Katie Geneva Cannon Graduated from Two HBCUs Before Becoming the First Black Woman Ordained in the Presbyterian Church

Did you know that the woman who helped build an entire field of theology around the experiences of Black women got her start at two historically Black schools? Her name was Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, and her work reshaped how the church thinks about faith, ethics, and Black womanhood.

Cannon was born on January 3, 1950, in North Carolina and came of age in the segregated South. Education became her path forward. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Barber-Scotia College, a historically Black institution in Concord, North Carolina, and went on to receive her Master of Divinity from Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, the historically Black seminary founded to train Black clergy. Those two schools gave her the foundation for everything that followed.

On April 24, 1974, in Shelby, North Carolina, Cannon was ordained, becoming the first African American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). According to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she opened a door that had never been opened before, and she spent the rest of her life making sure others could walk through it.

She continued her studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, earning her Ph.D. in 1983. It was there and in the years after that Cannon became a pioneer of womanist theology, taking Alice Walker’s concept of “womanism” and applying it to Christian ethics. Working alongside scholars like Dr. Delores Williams, Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes, and Rev. Dr. Jacquelyn Grant, she insisted that the moral lives and lived experiences of Black women belonged at the center of theological study, not the margins. Her books, including Black Womanist Ethics and Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community, became foundational texts.

Cannon taught at Temple University, the Episcopal Divinity School, and Harvard Divinity School before joining Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, in 2001 as the Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics. As Union Theological Seminary noted, she is widely regarded as a founder of the womanist movement. In 2018, the seminary established the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership in her honor.

She died on August 8, 2018, at the age of 68, but her canon lives on in every scholar and preacher who builds on the ground she broke.

From the yards of two HBCUs to the pulpit and the professor’s chair, Katie Geneva Cannon proved that Black women’s voices are essential to the life of the church. This is a fact.

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