‘She endured cruelty’: what led to a leader’s death at a historically Black university?

Antoinette Candia-Bailey couldn’t wait to slap a Lincoln University bumper sticker on her mother’s car upon receiving her acceptance letter to the historically Black college. After graduating in the late 90s with a degree in sociology, she made regular trips back to the central Missouri school to celebrate homecoming with her sisters of Alpha Kappa Alpha Inc, the nation’s oldest Black sorority. When a position as vice-president of student affairs came available at Lincoln in spring 2023, Candia-Bailey – a polished administrator with a PhD in leadership studies, whom most knew as “Bonnie” – saw fit to continue her higher-ed career where it started. “I don’t know anybody who loved that school more than she did,” says Monica Graham, a former classmate.

But when the two met up at homecoming last October, Graham couldn’t help noticing a dip in her friend’s school spirit. “Things have gotten really, really bad at the university,” Candia-Bailey told her, “but I’m not going to let it kill me.” Three months later, Candia-Bailey was found dead by suicide at age 49. Says Graham: “My heart just dropped.”

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The official investigation into Candia-Bailey’s death is pending, per the coroner’s office. And research makes clear that no suicide can be attributed to a simple cause or single factor – rather, a combination of issues can contribute to mental health crises.

But Candia-Bailey left behind a document trail alleging that her boss’s inattention to her mental health concerns left her devastated: John Moseley, Lincoln University’s first white president in 150 years, “appeared heartless” and “hurt people intentionally”, Candia-Bailey alleged. Her death has rocked Lincoln’s tight-knit community and roiled Black academia, prompting questions about white leadership at an HBCU (historically Black college or university) when states are under pressure to close the schools’ funding gaps. On Thursday, alumni sat in on a Lincoln board of curators meeting to voice their concerns before gathering with Lincoln students at the Missouri capitol to demand better protections for faculty and students’ mental health on campus. A group of about 40 stood on the capitol steps holding a banner that read: “Karma is a beast and it never expires” – a quote from Candia-Bailey’s final email.

Based on Candia-Bailey’s own accounting of her eight-month tenure at Lincoln – captured in letters, emails and text messages reviewed by the Guardian – the trouble began with a disastrous performance evaluation Candia-Bailey received in mid-November. Candia-Bailey, who had considered her work to be at least satisfactory, was not only blindsided by the poor review but also by the source: the man who had expressed such enthusiasm when he hired her just six months earlier. “The 11/15/23 evaluation meeting was the first time I heard many of the concerns,” she wrote to Moseley. “When I respectfully challenged you, you agreed to ‘strike a concern’. I couldn’t even finish the meeting because you didn’t hear me. I left in tears.”

The situation went “downhill”, Candia-Bailey said, after she asked Moseley and the board of curators for accommodations through the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act due to what she described as her “severe depression and anxiety”. She alleged Moseley had made jokes about and revealed her condition to peers. She filed a formal complaint, but Lincoln’s investigation cleared Moseley, while Candia-Bailey was scolded by HR for taking “no responsibility” for her “poor work”. The board of curators declined to take action, with the board president, Victor Pasley, telling Candia-Bailey in a 16 November email it “does not engage in the management of personnel issues for Lincoln University”.

A month and a half later, on 3 January, Candia-Bailey was fired for “insubordination” because she mishandled student housing matters and mismanaged her staff, according to her formal termination letter.

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Candia-Bailey’s final email to Moseley, a 12-page letter sent on 8 January, rebuked Moseley for harassment and bullying and accused him of making her do the “dirty work” of pushing out Lincoln alumni under her remit. She wrote: “My mom worries and had so many sleepless nights because of my stress from this job.”

Candia-Bailey cc’d the board of curators and also sent the email to members of Lincoln’s national alumni association, who had been advising her on remediation strategies after her termination. Her fatalistic tone was especially concerning to Herbert Kitchen, the San Francisco alumni chapter head, who received the email at 4 in the morning. It wasn’t until he scrolled to the end that he realized it was a suicide note. “People were calling, texting, scrambling to find her,” he remembers of the ensuing panic. “The pings from her phone led to where she was.”

