Atlanta, Georgia · Founded 1958
“The largest free-standing African American theological school in the U.S. - five Black denominational seminaries training preachers together on one Atlanta campus.”
ITC's 62nd commencement held fully virtual during COVID - the pandemic-era graduation that the board later cited as a turning point toward financial exigency.
ITC's official recap of Mason's 2025 investiture at Zion Hill Baptist Church - academic regalia, medallion and mace, the post-exigency rebirth on film.
Archival recording of Omega Psi Phi founder Bishop Edgar Amos Love preaching to the ITC student body circa April 1962 - the oldest surviving ITC chapel footage found.
Red-carpet interview moments before ITC president Herman 'Skip' Mason won 2025 Influencer of the Year at Atlanta's RICE Awards.
ITC's president lecturing on how DNA helps African Americans recover family history fragmented by enslavement - the historian side of the seminary's leader.
Long-form interview with ITC's president on preserving Black Atlanta history, from his archival work to leading the seminary.
Pastor Jamal Bryant sits down with ITC president Skip Mason on seminary decline, HBCU funding, and the future of Black theological education.
Recap of ITC's Chairman's Dinner and Mason's investiture, highlighting fundraising gifts including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the HBCU Brilliance Initiative.
Gammon Theological Seminary's virtual open house - a look at how ITC's United Methodist constituent school recruits the next generation of preachers.
ITC/Morehouse School of Religion M.Div. alumnus Dr. John Adolph preaching - an example of the pulpit craft the seminary produces.
Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ, one of the largest Black Pentecostal denominations in the world.
Womanist theologian and the first woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
Foundational womanist theologian; her ITC Journal essays and 'White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus' shaped Black feminist theology.
Civil rights activist and Atlanta pastor, a foot soldier of the movement generation ITC was built to serve.
Educator who became the first African-American president of Howard University.
Pastor who built New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia into a megachurch.
Civil rights activist and United Methodist bishop.
United Methodist bishop.
United Methodist bishop and church historian.
Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Bishop of the Methodist Church and later the United Methodist Church.
Bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
Baptist pastor who served as president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
Georgia politician and pastor.
South Carolina politician and pastor.
Methodist minister who was also a pioneering architect of Black churches.
Historian and theologian of the Black church.
Pastor, academic administrator, and theologian.
Pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Beaumont, Texas; earned his M.Div. with honors from ITC's Morehouse School of Religion.
The vision of one shared seminary for Black ministers began taking form in the early 1940s, after Benjamin E. Mays became president of Morehouse College. Gammon Theological Seminary and Morehouse started a cooperative exchange program, and Mays - who also credits himself with pushing the idea - argued plainly that the small Black theological schools could never raise the money to build first-rate facilities on their own, but could do it together. Talks between Gammon, Morehouse, and Morris Brown College (speaking for Turner Theological Seminary) ran through the decade. It was an ecumenical dream born of hard economics: pool the pulpits, or watch the schools starve one by one.
On March 14, 1958, a petition was submitted to the State of Georgia to charter the Interdenominational Theological Center, and the ITC was founded as a joint initiative of four seminaries: the Baptist-affiliated Morehouse School of Religion, the United Methodist-affiliated Gammon Theological Seminary, Turner Theological Seminary (African Methodist Episcopal), and Phillips School of Theology (Christian Methodist Episcopal), which came in from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. The Sealantic Fund, established by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to support theological education, put up major early money. The petition and founding documents now sit in the Harry V. Richardson papers at the Atlanta University Center's Woodruff Library - the paper trail of Black ecumenism becoming an institution.
Instruction began in September 1959 with 21 faculty members and 97 students, operating out of the old Gammon campus while its own buildings went up. Dr. Harry Van Buren Richardson - Gammon's president, a Tuskegee Institute chaplain from 1932 to 1948, and the man who had organized a statewide interracial ministers' alliance in Alabama - became ITC's first president and served until 1968. The new school won accreditation quickly from the American Association of Theological Schools, which had already accredited Gammon, giving the consortium instant academic legitimacy. Among the early board chairmen were Dr. Ernest Cadman Cowell, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. - the fathers of the movement lending their names to the project.
ITC's own facilities were completed in 1961 on a ten-acre plot in the heart of the Atlanta University Center, a gift of Atlanta University, between Beckwith Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The campus put the seminary shoulder-to-shoulder with Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark Atlanta - the Black intellectual capital of the South. The chapel at 671 Beckwith Street SW became the school's spiritual center, the room where generations of preachers would be formed and where, decades later, Richardson himself would be eulogized. ITC's own catalogs of the era called the buildings modern and fully equipped, a point of pride for a school born from underfunded parts.
