It's just just ok.

My family's been in the Presbyterian church since 1867, when Luke Dorland

and some of the white missionaries from the Presbyterian church came south after the Civil War. My family

was immediately connected with those mission stations and those mission churches that got started at that

point.

Would 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,

it is no coincindence that I was ordained.  I was the first black woman

to be ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament

in the Presbyterian Church. I

was ordained in nineteen seventy-four. I was born in 1950. January 13, 1950. My

family has been connected to the Presbyterian church since 1867 when the white missionaries came south after the Civil War

to work with the freed people. They started churches and schools and all kinds of.  They

connected. As philanthropists and missionaries, they connected much of their work and modelled

a lot of it also with Freedmen's Bureaux. One of my

interests at some point is to go back and look at Presbyterian

documents in terms of what was really theological rationale as well as  saving lives has happened.

My biological  chronological background was that I have

three brothers, three sisters. My parents were both ruling elders in the Presbyterian Church

I'm from Kannapolis, North Carolina, which is the home of Cannon Mills textile products. So, at some point

my 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

he was the first black woman to work in the mill to do anything other than to clean toilets and janitorial work. She was the

first black woman in Cannon Mills who would be allowed to work on a machine.

So I'm from a up poor working class context strata society,

meaning 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

grandfather, my

mother's father, was the only free child. All his brothers and sisters were child of slaves.

So 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.

So, I grew up understanding what it meant to be the first. My mother would be the first generation of freed people

and that we had come from a very strong line of survivors. And so, I heard a

lot 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

matter how much evil I may experience in life or

how evil and unjust it might be, the God we serve is a good God. And, the God we serve,

everything that God made is good. Because no matter how much people may tell us that we are inferior, or less than, or from at

Jim Crow-ism or segreation,

that because we are created in God's own image that we were good people. And we had to live

that out, even if the mores and the laws of society did not

allow us to express all our gifts. So I heard a lot of stories about childhood slavery. I heard

a lot of Bible stories. My parents and my Sunday School

teachers, as well as other adults in our lives, stressing the

catechism that we learned. All the Bible stories, the parables.

It's almost like we had to memorize the Bible as if it were not going to be around any more

So those are the second thing stories. and

the first stories were stories  of slavery, and the second were the Bible stories.

And, then the third, I guess, were stories that I heard about, within the culture, a lot of stories that w

ere stories of survival.

Will 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

working force family. Growing up in a context where the Klan marches at will. The only place that black

people could go was the church. Only home and church. AAnd, because

we 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

everything that we did outside the home was at church. The church was not only our religious

sacred place. It was the place where we learned public speaking. We had. E

very Christian holiday we celebrated with recitals or oratorical content and all kinds of musicals.  The

church was a place for the young people to have

fellowship. We had Vacation Bible Schools every summer. We had.

I don't know. If there was a social activity. If there was anything

that did not happen in one's home, it happened in the church. So the church was always meaningful to me and because

my church where all my immediate family belonged to it. started and

my grandmother my mother, my aunts and uncles, got together and said, we need our own church.

And it started out as a mission church. And the interesting thing about my sister and me. Not only did

my 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.

And so, I just assumed that the General Assembly

was also all black. I had no idea because growing up in Catawba Presbytery.

And was all part of the power of being a Presbyterian. Even though we were black and Presbyterian,

we worshipped in a way that was true to the black religious heritage. If you

would 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

truly worshipped in the black religious tradition. and I had no

idea 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

I've been Presbyterian since 1867. And, its like. No! You act like a Baptist! But, you

know, what they were saying is I moved so competently in the black church

tradition in black and parodies. I must have joined the Presbyterian church as part of my upward mobility. and the something social strata.

so being an all black presbytery in an all black synod, we did

business in the black way. Meaning, we ran our presbytery meetings very much according to the way black groups run meetings.

for example you don't cut off the spirit

You don't. It's not run so tight according to Robert's Rules of Order,

that people are treated in any inhumane or disrespectful way. It's much more

of the folk tradition of Africa. You take care of business. And, you do

it as long as it takes to do it. If something comes up

you 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

called

the meeting again. And, the black people walked out because there's something about losing a brother or sistero

from this life that stops everything. I mean. I remember when I was in Africa in 1971 and President Tubman [Tubman, William] died

in Liberia. And we all. I mean, you stop life to celebrate that somebody has

gone on and that's it. And I was

so discombobulated because we could we called a meeting and

we'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 .