Lincoln University has been reeling since. Shortly after Candia-Bailey’s death on 8 January, the board of curators announced that Moseley had put himself on paid administrative leave and that the school had retained a law firm to conduct an independent review.

In the wake of her passing, students held demonstrations on campus demanding “Break the Silence” and “Justice 4 Bonnie”. “She would go that extra mile to help us,” says Kenlyn Washington, Lincoln’s student government president, “but they would kinda prohibit her when she was over there in her job – so it was a lot.” The alumni association wrote a letter to Pasley demanding Moseley’s termination. On Thursday, students and alumni met with members of Missouri’s legislative Black caucus at the capitol to discuss tactics for removing Moseley.

In a statement to the Guardian, Pasley called Candia-Bailey’s death “a tragedy that has shaken our university to its core”, adding: “I can reiterate that we are taking all the necessary steps to ensure a transparent third-party review that provides a comprehensive examination of the facts surrounding this tragedy. This review will be an important part of the Board’s commitment to making the best decisions for the entire University community.” Neither Moseley nor the law firm have responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

Workplace suicides have risen significantly in the US since 2005, when 180 were recorded; in 2019, that figure had climbed to 307. “We don’t really know what causes suicide,” Dr April Foreman, an executive committee member for the Board of the American Association of Suicidology, told the Guardian in 2022. But “we can say workplaces impact people’s lives”.

Candia-Bailey’s mother and husband told NBC News that Candia-Bailey was depressed and felt unsupported at the university. They said they hoped she was remembered as an inspiration and an advocate for Lincoln. A representative from Candia-Bailey’s family declined an invitation to speak with the Guardian.

Online, the hashtag #FireMosley has become a byword among the Lincoln community and Black scholars at large who consider Candia-Bailey’s passing a tragic case of misogynoir, a double prejudice against Black women. In the workplace, they’re seen as likable and moldable at first, only to become magnets for suspicion and contempt as they grow in their job responsibilities – a phenomenon explored in a buzzy 2013 study titled Going from Pet to Threat. In higher education, Black women also tend to receive the lowest scores on student evaluations due to gender and race bias and have marked difficulty seeking tenure.

“In my experience, Black women faculty and staff are more likely to feel dismissed, ignored and made to feel invisible,” says Maia Hoskin, assistant professor in the counseling programs at Loyola Marymount University. “And even for me personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve had to work harder to prove myself and that my position is more vulnerable than my white peers’.”

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As the wider online discourse swelled, Candia-Bailey’s case was contextualized within the charged atmosphere in which Black women academics have operated since time immemorial. Her death came on the heels of Claudine Gay’s ouster from Harvard amid claims of plagiarism, an incident Black female students and intellectuals viewed as the political weaponization of misogynoir, led by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. “He outlined step by step how they went about doing this and bragged about being behind efforts to eliminate critical race theory,” Hoskin says of the rightwing attack on campus DEI efforts. “These experiences that we’re seeing in higher education with Black women have always existed. They’re just being showcased more.”

It’s a tragic coincidence that Candia-Bailey’s suicide also came within months of the deaths of Orinthia T Montague, president of Volunteer State Community College, and JoAnne A Epps, president of Temple University, Black women who were seen as leading lights in the academic community. “The past few months have been difficult,” says Terrell Strayhorn, the associate provost who directs Virginia Union University’s Center for the Study of HBCUs. “These are all women who were at times vocal about the weight of their work.”

Before earning her PhD from North Carolina A&T State University, Candia-Bailey wrote a dissertation in 2016 called My Sister, Myself, drawing on more than a dozen interviews with her peers at North Carolina institutions. She concluded that harmful stereotypes remained a significant career obstacle for Black women in leadership positions in academia, who had to be “more persistent and find alternatives to succeed”. After her death, Candia-Bailey’s adviser reread the dissertation and told NBC News she was horrified by its prescience. And yet, in the news release announcing her hiring at Lincoln University, Candia-Bailey had maintained a sunny outlook: “I believe diversity work is like a puzzle,” she was quoted as saying. “I strive to help individuals find their pieces in the puzzle.”

In the release, Moseley said: “I feel certain she is the right leader to guide those efforts.”

