Podcast with Dr. Cannon before the 2018 CWL Inaugural GatheringFourteen African-American women scholars were invited to Richmond, Virginia, to participate in a womanist conference that critiqued the complex cultural histories and international globalization in today’s political domain. “Womanism,” as it’s called, has been a social movement of liberation ever since Alice Walker coined the term in 1983. Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, activist, and author of “The Color Purple.” She accepted an invitation to keynote the April 2018 conference -- "Bearing Witness to Womanism: What Was, What Is, What Will Be" -- and help launch the Center for Womanist Leadership. This center is the first of its kind, a place where women of African ancestry wrestle with actualizing the deepest possibilities of human existence. Co-organizer and Union Presbyterian Seminary Professor of Christian Ethics Katie Geneva Cannon spoke with her student Ayo Morton about why the conference matters, and her own challenges growing up black in the USA.
