“Heartbreaking.”
That is how Falon Ensley, a student and former student government president at Lincoln University, described her feelings reading Antoinette Candia-Bailey’s final email to LU president John Moseley.
On Jan. 8, Candia-Bailey, former vice president of student affairs at LU, took her own life. In that final email sent hours before her death, Candia-Bailey describes the toll that life at Lincoln has taken and offers ways that workplace culture could be improved.
Candia-Bailey, who went by the nickname “Bonnie,” had assumed her role as vice president in May 2023 — less than a year prior. In that time, she contended she was overworked, subject to microaggressions, faced harassment and bullying after receiving poor performance evaluations, and was dismissed by Moseley and the LU Board of Curators when requesting Family and Medical Leave and Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations due to her mental health.
Ensley is disappointed at the university’s inability to “take care of an alum, and also a faculty member that they begged to come back and work.”
“When you think about weathering, think about something that continues to be beat, and beat, and beat until it’s unable to really maintain its shape or maintain whatever posture position it was in,” said Erica Savage, a wellness lifestyle consultant who has written on weathering.
Candia-Bailey’s story mirrors a phenomenon associated with Black women and girls known as “weathering.” Coined in 2006 by researcher Arline Geronimus, weathering describes how marginalized communities experience “early health deterioration as a consequence of the cumulative impact of repeated experience with social or economic adversity and political marginalization.”
“When you think about weathering, think about something that continues to be beat, and beat, and beat until it’s unable to really maintain its shape or maintain whatever posture position it was in,” said Erica Savage, a wellness lifestyle consultant who has written on weathering. “And this is exactly what is happening to Black women. This phenomenon speaks to social structures that impact us.”
Geronimus’ initial 1986 study analyzed fetal mortality rates among Black and white mothers. She found that Black teenage mothers gave birth to healthier babies than Black mothers in their 20s and older. She suggested that teenage mothers gave birth to healthier children as a result of fewer years of racism-related stress.
The maternal mortality rate for Black women is also disproportionately high compared to their non-Black counterparts. The CDC reported in 2021 that the rate was 2.6 times the rate for white women. Within Missouri, Black women are three times more likely to die within a year of childbirth than white women, according to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Other instances of poor mental health outcomes for Black women and girls are also prevalent today.
A December 2023 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry finds that suicide has disproportionately increased over the past two decades among Black women, and has more than doubled for young Black women and girls aged 15-24.
Following Candia-Bailey’s death, Savage re-shared an essay on her social media detailing her struggles with suicide after suffering a traumatic brain injury in 2021. In it, she suggests that the everyday stressors of Black womanhood keep “Black girls and women relegated to lives of labor, punchlines, punching bags, deterioration, and death.”
Her conclusions are mirrored in the life expectancy for Black Americans. A 2022 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that life expectancy for Black Americans falls behind that of white Americans. Missouri saw the greatest increase in life expectancy disparity from 1990-2019, the years included in the study.
Prevalent in the professional sphere is burn-out, a phenomenon caused by workplace stress causing “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy,” as defined by the World Health Organization.
At Lincoln, Candia-Bailey’s death has led to calls for student involvement in administrative decisions and created a space for students to highlight other ongoing issues at the university, such as the quality of food and conditions of their residence halls, according to previous Missourian reporting.
“We’ve been saying this constantly for years and years,” said Kenlyn Washington, the current student government president at LU. “It’s just sad that it took us (until) now until we have the news until we have TV for them to actually understand where we’re coming from and how we’re feeling.”
Other students echoed the sentiment that without the loss of life, they would not have had the space to address their concerns. “It comes at a great cost,” said LU student Tyree Stovall, “but at the same time (Candia-Bailey is) kind of saving Lincoln.”
Students say by writing her email, she left a call to action that they intend to follow.
“She made a statement in her letter that said, ‘It started at Lincoln for me, and it ended at Lincoln for me,’ and it’s not ending in Lincoln,” Ensley said.
“Even though she is not here anymore, we are going to make sure that her story lives on forever at Lincoln University, and we are going to make sure that mental health is taken seriously within the years moving forward.”