This, after all, was the school where she came of age as a young woman and collected lifelong friends. Lincoln University was supposed to be her home away from home, a safe space. Ultimately, it was neither.

Lincoln University (enrollment: 1,700) sits at a considerable remove from HBCUs in the south-east that were started by white Christian missionaries, says Strayhorn. It was established by civil war veterans of the 62nd and 65th colored infantries in the Missouri capital, Jefferson City. A statue at the center of campus memorializes the soldiers, with one kneeling down to help another on to the plinth. The plaza is surrounded with bricks inscribed with names of benevolent school alumni, family and friends. At least two pavers bear Candia-Bailey’s name.

The plaza is where Lincoln students and alumni gathered on Thursday to honor Candia-Bailey with a candlelight vigil. Crystal Jackson, one of Candia-Bailey’s line sisters, remembered her friend’s passion for ensuring equal opportunities for Black women – “especially when we’re qualified and most times overqualified”, she said, per KOMU-TV. “She had an ear for uplifting people.”

Richard Baxter Foster, 62nd infantry lieutenant, was so committed to fighting for freed Americans’ right to education that he used regiment funds to purchase a Webster’s dictionary for knowledge-hungry troops. He became Lincoln’s founding administrator and then yielded his position to a string of Black administrators. And while HBCUs already over-index on white faculty, non-Black students and board members relative to the inverse at predominantly white institutions, Moseley was an unexpected choice for university president.

“We all believe his inexperience is what led to him not knowing how to handle her [mental health] request,” says Graham, Candia-Bailey’s former classmate. “Here this woman comes with all this experience, and you have none. So the only thing you can do is intimidate and belittle her because you’re her boss.”

An ex-athlete who pairs sneakers with bow ties, Moseley, 47, earned his doctorate in educational leadership and policy analysis less than a year before becoming president at Lincoln. Mosley had begun his Lincoln career as coach of its second division men’s basketball team. “Working in college athletics for nearly 10 years, my goal had always been to become a head basketball coach,” he said in a 2018 interview with a city blog. He proved to be quite middling in the end, going 93-107 in seven seasons. Nevertheless, he was selected to serve as the school’s interim athletics director after his first season coaching, shedding the interim tag soon after. (Some might take his decision to coach basketball while running the athletics department as ambitious, while others might see it as a failure to delegate; Candia-Bailey made the latter point about his management style in her final email.)

Moseley’s athletics bio highlights his track record of producing academically fit student-athletes and securing millions to improve Lincoln’s recreation facilities. Even so, an athletics department higher-up becoming school president is a long leap even by America’s conflated higher-ed standards. (As successful as Nick Saban has been leading the University of Alabama football team, no one is reasonably suggesting he take over the school’s administration in retirement.)

When Moseley’s predecessor, Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Lincoln’s second female president, resigned in May 2021 (despite signing a contract extension to stay at Lincoln through 2024), Moseley was tapped to serve in the interim while the board of curators hunted for her permanent successor. “Whenever there is a presidential search and they have the candidates, the world knows who the finalists are,” says Kitchen. “But the board of curators kept that under wraps. We as alumni, as students, as a community, were wondering what was happening.” In January 2022, the board stripped the interim tag from Moseley’s job title a second time. Weeks later, it was revealed that the board had chosen Moseley over a shortlist of HBCU veterans on the academic side of administration, according to alumni.

Moseley’s promotion was a sore spot in the Lincoln community. “A president should have extensive background in student services or instruction or both,” according to Kitchen, himself a 30-year higher-ed veteran. Graham says some of her peers stopped attending homecoming and other reunion events in protest. “They weren’t happy they made the basketball coach the president,” she says. Others took exception to Moseley’s support of Lincoln’s new police academy, a first for an HBCU, on the heels of a social justice movement that saw students from Lincoln rallying in Ferguson, Missouri, in support of Mike Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by the police officer Darren Wilson. “We believe it prepares you to go out and serve the community and prepares you with the cultural competency you need regardless of the situation you find yourself,” Moseley said of the academy.

