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Katie Cannon interviewed by Alice Brasfield, December 7, 1987, side 1.
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- speakerIt's just just ok.
- speakerMy family's been in the Presbyterian church since 1867, when Luke Dorland
- speakerand some of the white missionaries from the Presbyterian church came south after the Civil War. My family
- speakerwas immediately connected with those mission stations and those mission churches that got started at that
- speakerpoint.
- speakerWould you begin with some background information: Where you were born, when, and where you grew up, and then include some background if you can. Well,
- speakerit is no coincindence that I was ordained. I was the first black woman
- speakerto be ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament
- speakerin the Presbyterian Church. I
- speakerwas ordained in nineteen seventy-four. I was born in 1950. January 13, 1950. My
- speakerfamily has been connected to the Presbyterian church since 1867 when the white missionaries came south after the Civil War
- speakerto work with the freed people. They started churches and schools and all kinds of. They
- speakerconnected. As philanthropists and missionaries, they connected much of their work and modelled
- speakera lot of it also with Freedmen's Bureaux. One of my
- speakerinterests at some point is to go back and look at Presbyterian
- speakerdocuments in terms of what was really theological rationale as well as saving lives has happened.
- speakerMy biological chronological background was that I have
- speakerthree brothers, three sisters. My parents were both ruling elders in the Presbyterian Church
- speakerI'm from Kannapolis, North Carolina, which is the home of Cannon Mills textile products. So, at some point
- speakermy ancestors were slaves on the Cannon plantation. When slavery was kicked out, father started working in the mill, the Cannon Mill. The next year my mother went to the mill. S
- speakerhe was the first black woman to work in the mill to do anything other than to clean toilets and janitorial work. She was the
- speakerfirst black woman in Cannon Mills who would be allowed to work on a machine.
- speakerSo I'm from a up poor working class context strata society,
- speakermeaning that my family. My parents had to work all their lives, and that has given a lot of meaning. I'm wondering about some of the stories you were told as a child about your forebearers? You mention that they go back to 1867. My
- speakergrandfather, my
- speakermother's father, was the only free child. All his brothers and sisters were child of slaves.
- speakerSo I grew up understanding childhood slavery as the cruelest, most severe institution that ever. A form of slavery that ever had been perpetrated in the world.
- speakerSo, I grew up understanding what it meant to be the first. My mother would be the first generation of freed people
- speakerand that we had come from a very strong line of survivors. And so, I heard a
- speakerlot of stories of childhood slavery, a lot of stories. My grandmother used to tell us about how important the church and how important the trail was. No
- speakermatter how much evil I may experience in life or
- speakerhow evil and unjust it might be, the God we serve is a good God. And, the God we serve,
- speakereverything that God made is good. Because no matter how much people may tell us that we are inferior, or less than, or from at
- speakerJim Crow-ism or segreation,
- speakerthat because we are created in God's own image that we were good people. And we had to live
- speakerthat out, even if the mores and the laws of society did not
- speakerallow us to express all our gifts. So I heard a lot of stories about childhood slavery. I heard
- speakera lot of Bible stories. My parents and my Sunday School
- speakerteachers, as well as other adults in our lives, stressing the
- speakercatechism that we learned. All the Bible stories, the parables.
- speakerIt's almost like we had to memorize the Bible as if it were not going to be around any more
- speakerSo those are the second thing stories. and
- speakerthe first stories were stories of slavery, and the second were the Bible stories.
- speakerAnd, then the third, I guess, were stories that I heard about, within the culture, a lot of stories that w
- speakerere stories of survival.
- speakerWill you talk about growing up in the church? Growing up in the church has been, has made me who I am today. Because, in light of all I've said, about growing up in a Jim Crow Society with segregation as the rule of the day, growing up in the rural south and being part of a
- speakerworking force family. Growing up in a context where the Klan marches at will. The only place that black
- speakerpeople could go was the church. Only home and church. AAnd, because
- speakerwe were Christians, we didn't go to juke joints. We didn't go to nightclubs. And, there were only one or two in the county anyway. So
- speakereverything that we did outside the home was at church. The church was not only our religious
- speakersacred place. It was the place where we learned public speaking. We had. E
- speakervery Christian holiday we celebrated with recitals or oratorical content and all kinds of musicals. The
- speakerchurch was a place for the young people to have
- speakerfellowship. We had Vacation Bible Schools every summer. We had.
- speakerI don't know. If there was a social activity. If there was anything
- speakerthat did not happen in one's home, it happened in the church. So the church was always meaningful to me and because
- speakermy church where all my immediate family belonged to it. started and
- speakermy grandmother my mother, my aunts and uncles, got together and said, we need our own church.
- speakerAnd it started out as a mission church. And the interesting thing about my sister and me. Not only did
- speakermy church get I get my family connected with the Presbyterian Church, but I come from an all black congregation, all black presbytery in an all black synod.
- speakerAnd so, I just assumed that the General Assembly
- speakerwas also all black. I had no idea because growing up in Catawba Presbytery.