Interesting. My mother has always said that the only thing she ever wanted when each of her

children was born. The only thing she wanted was that we would not spend eternity in hell. She

didn't care whether we were professional people but the souls of them would not

be damned for eternity. An that she spent a lot of

time to make sure that we went to revival meetings in the summer. And if there were

any program at the church that we would be there. And so that's the only thing. And, she still reminds me of that. She

doesn't care how many credentials or how many accolades that I might receive

if I'm not going to church on Sunday that disturbs her deeply.

And, her sense of me as a minister, is not

really one of confidence. I don't fit the stereotype of her understanding of minister.

I still have too much fun, you know, to be a real minister. Was it right for a

woman to be a minister? For her? if I fit into her model. You

know she doesn't. Her sense of me as a minister is I tell jokes. I dance. I laugh. I tease my nieces and nephews.

I don't. I wear colorful

clothes. You know, like I don't. I don't have a drab lydia warm light.

And, that disturbs her. Ministers are not supposed to be. And,

I don't live with absolutes.

I think that's the biggest problem. She. She. My mother know absolutely what's right and wrong

what's good and evil. And, she knows this. And, I don't do theology. I don't do ministry

that 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.

My father's response is that. W

hen 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

they said, "Well, Esau, So do you think about women

being 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

a religious vocation. But I thought I wanted to be a nun. But, I didn't

know 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

nd, 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

one Catholic church in Kannapolis.

I 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

Catholic 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.

So. Then, when I realized that. Someone said to me you

can'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

serve, 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

nd, I wanted to see the world. And, I read a lot about it, avid reader, bookworm as a child. I wanted

to 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

according to my parents, I am still stuck there. probably. One

minute I'd be totally grown, and womanish and the next minute crying like a baby. I don't know

how adult, especially teachers, who

teach children in adolescence deal with all of that adrenalin and all those mood swings.

I don't work well with youth groups because I got

stuck there in my own faith development. And, so I do well teaching adults, but adolescents, I

just get boggled by them. But, it is like, what are they doing now? I

can't comprehend them.  When I was pastoring a church in New York City, I ran a summer camp.

And 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

to reason with them.

There was no way to reason with them. So. That

was 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.

And 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.

Never, ever go to church. I was over church. I was tired of church. And, I wanted to experience the real world. You

know all that adrenalin was going on in me, all those hormones telling me all kinds of things. And basically,

not have been

because one did not talk about sex and bodies or anything because black Christians. And, all

my mother ever said was you know right from wrong. All of this stuff happened and none of it was

making sense from the Christian concept.  all of that I was experiencing, which is really

coming from my own essential being was considered sinful. And so up until that point,

the church made a lot of sense to me you know, which was that one could live above sin policy, that one could live

above the world.  I can remember, even when I was like ten, pre-adolescent, in fifth grade and kids would tell jokes

And when I would walk. Oh, you are a Christian. You know I made it very

clear that I was that kind of Christian. And, I would always try to proselytize

and try to keep other people to not be not spend eternity in hell. That was the whole hell and damnation

kind of theology that had been handed to

me. 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.

So you wouldn't spend eternity. and so

that was. By the time I hit twelve or thirteen I was like God didn't watch with me any more.

But I'd rather spend life in hell than do good any more.

This that's what I was going through then. When I went to college in 1967, I

went to Barber-Scotia College, which was a Presbyterian College, started by the same group of missionaries, Luke Dorland was the founder in 1867. M

y great-grandmother had gone there a hundred years earlier as a freed slave.

And it was it was everything

for people who had been denied the right to learn to read and write. So so they were

cultivated people to be freed people basically women in Scotia Presbyterian.  It was called Scotia Seminary. And

I do not want to go to that school because

all of my mother's cousins and others had gone to Barber-Scotia.

And I wanted to go to A & T State University. My mother

gave 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

. I was only seven miles from Scotia. And, I packed this trunk.  You would have thought I was going at least to Greece

or Turkey or maybe Kenya or

somewhere. I mean I packed a trunk that was ready for the ocean liner. You know, a seven-mile voyage

because 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

of 1967 at Barber-Scotia, I went in as a Negro. And, in

April, April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I already knew I was black.

That I was no longer a Negro. And so, that year 1967-1968,  was the real conversion, transformation

in the sense of politics, ideology, theology--

everything. So

everything 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

and I did not know what to do. It was a

hard time because we were at war with Vietnam. and

being a whole social strata, economic strata of students who came to Scotia, who were all

first generation college-educated people. And so therefore a lot of us. I think one thing they brought up in the profile

about that class. That most. Most of the students had never come there by themselves, had never set give

up. So not only are they teaching them academic subjects,

but they were acculturing them to move to predominant white society. So we had discussions. We had teas.

