The history of African-American Presbyterians – and, yes, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – must acknowledge the transformative life and ministry of the Katie Geneva Cannon. Without much fanfare or special services, in the middle of a regularly scheduled meeting of the Presbytery of Catawba on April 23, 1974, the Church confirmed the call of God and ordained Katie Geneva Cannon to the ministry of Word and Sacrament. She opened the door for many African-American Presbyterian women to acknowledge God’s call on our lives and to enter ordained ministry.
To understand Cannon’s ordination and ministry is to understand the context of her early life and formation for ministry. Born into a large religious family in the racially-segregated South, she was shaped by both the faith of her family and community and the evils of Jim Crow segregation. Reflecting on her childhood, Cannon recalled: “Using the notion of sin in my catechism class as a lens I wanted to know what wrongdoing my kith and kin had committed that made it a crime for me to swing on swings, slide down slides and build sand castles in sandboxes in tax-supported public parks where white children played. I wanted this good, loving and forgiving God help me understand the entrenched reasons why my signing up to participate in the Kannapolis city-wide spelling contest was a life-threatening transgression.”
Cannon was nurtured in a black Presbyterian family and church. At an early age, she became a member of the Covenant United Presbyterian Church in Kannapolis, North Carolina. She attended Barber-Scotia College and Johnson C. Smith Seminary at the Interdenominational Theological Center, two Presbyterian institutions primarily dedicated to the education of black students. She understood that pursuing education would allow her to escape the limitations of the segregated South and discover her calling in life. The Catawba Presbytery was the oldest of the all-black middle governing bodies of the former United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It was this black Presbyterian formation and her family and community that affirmed her gifts and encouraged her to explore the possibility of ordained ministry when there were no other role models.
Cannon’s ability to say yes to the divine call on her life in a world that said no to her existence became a model for many who would follow her. She helped us to see the possibility of who we could be. In 1983 while I was living and working in Boston, I struggled to answer my own call to ordained ministry. I remember praying to God that I didn’t know any African-American Presbyterian pastors. I was mindful of many strong African-American Presbyterian women elders like Thelma Adair, moderator of the 188th General Assembly (1976), however, I was still waiting to see who God was calling me to be. As divine providence would work, Cannon was teaching at Harvard and I saw someone like me serving the church. With her characteristic grace and forthrightness, she offered me the best of her wisdom and experience as I dared to say my own yes to the divine. There are many of us who had similar conversations with Cannon and are deeply grateful that she did not wait to see someone who looked like her but dared to be that someone to whom others would look.
Cannon not only opened ecclesiastical doors, she dared to open academic doors. As the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, she challenged the racism and sexism that would exclude the theological scholarship of black women. She discovered that the theological truths of her mother, grandmothers and women of the black church and community were unexplored valuable treasures for theological study and teaching. She mined the narratives of enslaved women and the rich literary work of black women authors and found jewels of theological reflection that helped generations of women survive and employ ethics of liberation. As one of the foremothers of womanist theology, she centered the experiences of black women and wrote the theology of our lives. She was committed to dismantling the oppressive systems that were undergirded by theologies of oppression. She reminded us, “Even when people call your truth a lie, tell it anyway.” It was this truth telling that freed many of her students and colleagues to walk unashamedly and unapologetically in their truth and by so doing to change the churches, communities, contexts in which they dwelled. Cannon understood her calling to be teaching and took great joy in leading students through educational processes that would both change them and strengthen the body of theological work that future generations would study. Many owe their professional academic careers to the guiding hand and wisdom of Cannon.