- speakerAnd was all part of the power of being a Presbyterian. Even though we were black and Presbyterian,
- speakerwe worshipped in a way that was true to the black religious heritage. If you
- speakerwould have come to our church, you wouldn't know that it wasn't Baptist, A.M.E., A.M. E. Baptist, Pentecostal, Churchof God, whatever. Because we
- speakertruly worshipped in the black religious tradition. and I had no
- speakeridea that Presbyterians were supposed to be cold and rigid until I came north. They used to kid me that you don't act like a Presbyterian. because
- speakerI've been Presbyterian since 1867. And, its like. No! You act like a Baptist! But, you
- speakerknow, what they were saying is I moved so competently in the black church
- speakertradition in black and parodies. I must have joined the Presbyterian church as part of my upward mobility. and the something social strata.
- speakerso being an all black presbytery in an all black synod, we did
- speakerbusiness in the black way. Meaning, we ran our presbytery meetings very much according to the way black groups run meetings.
- speakerfor example you don't cut off the spirit
- speakerYou don't. It's not run so tight according to Robert's Rules of Order,
- speakerthat people are treated in any inhumane or disrespectful way. It's much more
- speakerof the folk tradition of Africa. You take care of business. And, you do
- speakerit as long as it takes to do it. If something comes up
- speakeryou stop. And, I remember when Thelma Adair's [Adair, Thelma C. Davidson] husband Gene Adair [Adair, Arthur Eugene] dropped dead on the floor of the Presbytery of New York City of a heart attack. And, they had a recess for fifteen or twenty minutes and then they
- speakercalled
- speakerthe meeting again. And, the black people walked out because there's something about losing a brother or sistero
- speakerfrom this life that stops everything. I mean. I remember when I was in Africa in 1971 and President Tubman [Tubman, William] died
- speakerin Liberia. And we all. I mean, you stop life to celebrate that somebody has
- speakergone on and that's it. And I was
- speakerso discombobulated because we could we called a meeting and
- speakerwe've had our moment of silence. Now, we can continue. This is not my life. This is not my people. I don't feel like that way .
- speakerInteresting. My mother has always said that the only thing she ever wanted when each of her
- speakerchildren was born. The only thing she wanted was that we would not spend eternity in hell. She
- speakerdidn't care whether we were professional people but the souls of them would not
- speakerbe damned for eternity. An that she spent a lot of
- speakertime to make sure that we went to revival meetings in the summer. And if there were
- speakerany program at the church that we would be there. And so that's the only thing. And, she still reminds me of that. She
- speakerdoesn't care how many credentials or how many accolades that I might receive
- speakerif I'm not going to church on Sunday that disturbs her deeply.
- speakerAnd, her sense of me as a minister, is not
- speakerreally one of confidence. I don't fit the stereotype of her understanding of minister.
- speakerI still have too much fun, you know, to be a real minister. Was it right for a
- speakerwoman to be a minister? For her? if I fit into her model. You
- speakerknow she doesn't. Her sense of me as a minister is I tell jokes. I dance. I laugh. I tease my nieces and nephews.
- speakerI don't. I wear colorful
- speakerclothes. You know, like I don't. I don't have a drab lydia warm light.
- speakerAnd, that disturbs her. Ministers are not supposed to be. And,
- speakerI don't live with absolutes.
- speakerI think that's the biggest problem. She. She. My mother know absolutely what's right and wrong
- speakerwhat's good and evil. And, she knows this. And, I don't do theology. I don't do ministry
- speakerthat way. And, that bothers her, you know. But! Kid, you know that's wrong. And, it is like. No, I don't know that's wrong.
- speakerMy father's response is that. W
- speakerhen I first got ordained, some of the black men in my community were saying, Well, you're probably going to be Esau, you know identical twins, Jacob. And
- speakerthey said, "Well, Esau, So do you think about women
- speakerbeing ordained?" "Well I think women have as much right to send people to hell as men do." So. My sense of myself as a minister, I've always. At age seven, I think it was, that I decided that I wanted
- speakera religious vocation. But I thought I wanted to be a nun. But, I didn't
- speakerknow you had to be Catholic to be a nun. I thought I could be Presbyterian and be a nun. I knew I was always going to be a Presbyterian, but I didnot know. A
- speakernd, I had an aunt who was Catholic. I didn't know Catholicism was a religion. I had to go. I though it was. There was only
- speakerone Catholic church in Kannapolis.
- speakerI only knew one black person who was Catholic, and it was my aunt. And all I knew about Catholicism was. Etiquette was very important. And, I thought that was what
- speakerCatholic was, that you-- Catholic meant that you couldn't play, you couldn't be a child. You had to be very still and talk in a soft voice.
- speakerSo. Then, when I realized that. Someone said to me you
- speakercan't be a nun unless you're Catholic. So, I gave up the idea of being a nun. And so the next stage was I wanted to be a missionary. I really wanted to
- speakerserve, give my life in service, to travel the world. I wanted more than anything to get out of the oppressive, racist Klan town that I was in. A
- speakernd, I wanted to see the world. And, I read a lot about it, avid reader, bookworm as a child. I wanted
- speakerto experience some of that which I was, some of that which I read about. I thought being a missionary would allow me to travel the world, see the world. And, that's what I wanted to do. Then when I hit adolescence, I hit it with a vengeance And, when I say, my parents probably. The level was hard for me, and
- speakeraccording to my parents, I am still stuck there. probably. One
- speakerminute I'd be totally grown, and womanish and the next minute crying like a baby. I don't know
- speakerhow adult, especially teachers, who
- speakerteach children in adolescence deal with all of that adrenalin and all those mood swings.