We learned how to go through receiving lines. We had. Our orientations were. Everyone was learning etiquette. Learning

how to move, as black people, so that we did

not alienate white people so that the while people were not afraid of us. So that we could take our

gifts, our gifts and talents and be able to use them and show our light to the world. One of the

mottoes that they drove in us. No matter what would happen to people at Scotia, is

that we learned how to walk with the peasants and ride with the king. And if we didn't learn anything else, that was

what we got. We had to have that kind of heart and mind of integration.

so that at that point, when the head-on collision happened,  I just collapsed. I stopped church altogether.

I was no longer at home, so I didn't have to go. And,

I started reading everything black I could possibly read. And,

I couldn't believe it.  When I first. I remember when I first read Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower. It was so

devastating that I didn't cry, but I was just in a daze for several days because

how could black people have such a rich culture,

come from such a rich civilized people on the continent of Africa

and be told all our lives that we were a liability to civilization. I mean

from that point on I was gullible. I mean I just  read anything. And, it just

really grounded me. So when I finished college, I went to seminary as a skeptic.

I did not go as "Born again."  I did not go because God struck me dead. I went because

I wanted to know, Somebody had lied to me. Either the church was the opium of

the people, and Christianity was a slavery religion, or it wasn't. And I wanted to get some sense out of it. And,

all 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]

But just

to 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

so many of the, our male counterparts were fighting in Vietnam on the front lines, E

very day at mail call was like being in a war zone.

Somebody's fiance, somebody's brother, somebody's male relative had just been, body had been shipped home. So. When I

was at Union Seminary and met white women and men who did not know a soul who was killed in Vietnam, it was devastating, b

ecause then I realized even more, the class strata of what people served as fodder for the war,

because 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

somebody else. And, it was usually fiances because. or brothers, but a lot of innocent people who died. So, t

hat also prepared my question in my quest to try to make sense out of

all the religious training, this rote biblical story.

So 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

the black church is the only institution in black community that black people have any say so over. W

e don't own health care, education, nothing. So I knew that

if there was a revolution, the black church would be the base for it.

I knew that if there was going to be any change. If. if there were. If Christianity was a

slave religion, the only way to correct it, would be through the black church. If Christianity wasn't a slave religion, the only

way to liberate, the liberative message would be that through the black church.

So 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.

So just knowing that the church had. In my own story had

been that for so many other people.

About 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

One is Howard Divinity School in Washington, DC.  And, I.T.C. in Atlanta. The Inter-denominational Theological Center. And, Johnson C. Smith Seminary

moved to be part of that seven school consortium. And that was the greatest gift

to be in a black context, struggling to with issues. And it was a great time to be

in seminary in 1971 because a lot of the brothers had just come back

from Vietnam. A lot of the brothers we met in seminary were going to Vietnam. And

then, there was a group of women who joined the community of seminary, as single

women for the first time. And people basically didn't know.  They said the brothers. The men used to fail all the time. Well,

women 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.

So it was like this first wave of black single

women going to seminary to be theologically educated in ministry.

And, I was such a skeptic. And I was. Every time the professor would start the lesson, my hand

would be up in the air. And, they would send me to the library to read volumes and volumes and volumes. And I was never

ridiculed for it. I was never put down or belittled or shame-faced. None of that.

It was like people understood that I was struggling. And, I was not the only one struggling. Because

a 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

They go to a lot of. Some of them would go to Bible colleges and take all kinds of others , but no.  A

nd so therefore we were the first big wave of theologically-trained

clergy. So the United Methodists at that point decided a

real 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

money available. If the Presbyterian Church had not made it possible

for the money to be available, I would not have gone to seminary. I had

already signed up and worked with Margaret Flory. She had processed my application for eight months to send

me to Kenya for two years as a  Frontier Intern in Mission. And, they had

never had a black

American 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

the reason I made that change, because they already had me

scheduled for the ocean liner and where I supposed to go was that I had spent the summer with Operation Crossroads Africa in Liberia.

I had

travelled to Abijan, Ghana and decided that what I

needed was not to spend more time in Africa, because I was getting into the market in

Africa and my Africcan identity, what I needed to do the wrestling question in me, was "Is Christianity a slavery?" And,

that That answer was not going to be. That

question was not going to be answered for me by doing more mission work, which was to live out my dream of being a missionary.

