The HBCU Sisterhood: Testimonies of Triumph and Transformation, co-edited by Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, president of Benedict College, and Dr. Allia L. Carter, brings together first-person accounts from more than a dozen women who collectively represent decades of leadership at HBCUs across the country. The book was released in print this month, with digital editions expected June 21.
The volume grew out of a simple, sobering fact: of all the presidents who have ever led the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, only about 103 have been women, a number that, while historic, represents a fraction of the total. And few of their stories have been told in sustained, scholarly form.
“No story about HBCUs can be complete without considering the unique contributions and leadership of its women presidents,” Artis said during a virtual presidential conversation hosted by Virginia Union University's Center for the Study of HBCUs, where the project originated under the vision of the university’s president, Dr. Hakeem J. Lucas. “We wanted to amplify the voices of some of the foremost women leaders in higher education, not just at HBCUs, but across the entire landscape.”
The book’s parameters were deliberate: contributors had to be women of color who served as president at a single HBCU for a minimum of five years, a threshold designed to capture presidencies with enough depth and duration to yield substantive reflection. Among those featured are Dr. Dianne Boardley Suber, who served more than 14 years at St. Augustine's University — one of only a handful of women to reach that tenure milestone in HBCU history — along with Dr. Cynthia Warrick, who led three HBCUs over the course of her career, and Dr. Cynthia Jackson-Hammond, the former president of Central State University in Ohio who went on to lead a national higher education accreditation organization.
The accounts are candid. Warrick, who first entered higher education as a pharmacist and community board member in San Antonio before pursuing graduate degrees and the presidency, described arriving at South Carolina State University to find the institution's leadership structure had nearly collapsed. The outgoing president had left. There was no provost. The board vice chair, the vice president for finance, and the chairman had all been indicted. The state had suspended funding over governance failures. Accreditation was on probation.
“I had to bring on a whole new team in order to run the university,” Warrick said. At one public board meeting, when a board member attempted to present his own competing budget before cameras and reporters, Warrick said she stopped him directly. “I told him, if you want a job at South Carolina State, let me know, but this is not your job.”
Boardley Suber described a different kind of reckoning, one more internal. Having spent her formative career years at Florida A&M University, a campus environment she described as insulated and affirming, she said she was unprepared for the particular form of resistance she encountered in Raleigh, North Carolina, where St. Augustine’s is located.
“I had been used to dealing with the challenges of racism my whole life,” she said. “What I had never had to deal with was the challenges of being female. I'd never confronted it. And one morning I woke up and thought. ‘this isn't about me being African American. This is about me being a woman.’”
That realization, she said, forced a fundamental reassessment of her leadership style and public presentation. It was not a retreat, but a recalibration.
Jackson-Hammond, whose tenure at Central State was marked by financial stabilization and cultural transformation, offered a different kind of hard day: the deaths of students on icy Ohio roads.
“Those were the days of agony,” she said. “Families you could not reach because so many of our students are from out of state.”
Throughout the panel discussion, the presidents converged on themes that shape the book’s broader argument: that HBCU leadership demands a distinctive combination of institutional loyalty, community fluency, financial acuity, and, perhaps above all, the willingness to build teams capable of operating independently.
“You do not owe your life to the university,” Jackson-Hammond said plainly. “If you have a sound thinking cabinet, let them do their job.”
The anthology also includes contributions from Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, who led Philander Smith College and Bethune-Cookman University; Dr. Sebetha Lee Jenkins, the longest-serving woman president in Jarvis Christian University's history; Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette, the first woman president of Huston-Tillotson University; Dr. Brenda Allen, the first alumna president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; and Dr. Cheryl Davenport Dozier, former president of Savannah State University.
Artis said that she hopes the volume is only the beginning. An appendix catalogs every woman who has served as an HBCU president — public, private, two-year, four-year, and specialty — documenting tenures, institutions, and credentials in one place for the first time.
“This is a story of triumph and transformation,” she said. “Not a pain chronicle. These women overcame against odds, and the world needs to know that.”