- speakerI don't work well with youth groups because I got
- speakerstuck there in my own faith development. And, so I do well teaching adults, but adolescents, I
- speakerjust get boggled by them. But, it is like, what are they doing now? I
- speakercan't comprehend them. When I was pastoring a church in New York City, I ran a summer camp.
- speakerAnd I was crying every day. They would come and say, "Rev. Cannon, what is wrong?" I could not keep up with them. You know, they would talk to me about problems in the faith and this and that. And, I would be trying
- speakerto reason with them.
- speakerThere was no way to reason with them. So. That
- speakerwas the kind of adolescent kid that I was. I was just the kind of kid that I said mirror me. And, I still can't deal with them.
- speakerAnd so therefore when I hit adolescence, I made a vow that, if I ever got out of my parents' home, I would never go to church again.
- speakerNever, ever go to church. I was over church. I was tired of church. And, I wanted to experience the real world. You
- speakerknow all that adrenalin was going on in me, all those hormones telling me all kinds of things. And basically,
- speakernot have been
- speakerbecause one did not talk about sex and bodies or anything because black Christians. And, all
- speakermy mother ever said was you know right from wrong. All of this stuff happened and none of it was
- speakermaking sense from the Christian concept. all of that I was experiencing, which is really
- speakercoming from my own essential being was considered sinful. And so up until that point,
- speakerthe church made a lot of sense to me you know, which was that one could live above sin policy, that one could live
- speakerabove the world. I can remember, even when I was like ten, pre-adolescent, in fifth grade and kids would tell jokes
- speakerAnd when I would walk. Oh, you are a Christian. You know I made it very
- speakerclear that I was that kind of Christian. And, I would always try to proselytize
- speakerand try to keep other people to not be not spend eternity in hell. That was the whole hell and damnation
- speakerkind of theology that had been handed to
- speakerme. And, at the same time, they said God was good and loving and would take care of us in every situation. But it was all. I was always trying to save souls.
- speakerSo you wouldn't spend eternity. and so
- speakerthat was. By the time I hit twelve or thirteen I was like God didn't watch with me any more.
- speakerBut I'd rather spend life in hell than do good any more.
- speakerThis that's what I was going through then. When I went to college in 1967, I
- speakerwent to Barber-Scotia College, which was a Presbyterian College, started by the same group of missionaries, Luke Dorland was the founder in 1867. M
- speakery great-grandmother had gone there a hundred years earlier as a freed slave.
- speakerAnd it was it was everything
- speakerfor people who had been denied the right to learn to read and write. So so they were
- speakercultivated people to be freed people basically women in Scotia Presbyterian. It was called Scotia Seminary. And
- speakerI do not want to go to that school because
- speakerall of my mother's cousins and others had gone to Barber-Scotia.
- speakerAnd I wanted to go to A & T State University. My mother
- speakergave me an option. She said I could either go to Barber-Scotia or work in Cannon Mills the rest of my life. So, I packed my trunk
- speaker. I was only seven miles from Scotia. And, I packed this trunk. You would have thought I was going at least to Greece
- speakeror Turkey or maybe Kenya or
- speakersomewhere. I mean I packed a trunk that was ready for the ocean liner. You know, a seven-mile voyage
- speakerbecause I was saying, I am leaving. This was a symbolic act. That I am not coming back to this place. So, when I arrived in September
- speakerof 1967 at Barber-Scotia, I went in as a Negro. And, in
- speakerApril, April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I already knew I was black.
- speakerThat I was no longer a Negro. And so, that year 1967-1968, was the real conversion, transformation
- speakerin the sense of politics, ideology, theology--
- speakereverything. So
- speakereverything I had been part of up until that point, even though as an adolescent, I had been rebelling, going the other way, a head on collision, this Negro theology and Black ideology
- speakerand I did not know what to do. It was a
- speakerhard time because we were at war with Vietnam. and
- speakerbeing a whole social strata, economic strata of students who came to Scotia, who were all
- speakerfirst generation college-educated people. And so therefore a lot of us. I think one thing they brought up in the profile
- speakerabout that class. That most. Most of the students had never come there by themselves, had never set give
- speakerup. So not only are they teaching them academic subjects,
- speakerbut they were acculturing them to move to predominant white society. So we had discussions. We had teas.
- speakerWe learned how to go through receiving lines. We had. Our orientations were. Everyone was learning etiquette. Learning
- speakerhow to move, as black people, so that we did
- speakernot alienate white people so that the while people were not afraid of us. So that we could take our
- speakergifts, our gifts and talents and be able to use them and show our light to the world. One of the
- speakermottoes that they drove in us. No matter what would happen to people at Scotia, is
- speakerthat we learned how to walk with the peasants and ride with the king. And if we didn't learn anything else, that was
- speakerwhat we got. We had to have that kind of heart and mind of integration.