But I needed some answers. And Jim Cone, who was now the president of the I.T.C.,

talked to me and said to me, teach me to come to seminary. And, I think I flew back into the country on a Friday

And 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

in the Presbyterian Church. And, Katie Cannon, you are that person. And, I say, well, Doc, I don

't want to be no a minister. You know I don't want the black

preacher is the only the most powerful black man in the black community where I come from. And,

for me to stand in the pulpit and to preach, is to be a castrator of black men,

to be an oppressor, to be joining those outside who always emasculated black men. And, so

I don't want to do it. I say I want to work on kids. I don't want to go the minister track.

And he looked at me. This was during to when we had. Well, with the M.R.E. is t

he only thing you can do is work at the Y.

I said, "The Y?" Well, black people couldn't go to the Y in Kannapolis. I had no. I didn't even know

what went on at the Y. The only thing I knew about the Y was my aunt, who was a retired school teacher,

answered the phone at the Y in Charlotte, North Carolina. And so

I said if I get a masters in religious education and the only thing I could do was to

answer 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

didn't want to

work at the Y.

I had no idea of the rich history of the Y.W.C.A. I had no idea of any of that. But, I knew

that if all I could do was to go back and answer

the phone at the Y, then I didn't want to do that.

So 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

when

all I. I was a revolutionary.you know. And nation time and we were going to declare

revolution on the United States so that black people would have our full dignity. And that was a radical

move for them. And, my sense of theological training was that

I wanted to be able to. When I decided that I had a call to the ministry. It was within

the first two months of seminary. I wanted to minister to all the young black men and women, who had

grown up in a church just like I had, where the

church was the base of everything we did outside the home. And, we were not revolutionaries. Maybe

it's not the opium of the people. And within

two months of theological education, I knew that a

lot of the truth was not being communicated from the pulpit to the pew. And, I wanted it to

be one of the prophets. I wanted to be one of the people saying, "There is more here, folks

. This is not a fake religion. There is a whole lot  of truth, there's a whole lot that's gonna make sense, if

we get the word out to the people." And, that mixture was important. The mixture

in the fact there were older pastors who were there to get theological training. And, here we were

straight out of college. Twenty-one, twenty-two. Interested highly in having a good time. a

lot of

rhetoric you know. And it was just a mix because

we had questions and they had answers. And so, what we had.

The mixed mixture. Why the mixture was good was that the older group had to learn

that 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

had to learn there are some things

you can't get answers from. You have to live on faith. So our

questions and their faith made for a richer faith. Because they had to question

and we had to believe and it was great. Those, those men I was in seminary

with. 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

I.T.C at that time, everything was required, everything. It was very different from what happened

Where it is the cafeteria style you go to in, you take, and do what you want to do.

Yes. or we basically. No course is required.

You have to show that you have competency in the seven areas of study. But

if somebody comes in and has been teaching history in public school or anywhere they don't have to take

one-oh-one courses. you know. We respect that adult learning. But for us it wasn't that

kind of the way. It was clear to the people working together at that point

that we had to we have to moved by everything. We had the Old Testament, the admission, the New Testament, Presbyterian history,

language of Hebrew Greek. Christian Education, sociology

of religion church history, philosophy, theology, but everything

and so we all almost.Most of us who were doing any kind of quality work,

moved through the seminary in every course together every year. So we were

like a community all the way through.

If there were two sections that section moved through. You know we took Old Testament, New Testament. T

hey moved to basically the same way.

And, so it worked. And we had a few electives but just, maybe out of

three years of study,

you might have had an option to take three courses. Everything else was required, full load. That's

where they didn't know qwhat to do with us. Being that. They had. There had

never 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.

But she didn't. She's not ordained. Lillian. Lillian Anthony Wells.  Lillian Anthony anyway.

And Emily Gibbs had gotten a Masters of Religious Education. So there had been women in  fact

in seminary, but not black women in seminary for the M.Div. on the ordination

track. So when they, when it was time to me for field education, since I was saying

I'm not a minister. And I was trained in college to be in  elementary education teacher,

I 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,

I did not have that pulpit experience until after I was ordained. And, then when

I 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,

I didn't read it. I mean, I didn't say it. it was like.

You graduated in seventy-four?.

In the process of. Well, I guess, a very important part of my story, when I accepted my identity as a preacher,

and I really accepted my call to the ministry. The second year of seminary I had to take homiletics.