While Cannon’s primary calling was teaching in the academy, she stayed connected to the black Presbyterian Church. She would often state: “It’s an abomination for those of us that hear, to be as smart as we are, trained as we are and to not know how to make it clear and gettable for anybody who wants know what we know. Theology is holy work, it’s a sacred vocation. It is our job to make it available to the masses of the congregation. To anybody who wants to be able to read what I know, I should be able to write so they can get it.” While a doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary, she served as pastor of the Ascension Presbyterian Church in East Harlem. While teaching at Temple University she served as a parish associate at the Berean Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and during her tenure as the Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary, she was an active part of the First United Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia. Without question, Cannon’s teaching and preaching was filled with pastoral sensitivities to students, colleagues and all who encountered her and whom she engaged. It was this deep commitment to both the academy and the church that allowed Cannon as she would encourage others to “think with her heart and feel with her head.”
Cannon’s influence was not limited to the United States. Committed to building bridges between the African diaspora and the African continent, she traveled frequently to Africa. She engaged with African theologians in general and African women theologians in particular. She was one of the founding directors of the Daughters of the African Atlantic Fund, whose mission is to enhance the quality of life for continental and diasporan African women and girls. It seeks to address the challenges of African and African-descended women and girls with wholistic action and advocacy rooted in womanist theological understandings.
Cannon would also represent the PC(USA) at international theological forums, challenging and broadening Reformed understandings to be inclusive of African-Americans in general and African-American women experiences and perspectives. Her paper, “Redemptive ethics: More than forgiveness of sins” asks: “It is difficult for African-Americans who have been part of the Reformed faith tradition ever since the establishment of the first Presbyterian Church in North America at Southold, Long Island, New York, in 1640 to the date of the First General Assembly in 1789, to grasp the significance of the 16th century Protestant Reformation leader, John Calvin, in relation to our deepest theological and spiritual problems? To make this point another way is to ask, has the Black Church’s faith practices been well served by John Calvin’s inquiry into the Scriptures? In essence, have our day-to-day ministries been influenced by Calvin?” She then goes on to claim: “If Black Presbyterians have learned anything from the writings of Calvin, it is that redemption means no more alienation from God. God fashioned all humans in God’s divine likeness — in righteousness, wisdom and goodness. Restoration from sin is putting our trust in God instead of succumbing to the fear invoked by Christian powerbrokers who could in the past and still to this day can inflict pain, torture, and even kill with the entire coercive power of the State supporting them.”
During one of the most regressive and oppressive periods in the United States, The Center for Womanist Leadership was inaugurated in April 2018 in Richmond, Virginia. CWL, a collaboration between Union Presbyterian Seminary and the Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology, was the bringing together of womanist theology in the academy and the community. CWL’s purpose is to equip, empower and set free black women to serve as changemakers in the church, community and academy. The Center for Womanist Leadership was Cannon’s dream fulfilled. During the inaugural celebration, with Alice Walker (who first used and defined the term womanist) as the keynote speaker, there was a gathering of a beloved community: people from different races, social classes, gender identities, educational backgrounds, faith commitments, sexual orientations, theological persuasions were praying and singing, dancing and studying, preaching and teaching, laughing and loving, believing in the possibility of a new reality — with the experiences of black women at the center of discourse. All of this occurred in the place that had once been the seat of the Confederacy and the institution that had contributed to the theological justification of slavery. Cannon took seriously the work of “debunking, demasking and detangling” systems of oppression.
Cannon would often say, “Do the work your soul must have” and quoting Howard Thurman, “Live your life in such a way God will not regret having created you.” Her life was one of God’s answers to the contradictions of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism and all humanly created barriers of exclusion, domination and oppression. For many of us she was a beloved elder sister, role model, compass, north star, teacher, pastor, sister-friend, trailblazer, boundary breaker, demon slayer. She helped us find our God-given humanity and our authenticity that enables us to do the work our souls must have. She taught us, “Everyone has a vocation you don’t leave this life until you finish the work God called you to do.” For many of us, Cannon left this life way too soon. However, maybe by doing our own soul’s work, we will find ourselves contributing to the completion of the work that was started by Katie Geneva Cannon. If this is so, she will be honored, and God will be glorified.
Robina Marie Winbush is associate stated clerk of the General Assembly and director of ecumenical relations for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Louisville, Kentucky.