- speakerso that at that point, when the head-on collision happened, I just collapsed. I stopped church altogether.
- speakerI was no longer at home, so I didn't have to go. And,
- speakerI started reading everything black I could possibly read. And,
- speakerI couldn't believe it. When I first. I remember when I first read Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower. It was so
- speakerdevastating that I didn't cry, but I was just in a daze for several days because
- speakerhow could black people have such a rich culture,
- speakercome from such a rich civilized people on the continent of Africa
- speakerand be told all our lives that we were a liability to civilization. I mean
- speakerfrom that point on I was gullible. I mean I just read anything. And, it just
- speakerreally grounded me. So when I finished college, I went to seminary as a skeptic.
- speakerI did not go as "Born again." I did not go because God struck me dead. I went because
- speakerI wanted to know, Somebody had lied to me. Either the church was the opium of
- speakerthe people, and Christianity was a slavery religion, or it wasn't. And I wanted to get some sense out of it. And,
- speakerall my life, as long as the Spirit is in me, I'll be grateful to James Cone, for his book, Black Theology [Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation]
- speakerBut just
- speakerto back up a minute, when I was at Scotia and we were talking about. When I mentioned about being at war in Vietnam and the social strata. Since
- speakerso many of the, our male counterparts were fighting in Vietnam on the front lines, E
- speakervery day at mail call was like being in a war zone.
- speakerSomebody's fiance, somebody's brother, somebody's male relative had just been, body had been shipped home. So. When I
- speakerwas at Union Seminary and met white women and men who did not know a soul who was killed in Vietnam, it was devastating, b
- speakerecause then I realized even more, the class strata of what people served as fodder for the war,
- speakerbecause it was such a daily reality for us. When you go to mail call and all of a sudden you heard these screams. And, you knew it was
- speakersomebody else. And, it was usually fiances because. or brothers, but a lot of innocent people who died. So, t
- speakerhat also prepared my question in my quest to try to make sense out of
- speakerall the religious training, this rote biblical story.
- speakerSo what relevance if any is this to my life. I am curious why you went to seminary instead of grad school? What pushed you? Because
- speakerthe black church is the only institution in black community that black people have any say so over. W
- speakere don't own health care, education, nothing. So I knew that
- speakerif there was a revolution, the black church would be the base for it.
- speakerI knew that if there was going to be any change. If. if there were. If Christianity was a
- speakerslave religion, the only way to correct it, would be through the black church. If Christianity wasn't a slave religion, the only
- speakerway to liberate, the liberative message would be that through the black church.
- speakerSo there was no other place to move. I knew I couldn't change the school system, the health care system, the business system. None of that.
- speakerSo just knowing that the church had. In my own story had
- speakerbeen that for so many other people.
- speakerAbout seminary work. It's up to some of the. I did my seminary work at Johnson C. Smith Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. Oh, okay. I went to an all black seminary. There were two black accredited seminaries in the United States out of two hundred accredited seminaries in North America
- speakerOne is Howard Divinity School in Washington, DC. And, I.T.C. in Atlanta. The Inter-denominational Theological Center. And, Johnson C. Smith Seminary
- speakermoved to be part of that seven school consortium. And that was the greatest gift
- speakerto be in a black context, struggling to with issues. And it was a great time to be
- speakerin seminary in 1971 because a lot of the brothers had just come back
- speakerfrom Vietnam. A lot of the brothers we met in seminary were going to Vietnam. And
- speakerthen, there was a group of women who joined the community of seminary, as single
- speakerwomen for the first time. And people basically didn't know. They said the brothers. The men used to fail all the time. Well,
- speakerwomen only come to seminary to get husbands. and then they realized that we were serious about what we were doing and they had to recognize the different kinds.
- speakerSo it was like this first wave of black single
- speakerwomen going to seminary to be theologically educated in ministry.
- speakerAnd, I was such a skeptic. And I was. Every time the professor would start the lesson, my hand
- speakerwould be up in the air. And, they would send me to the library to read volumes and volumes and volumes. And I was never
- speakerridiculed for it. I was never put down or belittled or shame-faced. None of that.
- speakerIt was like people understood that I was struggling. And, I was not the only one struggling. Because
- speakera lot of the older black men being that we were a seminary foundation, a lot of the Baptists, United Methodists, and some of the Pentecostal men, had been pastors since they were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. Had been preaching that long. Had been pastors since they were in their twenties, but they had never been theologically trained. Eighty percent of all black clergy had no theological training, formal theological training
- speakerThey go to a lot of. Some of them would go to Bible colleges and take all kinds of others , but no. A
- speakernd so therefore we were the first big wave of theologically-trained
- speakerclergy. So the United Methodists at that point decided a
- speakerreal push to send their ministers to seminary. There was an aggressive recruitment from among Presbyterians, United Presbyterian Church, for racial-ethnic seminarians. So therefore, we went to seminary. And, there was
- speakermoney available. If the Presbyterian Church had not made it possible
- speakerfor the money to be available, I would not have gone to seminary. I had
- speakeralready signed up and worked with Margaret Flory. She had processed my application for eight months to send
- speakerme to Kenya for two years as a Frontier Intern in Mission. And, they had
- speakernever had a black
- speakerAmerican in this program and I was supposed to be one of the first. And, she was just devastated when I told her no, I'm going to seminary. And
- speakerthe reason I made that change, because they already had me
- speakerscheduled for the ocean liner and where I supposed to go was that I had spent the summer with Operation Crossroads Africa in Liberia.