And, I went back and talked with Dr. Collinson. Doc. He said, "Kate, go on and do it."

So the first semester was the preparation of sermons. The second semester was the delivery of sermons. The

first time I ever flunked a course or exam was in preaching.

And that's what made me a preacher. Dr. Clark made it very clear to me. His name was Isaac R. Clark, Senior.

And, to this day he's the most formative

male influence in my life after my father. But as a speaker, he was a lot

more forceful than my father. Dr. Clark didn't want any women in his class. He

didn't want any women preachers because all they would do is get up there

with 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

looking for but maybe you might b`e like Emma Darnell and her father is one of the deans in the

Christian Methodist Episcopal denomination. And, she's a lawyer. She can speak, but she's not a preacher. She us

ed to come up here to the seminary.  Do you know Emma Darnell? No, I don't. But, maybe

you might be like Emma Darnell, and you might have some sufferers. So you can stay. So

that was a challenge that he would say that and that. The

man was incredible. And, I have mastered his technique and now I'm looking forward to. I taught

one class on homiletics at E.D.S. And, I'm looking forward to sabbatical to teach it again, because we need more

people to know how to preach prophetically in the world. So I took the

course. I flunked the first exam. And at that point it became a challenge.  Oh, yes, I'm  going to master this. And,

I finished the class with the highest average in the class. And when it came time to deliver the sermon, I

had to cry. I had to go to pastoral counseling. I had to talk to doctor Pugh, who was the pastoral counselor. counselor. I said

I can't do it. I can't be castrated like this. Well what, what

will it mean if I preach better than they do? What does that mean?

And, he said, "So why don't you ask them?" So, I went back to the class, and I asked the brothers.

I said, "What would it mean if I preached better than you? They said, well what about that? I I

needed them to send me forth. I needed their blessing. I needed them to

say that if God has laid this on me, that they

support me in it. Then, the second problem I had

with my preacher identity with my identity as a preacher. I was not pure. I thought that as a woman in

ministry that they, that we could not have sinned at any point. No amount, above sin,

you know.

And, it was like, I know i hated people. I know I can be spiteful

and everything else. And so in

preparation for our delivering a sermon, we formed ourselves as a prayer band and group where we had sermons together.

and i had seen these brothers get up and pray

and stuff, and they're dominating. And, I know all their sins,

Any they preach every time they'r sin.  And, I say, "Wait a minute.thing because we talk about everything. And, it's like, "Oooh!"

So who am I. And then I begin to understand that that the

prophet and the people in the Bible were not perfect people. They were the ones who had

the most humanity were often the ones that God called.

And at that point that was the second thing I needed to get up and preach.

Just 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

I 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

the people unclean, but my eyes have seen the glory.

So that was my system, my step as a preacher.

And after that I led that class and delivered the sermon, and I really learned how to preach. And, then I took the.

But 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

I've ever met that I couldn't teach how to preach even  And, the problem with it, I think, most

women 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.

We walk through and you fall out the back door. And the women have so many rules and

you 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.

So I love preaching and I'm teaching it. So, in 1974,

in 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

very day

I decided that I want to be a scholar of Hebrew Scripture. And at that

point, Union Seminary in New York City had made a decision to actively recruit racial-ethnic

people and women.

And I was a woman and I was black. And so I applied to Union Seminary

And Bobbie Jo Salter was their full-time recruiter, who came down to ITC and he recruited

about seven or eight of us to come to Union Seminary. And I finished seminary in May, did

some research work that summer, packed up my car.

I didn't have one penny. At that point, I

didn't have one penny to move to New York, not one penny. I had a scholarship waiting for

me. I had a tuition scholarship already paying`my scholarship, and I had some money to live on

that wasn't coming through until after Labor Day. So I wrote friends at 475 in New York [Interchurch Center]. And, I say, I

have this opportunity to go do a doctorate, but I have no money. And, they took

out $500, different, from different offices of the Program Agency. Oscar McCloud [McCloud, J. Oscar] and the Board, a whole list of

them, I gathered from twenty-five here, fifty there, twenty-five here until they got

five hundred dollars, they sent it to me. And, that is how I

started. I moved. I rented a car, drove up to Union Seminary, pulled in. And, that's

what 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

. But they made it

possible for me because without that five hundred dollars, without that money I couldn't have came up, accepted it

. In April, prior to that, the Presbytery of Catawba ordained me to get a Ph.D. And, never before had they done that. I

mean they didn't know what to do with me. Here was a woman who has passed all her ordination exams, who had

made only two B's in her seminary career.

