds that the black military experience profoundly disrupted Southern hierarchies and presented black men with unprecedented opportunities to elevate their political, economic, and social status; however, these aspirations rarely went uncontested. Nearly 40 percent of Tennessee’s black male population of military age enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, and as these men pursued individual agendas and attempted to build families and communities they played a critical part in the postwar remaking of the urban and rural South. The redefinition of Southern society produced inter- and intra-racial tension and occasionally brutal violence, but it also involved striking accommodations and reconciliations. This study also explores conflicting commemoration of the war by contrasting black prominence in the state’s racially integrated Grand Army of the Republic veterans’ organization with efforts to recognize Confederate “colored soldiers.” The dissertation’s most important sources are federal military pension records at the National Archives in Washington, which allow the study to focus on otherwise largely undocumented and unexplored lives. These invaluable records provide information about antebellum, wartime, and postwar family life, health conditions, employment history, economic mobility, geographical mobility, race relations, and relationships with white ex-soldiers.

This Senior Thesis in History analyzes a number of newspaper articles from the 1950s and 1960s in order to investigate a noticeable historiographical narrative on former Harlem Globetrotters’ owner Abe Saperstein. Three historiographical accounts present the debated dichotomy of Abe’s character as a patronizing, bigoted owner toward his black players and as a champion of blacks’ rights. This research inquires as to the extent to which 1950s and 1960s newspaper portrayals of Abe either support or oppose historiographical interpretations. The resultant analysis argues that while a large portion of 1950s and 1960s articles bolster the substantially negative modern interpretations of Abe’s character, a significant amount of the primary sources present the owner in a much more favorable manner.

It is the intention of this dissertation to provide a 'theory' of African American religious experience that is guided by postmodern critical thought, with particular emphasis on methodologies attempting to grasp what is referred to as the quotidian, the ordinary, but primarily as "everyday life." It is my contention that this constitutes a promising approach that African American religionists should consider. Indeed, for almost forty years, there has been one dominant interpretative lens for the study of African American religious experience, often referred to as a hermeneutics of liberation. It is my contention that this orientation, with its emphasis on the macroscopic, is markedly inadequate. I maintain that what is needed is a focus on the microscopic. Moreover, I also assert that if there is to be a locus for opposition to oppression, it is to be found on the level of the "everyday" --- that which is often passed over as insignificant or irrelevant.