Around April 1962, Bishop Edgar Amos Love - one of the founders of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and a Methodist Episcopal bishop - addressed the ITC student body in a sermon titled 'Challenge of the Difficult,' preaching from Joshua 14. The address was preserved in the ITC's audio-visual archive, part of a collection of sermons and presentations recorded for students through the 1960s. The archive also holds talks by ITC faculty like Harry Richardson and Charles Copher, and by visiting clergy including Rabbi Jacob Rothschild. That 1962 Love sermon, later aired during Omega Psi Phi's 2020 Virtual Founders' Day, is one of the earliest surviving recordings of ITC's chapel life.
In 1965, President Harry Richardson traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to talk with Church of God in Christ denominational leaders about establishing a COGIC seminary affiliated with ITC. The Pentecostal tradition had never been part of the consortium, and bringing it in would complete the ecumenical circle the founders imagined. The conversations took five years to bear fruit, but they planted the seed for the Charles H. Mason Theological Seminary. Richardson's Memphis trip shows how deliberately ITC built its coalition - denomination by denomination, handshake by handshake.
Harry V. Richardson retired in 1968 after nine years as ITC's founding president, and Dr. Oswald P. Bronson succeeded him, serving from 1968 to 1975. Richardson's tenure had carried the school from charter to accredited, settled institution with its own campus. A Charter Day banquet was held March 14, 1968 - ten years to the day from the charter petition - marking the close of the founding era. Richardson would live to 1990, dying at 89 in Atlanta, and his memorial service filled the ITC chapel he had built.
The Presbyterian-affiliated Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary joined ITC in 1969, relocating to Atlanta from Charlotte, North Carolina. Dr. James H. Costen became its first dean - a post that would shape his whole career. Johnson C. Smith was the only historically Black theological seminary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), with roots reaching back to 1867 and Freedman's College of North Carolina, a school built to educate newly freed slaves. Its arrival made ITC a six-member consortium and the most ecumenical Black seminary experiment in the country.
The Charles H. Mason Theological Seminary was established as a new seminary within ITC in 1970, named for Charles Harrison Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ. It fulfilled the vision Richardson had carried to Memphis five years earlier, bringing the Pentecostal tradition into the consortium. With Mason's arrival, ITC's seminaries represented the Baptists, Methodists, AME, CME, Presbyterians, and COGIC - nearly the whole map of the Black church under one roof. Students outside the member denominations enrolled through the Harry V. and Selma T. Richardson Ecumenical Fellowship, named for the founding president and his wife.
From 1971 through 1979, ITC operated the Absalom Jones Theological Institute in cooperation with the Episcopal Church, named for Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, the first African American ordained as an Episcopal priest. It was the consortium's boldest ecumenical reach - a seventh tradition at the table. But enrollment never reached the level needed to sustain it, and the institute closed in 1979. The Jones experiment stands as a reminder that ITC's genius was also its fragility: the coalition only worked when the students showed up.
In 1973, ITC began publishing The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center, an annual academic journal the school describes as dedicated to theological education with a special emphasis on the African-American perspective. It became one of the main scholarly outlets for Black theology and womanist thought - Jacquelyn Grant published foundational womanist theology essays in its pages through the late 1980s and 1990s. The ITC Press went on to publish books including seven volumes in the Black Church Scholars Series. For a school that trained preachers, the Journal proved ITC could also shape the academy.
ITC did not obtain its independent charter until 1975, seventeen years after the founding petition - until then it had operated under the legal umbrella of its member institutions. The charter made the Center a fully independent institution in the eyes of the state. Dr. Grant S. Shockley had become president in January 1976 and served through December 1979, followed by Dr. James Deotis Roberts from August 1980 to April 1983. The mid-70s charter marked ITC's passage from an ambitious cooperative project to a permanent fixture of Black higher education.
Dr. James H. Costen, the Presbyterian minister who had been the first dean of Johnson C. Smith Seminary when it joined ITC, became the Center's president in December 1983 and served through June 1997 - nearly fourteen years, the longest presidency in ITC history. Costen steadied the institution through the 1980s and 90s, and the James H. Costen Lifelong Education Center on campus was later named for him. When he died, his papers became one of the Woodruff Library's richest resources on African American religion and education in the South. His tenure is remembered as the era when ITC fully matured into the flagship Black seminary.
The Lutheran Theological Center in Atlanta was established on the ITC campus in 1997, growing out of an enrichment program started in 1988 through which students from two Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seminaries took courses at ITC. It gave students from any of the ELCA's eight seminaries a way to study in Atlanta - at ITC, Candler, or Columbia - for credit at their home schools. That same year, Dr. Robert Michael Franklin became ITC's president, serving from July 1997 to June 2002, with Dr. Oliver Haney Jr. filling in as interim for a year during the search for his successor. The Lutheran arrival showed ITC's ecumenical pull reaching beyond the Black church traditions that founded it.