- speakerI had
- speakertravelled to Abijan, Ghana and decided that what I
- speakerneeded was not to spend more time in Africa, because I was getting into the market in
- speakerAfrica and my Africcan identity, what I needed to do the wrestling question in me, was "Is Christianity a slavery?" And,
- speakerthat That answer was not going to be. That
- speakerquestion was not going to be answered for me by doing more mission work, which was to live out my dream of being a missionary.
- speakerBut I needed some answers. And Jim Cone, who was now the president of the I.T.C.,
- speakertalked to me and said to me, teach me to come to seminary. And, I think I flew back into the country on a Friday
- speakerAnd that Sunday, my parents drove me down to Atlanta, and I enrolled in seminary. Could you talk about that experience? About the curriculum and field work? Anything that seems important. Any people, for instance. Well first of all, there's James Costen [Costen, James H.] James Costen was the man that believed. He said, it is time for a black woman to be ordained
- speakerin the Presbyterian Church. And, Katie Cannon, you are that person. And, I say, well, Doc, I don
- speaker't want to be no a minister. You know I don't want the black
- speakerpreacher is the only the most powerful black man in the black community where I come from. And,
- speakerfor me to stand in the pulpit and to preach, is to be a castrator of black men,
- speakerto be an oppressor, to be joining those outside who always emasculated black men. And, so
- speakerI don't want to do it. I say I want to work on kids. I don't want to go the minister track.
- speakerAnd he looked at me. This was during to when we had. Well, with the M.R.E. is t
- speakerhe only thing you can do is work at the Y.
- speakerI said, "The Y?" Well, black people couldn't go to the Y in Kannapolis. I had no. I didn't even know
- speakerwhat went on at the Y. The only thing I knew about the Y was my aunt, who was a retired school teacher,
- speakeranswered the phone at the Y in Charlotte, North Carolina. And so
- speakerI said if I get a masters in religious education and the only thing I could do was to
- speakeranswer the phone at the Y. He said, That's all you can do is work at the Y. So, I says, okay, sign me up for the M.Div. Because I
- speakerdidn't want to
- speakerwork at the Y.
- speakerI had no idea of the rich history of the Y.W.C.A. I had no idea of any of that. But, I knew
- speakerthat if all I could do was to go back and answer
- speakerthe phone at the Y, then I didn't want to do that.
- speakerSo that's how I got into the M.Div track. But Jim Costen seen something in me that I could not see in myself. And, seen very clearly that I could be the first black woman to be ordained
- speakerwhen
- speakerall I. I was a revolutionary.you know. And nation time and we were going to declare
- speakerrevolution on the United States so that black people would have our full dignity. And that was a radical
- speakermove for them. And, my sense of theological training was that
- speakerI wanted to be able to. When I decided that I had a call to the ministry. It was within
- speakerthe first two months of seminary. I wanted to minister to all the young black men and women, who had
- speakergrown up in a church just like I had, where the
- speakerchurch was the base of everything we did outside the home. And, we were not revolutionaries. Maybe
- speakerit's not the opium of the people. And within
- speakertwo months of theological education, I knew that a
- speakerlot of the truth was not being communicated from the pulpit to the pew. And, I wanted it to
- speakerbe one of the prophets. I wanted to be one of the people saying, "There is more here, folks
- speaker. This is not a fake religion. There is a whole lot of truth, there's a whole lot that's gonna make sense, if
- speakerwe get the word out to the people." And, that mixture was important. The mixture
- speakerin the fact there were older pastors who were there to get theological training. And, here we were
- speakerstraight out of college. Twenty-one, twenty-two. Interested highly in having a good time. a
- speakerlot of
- speakerrhetoric you know. And it was just a mix because
- speakerwe had questions and they had answers. And so, what we had.
- speakerThe mixed mixture. Why the mixture was good was that the older group had to learn
- speakerthat there are some things you can't prove by the Bible. That you have to question. Some things you just don't know. And, the younger group
- speakerhad to learn there are some things
- speakeryou can't get answers from. You have to live on faith. So our
- speakerquestions and their faith made for a richer faith. Because they had to question
- speakerand we had to believe and it was great. Those, those men I was in seminary
- speakerwith. The men I was in seminary with and a few women who were there with me would be bonded friends of mine for life. And
- speakerI.T.C at that time, everything was required, everything. It was very different from what happened
- speakerWhere it is the cafeteria style you go to in, you take, and do what you want to do.
- speakerYes. or we basically. No course is required.
