Beneath the weight of legacy and the beauty of Black resilience, the theme for the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership 2025 Spring Biennial Conference – “This Joy We Have: Womanist Resistance in the Face of Manifold Evil” – provided a prophetic balm for such a time as this.
More than 100 attendees of all denominations gathered May 1-3 in Charleston, South Carolina, in honor of the 40th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon’s groundbreaking academic essay that introduced womanist theology to mainline theological education. The opening night’s gathering was held at the International African American Museum. Using the acronym IAAM or “I AM,” the museum opened in June 2023 after a 20-year planning project, and it sits atop Gadsden’s Wharf, which was one of the nation’s most prolific former slave ports and is now hallowed by the presence of the ancestors. It is sacred, trembling ground. The museum’s executive director, Dr. Tonya Matthews, offered a womanist invocation of memory and place, providing a powerful history of Charleston’s significance in the Black American diaspora. According to Matthews, nine out of 10 Black Americans today can trace at least one ancestor back to the ports of Charleston.
At a time when memory is under siege and historical truth faces erasure, the thematic call and response from every speaker rang with ancestral urgency: “Remember.” Remember who we are, whose we are, where we’ve been and how we’ve survived. It was a litany of resilience, the kind Black women have always known — lifting holy memory as a liberating act.
Since 2018, the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership, under the visionary leadership of Rev. Dr. Melanie Jones Quarles, has offered a multifaceted approach to liberation through its six foci: womanist wellness, womanist witness, womanist worship, womanist wisdom, womanist wares, and womanist works. These initiatives embody a full-bodied theology that does not separate the spirit from the skin or the sacred from the struggle.
Attendees participated in breakout sessions ranging from cultivating contemplative joy to engaging deeply with the richness of Gullah Geechee culture.
“There is nothing like being in a room full of other Black women who love (the) Spirit and are committed to a more just church life, academia and society,” said Rev. Brooke Scott, organizing pastor from New Castle Presbytery in Delaware.
“At this conference, I was able to meet many of the people I have admired through the years, whether online or in books I’ve read. I was so inspired by all of what I learned, which included the history of the Gullah Geechee people and the ancestral lands of South Carolina, the value of talking about our wounds in order to heal, the healing power of play and joy, as well as the history of resistance in the South.
“Obviously, we have so much still to do in terms of justice and representation, but this conference made me feel affirmed in the fact that I am not the only one working towards a better world,” Scott said. “I am not the only one asking the questions I’ve asked. I am so glad that so many of my sisters are leading the way.”
Her words echo the collective sigh of many Black women who finally feel seen, heard and held in sacred space.
Rev. Patricia Bligen Jones led “The Art of Kintsugi,” one of the more embodied sessions at the conference. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver or platinum, became a metaphor for Black women’s spiritual mending in the session. Jones spoke not just about restoration, but about reclaiming the beauty in our brokenness. Her workshop was a womanist altar — where self-care is holy, and healing is protest.
Attendees left the session shedding burdens of silence, doubt and depletion, walking away reminded of their divine worth.
“As women, we tend to care for others better than we do ourselves, and sometimes, we must be reminded that our pain, trauma and hurt need a place to be heard and healed,” said Jones, who also serves on the Faith Advisory Council of the IAAM.
One of the most sacred moments of the gathering was Friday night’s closing worship at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Worshippers filled the sanctuary that still bears the grief and glory of June 17, 2015, when a White supremacist joined a Bible study and, after 90 minutes of prayer and study, murdered Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney and eight others. That night, the gathered community honored the blood-soaked floor as holy ground. Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie, president of the National Council of Churches, preached a soul-stirring message of Black hope and resurrection joy. At the same time, the choir from St. James Presbyterian Church lifted every voice with sacred fire.
With keynote addresses from Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems and Dr. Yolanda Pierce, this conference was more than academic. It was spiritual fortification. It was a sanctuary of sisterhood, a quilt of collective wisdom and a site of holy fire. Dr. Cannon’s dreams lived and breathed in every moment. As many recalled the inaugural 2018 gathering held shortly before her passing, this year’s gathering was a clarion call to keep building, writing and rising.
Rev. Le Quan Turner, commissioned ruling elder and pastor of Adelphi Presbyterian Church in Maryland, captured the spirit of the conference, saying: “The Katie Geneva Cannon Womanist Leadership Conference 2025 was a sacred space to recharge, reconnect, and be filled with joy. It was a celebration of womanist theology: uplifted, honored, explored, and embraced as a guiding light for all who seek justice, wisdom, and knowledge. What better place to gather than historic Charleston, S.C. (The Holy City), a city rich with legacy and resilience. In this city, I remembered the joy of the Divine Nine, sat in reverence and awe at the International African American Museum, shared meals infused with joy, and praised God with joy and thanksgiving with my fellow sisters. It was more than a conference; it was a joyful communion of spirit, scholarship, and sisterhood.”
Indeed, it was a womanist homecoming, a gathering of Black women who live at the intersection of Spirit, scholarship and survival and dare proclaim that this joy is ours, not because suffering makes us strong but because joy is our birthright.