Dr. Michael A. Battle was appointed president in September 2003 and served six years, until August 2009, when he left to become the United States representative to the African Union - a sitting seminary president tapped for a diplomatic post. The 2000s were ITC's enrollment high-water mark: fall 2006 brought 472 students, with more than fifteen denominations represented in the student body and at-large students forming the fourth-largest constituency. The school offered the Master of Divinity, Master of Arts in Religion and Education, the Doctor of Ministry, and even a doctorate in theology in pastoral counseling. Nobody at the time imagined the enrollment would fall by nearly 90 percent within two decades.
The Rev. Ronald Edward Peters, an ordained Presbyterian minister who had directed the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and pastored in Florida for 18 years, became ITC's eighth president on September 1, 2010. He succeeded Dr. Thomas W. Cole Jr., the Clark Atlanta president emeritus who had served as interim after Battle's departure. Peters, author of 'Urban Ministry: An Introduction,' brought a scholar's focus on the Black urban church to the presidency. His tenure ran into the early 2010s, when Dr. Edward P. Wimberly was appointed interim president in January 2013.
In June 2014, the Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary withdrew from the ITC consortium, ending a 45-year relationship that had begun with its celebrated move from Charlotte in 1969. The departure cut the consortium back and foreshadowed the institutional strain to come. Dr. Edward P. Wimberly's interim presidency bridged the gap until a permanent successor could be found. Losing the Presbyterians was the first visible crack in the ecumenical coalition Richardson had assembled.
On January 15, 2015, the Rev. Dr. Edward L. Wheeler - a Morehouse graduate who had spent years as president of Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis and came to ITC two years into retirement - was elected president, taking office that April and serving until his retirement on July 31, 2019. In October 2017 he unveiled the 'New ITC' vision at a State of the ITC gathering in the Costen Center lobby, preaching a liberating Gospel for a polarized nation and pushing the school's online Master of Divinity and hybrid programs. His era kept the doors open through the late 2010s, but the financial foundations were quietly eroding beneath the programming.
Upon Wheeler's retirement on July 31, 2019, the board named the Rev. Matthew Wesley Williams - an ITC alumnus who had been vice president of strategic initiatives at the Forum for Theological Exploration - as interim president. Williams framed his charge bluntly: 'Our call is not to merely save the ITC as we know it. This is the beginning of an effort to co-create the ITC our communities need. This is village work.' He led the school through the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced commencement online - the 62nd commencement in 2021 was fully virtual. The pandemic, the board would later say, turned long-simmering financial trouble into a crisis.
On April 14, 2023, the ITC Board of Trustees declared financial exigency, effective immediately - the formal term for a financial crisis requiring drastic corrective action, including cutting faculty and staff, suspending programs, and restructuring governance. President Williams was blunt in the press release: 'It's important to note that ITC is NOT CLOSING,' promising a 'hard reset' and a 'REBOOT' as a fiscally healthy institution. The board blamed COVID-19 compounding years of falling enrollment, reduced revenue, rising costs, pre-existing debt, and deferred building maintenance - despite salary cuts and building closures already in place. Enrollment had cratered from about 400 in the early 2000s to 267 in 2019. Later in 2023, the Rev. Dr. Maisha I.K. Handy - a 23-year ITC faculty member and dean - became interim president and launched an aggressive fundraising campaign.
In 2024 the coalition cracked again: Turner Theological Seminary, a charter member since 1958 with roots to 1894 at Morris Brown, left ITC to seek accreditation as a stand-alone institution, its president Ammie L. Davis saying the 2023 financial crisis forced the question of whether Turner could survive ITC going downhill. Turner had just 12 students enrolled that fall. Meanwhile the consortium gained a piece back: the Morehouse School of Religion rejoined ITC. And in August 2024, after Handy departed to become the first Black president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, the Rev. Dr. Herman 'Skip' Mason Jr. - Atlanta native, Morris Brown graduate, ITC alumnus, historian, and former 33rd General President of Alpha Phi Alpha - was named interim president. Enrollment sat around 60 students, mostly online and hybrid, and the school announced ATS reaccreditation through 2032 plus a campus redevelopment plan officials called 'our next huge project.'
The Rev. Dr. Herman 'Skip' Mason Jr. was formally invested as the 12th president of ITC, with the official recap filmed at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Atlanta - full academic regalia, the presidential medallion and mace, and a community the school says is united in mission. Days later, the 2025 commencement exercises were held May 10 at Zion Hill, with Presiding Bishop J. Drew Sheard of the Church of God in Christ delivering the keynote and nonprofit CEO Eslene Richmond-Shockley receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. More than 65 years after the charter, ITC remains the only graduate theological institution in the United Negro College Fund and the largest free-standing African American seminary in the country - smaller than it has been in generations, but still standing.