- speakerYou have to show that you have competency in the seven areas of study. But
- speakerif somebody comes in and has been teaching history in public school or anywhere they don't have to take
- speakerone-oh-one courses. you know. We respect that adult learning. But for us it wasn't that
- speakerkind of the way. It was clear to the people working together at that point
- speakerthat we had to we have to moved by everything. We had the Old Testament, the admission, the New Testament, Presbyterian history,
- speakerlanguage of Hebrew Greek. Christian Education, sociology
- speakerof religion church history, philosophy, theology, but everything
- speakerand so we all almost.Most of us who were doing any kind of quality work,
- speakermoved through the seminary in every course together every year. So we were
- speakerlike a community all the way through.
- speakerIf there were two sections that section moved through. You know we took Old Testament, New Testament. T
- speakerhey moved to basically the same way.
- speakerAnd, so it worked. And we had a few electives but just, maybe out of
- speakerthree years of study,
- speakeryou might have had an option to take three courses. Everything else was required, full load. That's
- speakerwhere they didn't know qwhat to do with us. Being that. They had. There had
- speakernever been any black Presbyterian women in.There had been black Presbyterian women in seminary because I met a woman who had graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary back in the fifties. I can't think of her name right now.
- speakerBut she didn't. She's not ordained. Lillian. Lillian Anthony Wells. Lillian Anthony anyway.
- speakerAnd Emily Gibbs had gotten a Masters of Religious Education. So there had been women in fact
- speakerin seminary, but not black women in seminary for the M.Div. on the ordination
- speakertrack. So when they, when it was time to me for field education, since I was saying
- speakerI'm not a minister. And I was trained in college to be in elementary education teacher,
- speakerI decided OK I will do something in the Saturday program. So, I didn't have any field experience. My field was tutoring. So I tutored in Old Testament and I tutored in New Testament. And, I tutored in preaching. But,
- speakerI did not have that pulpit experience until after I was ordained. And, then when
- speakerI didn't have any what we call pulpit mannerisms and it was totally all, and it was like, if it wasn't on the bulletin,
- speakerI didn't read it. I mean, I didn't say it. it was like.
- speakerYou graduated in seventy-four?.
- speakerIn the process of. Well, I guess, a very important part of my story, when I accepted my identity as a preacher,
- speakerand I really accepted my call to the ministry. The second year of seminary I had to take homiletics.
- speakerAnd, I went back and talked with Dr. Collinson. Doc. He said, "Kate, go on and do it."
- speakerSo the first semester was the preparation of sermons. The second semester was the delivery of sermons. The
- speakerfirst time I ever flunked a course or exam was in preaching.
- speakerAnd that's what made me a preacher. Dr. Clark made it very clear to me. His name was Isaac R. Clark, Senior.
- speakerAnd, to this day he's the most formative
- speakermale influence in my life after my father. But as a speaker, he was a lot
- speakermore forceful than my father. Dr. Clark didn't want any women in his class. He
- speakerdidn't want any women preachers because all they would do is get up there
- speakerwith their pretty little voice and not say anything. He said, It's like a Christmas present. You open it and there's nothing there. You say but are
- speakerlooking for but maybe you might b`e like Emma Darnell and her father is one of the deans in the
- speakerChristian Methodist Episcopal denomination. And, she's a lawyer. She can speak, but she's not a preacher. She us
- speakered to come up here to the seminary. Do you know Emma Darnell? No, I don't. But, maybe
- speakeryou might be like Emma Darnell, and you might have some sufferers. So you can stay. So
- speakerthat was a challenge that he would say that and that. The
- speakerman was incredible. And, I have mastered his technique and now I'm looking forward to. I taught
- speakerone class on homiletics at E.D.S. And, I'm looking forward to sabbatical to teach it again, because we need more
- speakerpeople to know how to preach prophetically in the world. So I took the
- speakercourse. I flunked the first exam. And at that point it became a challenge. Oh, yes, I'm going to master this. And,
- speakerI finished the class with the highest average in the class. And when it came time to deliver the sermon, I
- speakerhad to cry. I had to go to pastoral counseling. I had to talk to doctor Pugh, who was the pastoral counselor. counselor. I said
- speakerI can't do it. I can't be castrated like this. Well what, what
- speakerwill it mean if I preach better than they do? What does that mean?
- speakerAnd, he said, "So why don't you ask them?" So, I went back to the class, and I asked the brothers.
- speakerI said, "What would it mean if I preached better than you? They said, well what about that? I I
- speakerneeded them to send me forth. I needed their blessing. I needed them to
- speakersay that if God has laid this on me, that they
- speakersupport me in it. Then, the second problem I had
- speakerwith my preacher identity with my identity as a preacher. I was not pure. I thought that as a woman in
- speakerministry that they, that we could not have sinned at any point. No amount, above sin,
- speakeryou know.
- speakerAnd, it was like, I know i hated people. I know I can be spiteful
- speakerand everything else. And so in
- speakerpreparation for our delivering a sermon, we formed ourselves as a prayer band and group where we had sermons together.
- speakerand i had seen these brothers get up and pray
- speakerand stuff, and they're dominating. And, I know all their sins,
- speakerAny they preach every time they'r sin. And, I say, "Wait a minute.thing because we talk about everything. And, it's like, "Oooh!"