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Moseley also had a “my way or the highway” leadership style that caused a “significant amount of faculty and staff” to leave the university, one Lincoln employee and alum wrote in a letter to fellow alumni last May. In recent comments under Moseley’s 2018 blog interview, one person accuses him of “hiding behind his black wife to gain credibility to run a black college” (Moseley’s wife, Crystal Moseley, teaches wellness and physical education at the university). Another notes: “I am not saying that he was or was not qualified, but it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate the same leadership methods and skills as were used on the basketball court and be effective in high-level academic administration.”

For her part, Candia-Bailey saved some text messages she traded with April Robinson, Lincoln’s HR executive director who would later scold her on the school’s behalf for her “poor work” on official letterhead. As seen in one screenshot, Robinson sent a YouTube video titled 10 Signs You’re in a Toxic Work Culture, with the seeming intention of commiserating over their shared workplace environment through an informal channel. “If you can identify with at least three of the ten then it confirms what kind of environment you’re in,” she texted.

After thanking Robinson for the link, Candia-Bailey replied: “I shed a little tear last night after the video. I’m passionate about LU and I’m afraid for our future.”

Some of Lincoln’s loudest alumni have long been concerned with the optics of having a white president lead an HBCU and remain convinced Moseley was tapped for the top job for one reason: to more easily relate to the majority white state lawmakers who control the funding Lincoln desperately needs. “He was put there as a strategy according to the president of the board of curators, and that strategy was to be able to leverage resources from the Jefferson City community and the legislative body,” says Sherman Bonds, president of Lincoln’s national alumni association. “We hadn’t received our land-grand funding for quite some time. It seems as if he was the tool they wanted to use for that purpose, and that’s what gave him the advantage of being selected.”

By land-grant funding, Bond means Lincoln is designated to receive state and federal funding for specialized research. HBCUs, which enroll about 10% of Black students nationwide but represent only 3% of US colleges and universities, have struggled to collect their designated benefits: according to the Biden administration, historically Black land-grant colleges in 16 states have missed out on $13bn in funding over the past three decades. This is despite a mandate that states must refund land-grant money to Washington if they can’t match federal funding.

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Lincoln University had been shorted nearly $362m by 2020, per the Biden administration. Dave Griffith, a Republican state lawmaker, lamented that Missouri ultimately sent those dollars back to the federal government while guaranteeing the University of Missouri, the predominantly white institution that received the state’s first land-grant designation in 1870, its allotment. (He likened Lincoln University to a “red-headed stepchild”.) In a 2023 letter to Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, the US secretaries of education and agriculture pointed out that the shortfall had prevented Lincoln from advancing at the same rate as the University of Missouri. Parson’s office, which appoints Lincoln’s nine-member board of curators, has not publicly commented on the situation at Lincoln University, nor did it respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

In May 2022, the Missouri legislature voted to fully match Lincoln University’s federal land grant – about $10m altogether – for the first time in history. “It’s a very exciting day,” said Moseley, who can see the Missouri capitol dome from his office. “We see that there’s great possibility with what’s taking place.” He lists the accomplishment in his university bio. It’s not what he’ll be remembered for.

On 20 January, scores braved 14F (-10C) weather to pack Candia-Bailey’s funeral at her home church in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, nearly half those mourners Lincoln alumni. Hundreds more streamed the service online, filling the comments with their condolences and prayers. Candia-Bailey was dressed in a white lace headband and pink and green colors – her sorority colors. One speaker, a friend since grammar school, remembered her for the fight she showed in her youth before considering the fight she lost. “What she had to endure was simply inhumane, disingenuous, cruel and heartless,” he said. “It had a huge degree of racial undertone and narcissist behavior. But one thing’s for sure: nobody gets away. You will reap what you sow.” And then they closed her casket.

There will be many lessons to learn from Candia-Bailey death – in pushing back on misogynoir, in supporting mental health needs in the workplace, in leading with compassion. But Hoskin, the Loyola Marymount psychologist, is skeptical of any institution, even Lincoln, taking them to heart. “But what I hope changes,” she says, “is that this is a wake-up call to Black women and people of color overall to take care of themselves and to prioritize their self-care above any and all things. Again: I hope that that happens, but I don’t even think that will happen. It hasn’t even happened for me.”