And 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

our call is to teach. And, in order to teach, you got to have the degree."

And so, they went and made a plea before the Candidates Committee that my call, and they

quoted scripture and everything. Katie is called to get a Ph. D. It was

like. I don't believe this. So we went up to the presbytery meeting that

night. So I went for my examination. And, I had on a dress with a lot

of. 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.

They stopped my sermon, and they ordained

me. and Lonnie Oliver. The two

of us came up together. After the ordination, we got in the car and went back to Atlanta. And, there was

no hullabaloo. There was nothing.

I went back to school and I said, I'm ordained. I'm ordained. I did not know what

it meant. I had still not come into my identity as a minister. What that had meant. I

just know that I was ordained and that I needed to be ordained to do what I wanted to do.

So that was the night in April April 23rd, 1974.

I was ordained as the first black woman in the Presbyterian Church on the floor of presbytery, on the floor of Catawba Presbytery.

They all laid hands on, my momma and my daddy, my aunts and my uncles. And, they said very clearly

we are ordaining Corrine Cannon. We are ordaining you for your mother because your mother is a

presbyter. She has been faithful. You've done the theological work, but we are ordaining you for her.

So. Your mother is really being ordained tonight.

It didn't matter to me. I had to get back to Atlanta

So 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

money together for me to go to Union.

When I got there before I got there, Ed Ward [Ward, Edgar W.] who had been with the Vocation Agency, had asked me

what 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,

work 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

he was the one who created Operation Crossroads Africa that

John Kennedy eventually co-opted and made into the Peace Corps.

But 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

when I worked for the Presbyterian as

a youth representative after the takeover of 475 [Riverside Drive] by James Forman asking for

reparations. They brought in a Chicano from San Anton, a Pima Indian from Arizona.

I came up as a black. And they

had three white suburban young people.

A woman who had just come, Carolyn Ward or something. Had just come

back from out of the country in mission. Presbyterian. Winburn

Thomas [Thomas, Winburn T.]  out of West Chester, New York.

to talk about what is development and. And.

Something that happened that summer.

You started out with. . . oh you could.

I had met James Robinson that summer. They had introduced us to all the executives of the Church. We met

Eugene Carson Blake. We met all these people who had been running the Presbyterian Church as long as I'd

been alive. They took us around and we worked and they introduced us. They just exposed us. We had

our own expense accounts and everything. And, one of the people I met.

They took the Chicano, Rudy, I don't know his last name.

Patty Mock, who is now Patty Thundercloud and myself went down and met James Robinson. And, he asked me. He looked at me as says, "

Would you like to go to Africa next year?" And, I looked at him, and I said, "Yeah." But I knew the man was senile,

because I had just left North Carolina and being in New York was the

greatest joy of my life. The thought that I could be on the continent of Africa was like he has

to be. He cannot be clothed in his right mind if he thinks that this little country girl from Kannapolis, North Carolina can

go 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

seventy. So in nineteen seventy-one, I did go to Africa. but in nineteen seventy-four

when 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

and I came on as part of the staff. And

I would say that the only way that I was allowed to do what I was able to do was that I was

already ordained before I was there. It had to be out of order. I could

not I could not have been allowed in the pulpit or my. People were still.  I was. I

was 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.

I

was ordained in seventy-four. I think. I don't know. There had been black women ordained in the United Methodist Church.

And in the A African Methodist Episcopal Church, but you didn't see them that much.

And, 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

have nice hands or you have a nice face."

You. It is like they were not able to comprehend and. And. I preached. I mean that year, I must have preached in

25 different churches. You know. And, I preached a lot. In the black church

tradition, we have what we call "women's day." And, that has usually been when all of the women in the church have a service.

And that's the one time that a woman always preaches. And, it is usually the principal of the school

or one of the school teachers or one of the advanced. And, so

I did a lot of women's day services all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

And, a lot of Mother's Day services too. But it, people had just

never seen. And I'm so grateful that I knew how to preach because that was the litmus test

If you call. If you called. I mean, if you can't preach, that

means you have no call. So anybody who is mediocre

That 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.

100 percent. So the pressure of it

was a lot. But I did it because I knew that there were so

many other women in those, in other congregations who wanted to feel their call it.

So a lot was being laid on me. The test was whether. If this one was real, maybe there are

others 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

difference in my preaching then

and now is that I had no compassion.

What you only know so much about life from.