- speakerSo who am I. And then I begin to understand that that the
- speakerprophet and the people in the Bible were not perfect people. They were the ones who had
- speakerthe most humanity were often the ones that God called.
- speakerAnd at that point that was the second thing I needed to get up and preach.
- speakerJust to accept my own humanity and accept from a humble place. I don't know why God called me and didn't call somebody else, but
- speakerI take it as a call, and I accept it as a call, and I have fallen and I have sin, and so, like Isaiah, "Woe is me. I am a woman of unclean lips, and I dwell among
- speakerthe people unclean, but my eyes have seen the glory.
- speakerSo that was my system, my step as a preacher.
- speakerAnd after that I led that class and delivered the sermon, and I really learned how to preach. And, then I took the.
- speakerBut preaching is an avocation, not my vocation. But, it's so much of who I am that I love it. I love teaching. There's nobody that
- speakerI've ever met that I couldn't teach how to preach even And, the problem with it, I think, most
- speakerwomen clergy is that they put too many sermons in one. And, the problem, I think, with most men clergy when they are preachers is they don't develop the one sermon that they have. It's like the porch without the house.
- speakerWe walk through and you fall out the back door. And the women have so many rules and
- speakeryou get lost and you never get home on Sunday afternoon. They get you lost up in the attic or in the basement or in the parlor.
- speakerSo I love preaching and I'm teaching it. So, in 1974,
- speakerin that process of being an academic, I fell in love with Scripture. I've always loved the Bible. My grandmother and I used to sit and read the Bible together e
- speakervery day
- speakerI decided that I want to be a scholar of Hebrew Scripture. And at that
- speakerpoint, Union Seminary in New York City had made a decision to actively recruit racial-ethnic
- speakerpeople and women.
- speakerAnd I was a woman and I was black. And so I applied to Union Seminary
- speakerAnd Bobbie Jo Salter was their full-time recruiter, who came down to ITC and he recruited
- speakerabout seven or eight of us to come to Union Seminary. And I finished seminary in May, did
- speakersome research work that summer, packed up my car.
- speakerI didn't have one penny. At that point, I
- speakerdidn't have one penny to move to New York, not one penny. I had a scholarship waiting for
- speakerme. I had a tuition scholarship already paying`my scholarship, and I had some money to live on
- speakerthat wasn't coming through until after Labor Day. So I wrote friends at 475 in New York [Interchurch Center]. And, I say, I
- speakerhave this opportunity to go do a doctorate, but I have no money. And, they took
- speakerout $500, different, from different offices of the Program Agency. Oscar McCloud [McCloud, J. Oscar] and the Board, a whole list of
- speakerthem, I gathered from twenty-five here, fifty there, twenty-five here until they got
- speakerfive hundred dollars, they sent it to me. And, that is how I
- speakerstarted. I moved. I rented a car, drove up to Union Seminary, pulled in. And, that's
- speakerwhat I lived off of, the month of August after I got checked in, that money. Because the Presbyterian Church only paid my way through seminary
- speaker. But they made it
- speakerpossible for me because without that five hundred dollars, without that money I couldn't have came up, accepted it
- speaker. In April, prior to that, the Presbytery of Catawba ordained me to get a Ph.D. And, never before had they done that. I
- speakermean they didn't know what to do with me. Here was a woman who has passed all her ordination exams, who had
- speakermade only two B's in her seminary career.
- speakerAnd they said, well. What is her call?" And, Rev. Raymond Worsley [Pastor, Charlotte, NC, Grier Heights] and Dr. James Costen got together and said, "Y
- speakerour call is to teach. And, in order to teach, you got to have the degree."
- speakerAnd so, they went and made a plea before the Candidates Committee that my call, and they
- speakerquoted scripture and everything. Katie is called to get a Ph. D. It was
- speakerlike. I don't believe this. So we went up to the presbytery meeting that
- speakernight. So I went for my examination. And, I had on a dress with a lot
- speakerof. It was an orange dress with all these flowers in it and everything, a teardrop. And, my parents were there and some of my aunts and uncles from the local church because they all, they go to presbytery religiously.
- speakerThey stopped my sermon, and they ordained
- speakerme. and Lonnie Oliver. The two
- speakerof us came up together. After the ordination, we got in the car and went back to Atlanta. And, there was
- speakerno hullabaloo. There was nothing.
- speakerI went back to school and I said, I'm ordained. I'm ordained. I did not know what
- speakerit meant. I had still not come into my identity as a minister. What that had meant. I
- speakerjust know that I was ordained and that I needed to be ordained to do what I wanted to do.
- speakerSo that was the night in April April 23rd, 1974.
- speakerI was ordained as the first black woman in the Presbyterian Church on the floor of presbytery, on the floor of Catawba Presbytery.
- speakerThey all laid hands on, my momma and my daddy, my aunts and my uncles. And, they said very clearly
- speakerwe are ordaining Corrine Cannon. We are ordaining you for your mother because your mother is a
- speakerpresbyter. She has been faithful. You've done the theological work, but we are ordaining you for her.
- speakerSo. Your mother is really being ordained tonight.