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No Greek-letter organizations; ITC is a small graduate seminary, not an undergraduate campus. The Greek-letter connection runs through people, not chapters: Omega Psi Phi founder Bishop Edgar Amos Love preached to the ITC student body in 1962, and ITC president Herman 'Skip' Mason Jr. served as the 33rd General President of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
ITC finished its own facilities in 1961 on the ten-acre plot donated by Atlanta University, moving off the borrowed Gammon campus. The new buildings between Beckwith Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive put the seminary in the physical heart of the Atlanta University Center. For a school founded by pooling the meager resources of four small seminaries, owning a modern campus was the proof the experiment worked.
The campus chapel became the spiritual core of the school - the room where students were formed, presidents were memorialized (Harry Richardson's 1990 funeral service filled it), and generations of Black preachers learned to preach. It anchored daily worship life for a student body drawn from more than fifteen denominations.
The Lutheran Theological Center in Atlanta was established on the ITC campus in 1997, giving students from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's seminaries a residential base for Atlanta coursework at ITC, Candler, and Columbia. It was a facilities-level expression of ITC's ecumenical pull beyond its founding Black church traditions.
With fall 2006 enrollment hitting 472 students across the M.Div., M.A.R.E., D.Min., and pastoral counseling doctorate, the ten-acre campus operated at its fullest - classrooms, chapel, and student housing serving the largest student body in school history. The scale of that era is the benchmark every later rebuilding plan is measured against.
Under Edward Wheeler, ITC pushed the Master of Divinity online and expanded hybrid offerings, effectively extending the campus beyond Beckwith Street. The digital pivot kept enrollment pathways open as residential numbers softened. By 2024, officials said most students were distant or hybrid learners, with more in-person classes planned.
The James H. Costen Lifelong Education Center, named for ITC's longest-serving president (1983-1997), served as the showcase venue for the October 2017 'State of the ITC' gathering, where President Wheeler unveiled the 'New ITC' vision to trustees, faculty, students, and AUC neighbors. The building stands as the campus's main convening space for lectures, receptions, and community events.
The pandemic forced ITC to close buildings and cut salaries as part of emergency cost reductions, measures the board later cited when declaring financial exigency. Commencement went virtual in 2021. The closures marked the physical shrinking of a campus built for nearly 500 students down to one serving a fraction of that.
The April 2023 financial exigency declaration authorized suspending academic programs, reducing faculty and staff positions, and restructuring governance and administrative functions - with the physical plant part of the hard reset. The stated goal was a 'REBOOT' as a fiscally sustainable institution, and officials confirmed ITC remained fully reaccredited by the Association of Theological Schools through 2032.
With enrollment stabilized around 60 students and reaccreditation secured, chief institutional advancement officer Nancy L. Jones announced the next phase: 'We can now focus on redeveloping the campus, which is our next huge project.' ITC owns more than ten acres in southwest Atlanta, and the redevelopment is framed as the physical side of the post-exigency rebirth.
ITC staged its biggest 2025 moments - President Mason's investiture recap and the May 10 commencement with COGIC Presiding Bishop J. Drew Sheard keynoting - at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Atlanta rather than on campus. Using one of Atlanta's historic Black churches for milestone ceremonies reflects both the school's deep church ties and the reality of a campus still working its way back to full use.
ITC's faculty is small - about 16 academic staff for roughly 55-60 students as of 2024 - which keeps classes intimate but reflects the post-exigency contraction from the roughly 40 faculty of the 2000s. The Board of Trustees historically numbered 45, with 24 seats held by the participating seminaries plus at-large, alumni, faculty, and student representatives. Notable past faculty voices include womanist theologians Jacquelyn Grant and Katie Cannon, whose scholarship shaped Black theology far beyond Beckwith Street.
Atlanta native, Morris Brown and ITC alumnus, church historian and author, former 33rd General President of Alpha Phi Alpha; invested as president in 2025.
Led ITC's public turnaround messaging after the 2023 exigency, confirming ATS reaccreditation through 2032 and announcing the campus redevelopment plan.
Board chair through the 2023-2024 transition, praised interim president Maisha Handy's 'remarkable' ten-month tenure on her departure.
ITC feels less like a college and more like a working pastors' guild: a graduate-only campus of about 60 students, most of them studying online or hybrid, many already preaching on weekends. The ecumenical mix is the point - a Baptist, a Methodist, an AME, a CME, and a COGIC student arguing theology over lunch is the founding vision made daily. There are no dorms full of freshmen, no homecoming game, no marching band; the social calendar runs on convocations, Charter Day, commencement, and the AUC's shared library and lecture circuit. Small classes and a favorable faculty-student ratio mean every student is known by name, which is exactly what a seminary is supposed to do.