- speakerIt didn't matter to me. I had to get back to Atlanta
- speakerSo I had to get to my exams so I could graduate. When I. When my friends and. I did not even know. I still save that list of people who put that
- speakermoney together for me to go to Union.
- speakerWhen I got there before I got there, Ed Ward [Ward, Edgar W.] who had been with the Vocation Agency, had asked me
- speakerwhat would I like to do. Now do we have a black woman ordained, what are we going to do with her? And I said, if I can do anything,
- speakerwork in any church I want to in New York, I want to work at the Church of the Master because that ordains James Robinson [Robinson, James Herman]. Because
- speakerhe was the one who created Operation Crossroads Africa that
- speakerJohn Kennedy eventually co-opted and made into the Peace Corps.
- speakerBut he didn't coopt it completely. But its model, he also modelled. Peace Corps was modelled after Operation. I like James Robinson because in 1970
- speakerwhen I worked for the Presbyterian as
- speakera youth representative after the takeover of 475 [Riverside Drive] by James Forman asking for
- speakerreparations. They brought in a Chicano from San Anton, a Pima Indian from Arizona.
- speakerI came up as a black. And they
- speakerhad three white suburban young people.
- speakerA woman who had just come, Carolyn Ward or something. Had just come
- speakerback from out of the country in mission. Presbyterian. Winburn
- speakerThomas [Thomas, Winburn T.] out of West Chester, New York.
- speakerto talk about what is development and. And.
- speakerSomething that happened that summer.
- speakerYou started out with. . . oh you could.
- speakerI had met James Robinson that summer. They had introduced us to all the executives of the Church. We met
- speakerEugene Carson Blake. We met all these people who had been running the Presbyterian Church as long as I'd
- speakerbeen alive. They took us around and we worked and they introduced us. They just exposed us. We had
- speakerour own expense accounts and everything. And, one of the people I met.
- speakerThey took the Chicano, Rudy, I don't know his last name.
- speakerPatty Mock, who is now Patty Thundercloud and myself went down and met James Robinson. And, he asked me. He looked at me as says, "
- speakerWould you like to go to Africa next year?" And, I looked at him, and I said, "Yeah." But I knew the man was senile,
- speakerbecause I had just left North Carolina and being in New York was the
- speakergreatest joy of my life. The thought that I could be on the continent of Africa was like he has
- speakerto be. He cannot be clothed in his right mind if he thinks that this little country girl from Kannapolis, North Carolina can
- speakergo to Africa, then something. There is nothing wrong with me. It has to be something wrong with him. But I said yes anyway that I would go to Africa. So, that was in nineteen
- speakerseventy. So in nineteen seventy-one, I did go to Africa. but in nineteen seventy-four
- speakerwhen I graduated, I said I'd like to work at the church that James Robinson started when he was a student at Union Seminary. And, Ed Ward made it possible. He connected me with Gene Callender [Callender, Eugene S.], who was the pastor of the church
- speakerand I came on as part of the staff. And
- speakerI would say that the only way that I was allowed to do what I was able to do was that I was
- speakeralready ordained before I was there. It had to be out of order. I could
- speakernot I could not have been allowed in the pulpit or my. People were still. I was. I
- speakerwas like an E. T. experience. People had never seen a black ordained woman in any denomination. Evangelicals ordained this year, the United Church of Christ.
- speakerI
- speakerwas ordained in seventy-four. I think. I don't know. There had been black women ordained in the United Methodist Church.
- speakerAnd in the A African Methodist Episcopal Church, but you didn't see them that much.
- speakerAnd, I don't know how other denominations were. But I was like a novelty. And, people people would shake my hands after the service and say, "Why are you a minister? You
- speakerhave nice hands or you have a nice face."
- speakerYou. It is like they were not able to comprehend and. And. I preached. I mean that year, I must have preached in
- speaker25 different churches. You know. And, I preached a lot. In the black church
- speakertradition, we have what we call "women's day." And, that has usually been when all of the women in the church have a service.
- speakerAnd that's the one time that a woman always preaches. And, it is usually the principal of the school
- speakeror one of the school teachers or one of the advanced. And, so
- speakerI did a lot of women's day services all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
- speakerAnd, a lot of Mother's Day services too. But it, people had just
- speakernever seen. And I'm so grateful that I knew how to preach because that was the litmus test
- speakerIf you call. If you called. I mean, if you can't preach, that
- speakermeans you have no call. So anybody who is mediocre
- speakerThat meant every time I got up to preach, I had to go, I had to knock. I had to do the rhythmn dance I had to knock that thing out of the ball park.
- speaker100 percent. So the pressure of it
- speakerwas a lot. But I did it because I knew that there were so
- speakermany other women in those, in other congregations who wanted to feel their call it.
- speakerSo a lot was being laid on me. The test was whether. If this one was real, maybe there are
- speakerothers who will come here also. And, I was only twenty-four at the time. Then I learned from Dr. Clark [Clark, Isaac R.] how to preach. So the
- speakerdifference in my preaching then
- speakerand now is that I had no compassion.
- speakerWhat you only know so much about life from.