Atlanta, Georgia · Founded 1867
“The only historically Black seminary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — born to teach freed slaves to read, reborn online to teach the church to do justice. Since April 2025 it does business as the Justice Center for Sacred Theological Studies, same JCSTS initials.”
The Ministry Exchange (Dr. J. Wendell Mapson Jr.) sits down with President Paul Roberts, Dr. Ouida Harding, and Minister Warren Cooper on worship as resistance and the prophetic power of Black sacred music — the rebranded school telling its own story in its own words.
Day1 (aired Sept 6, 2026): President Roberts preaches Exodus 12 to a national radio audience, weaving Beyoncé's 'Formation,' the physics of energy, and his own story of leading the seminary back from near-collapse.
Roberts preached the closing sermon at the 2017 NEXT Church National Gathering, calling the church to 'mount a massive redirect' — preserved in NEXT Church's Race & the Church video series with study guides.
The PC(USA) Theological Education Fund's 7-minute film on Cannon — made months before her 2018 death — names her Master of Divinity from Johnson C. Smith Seminary in Atlanta and traces her path from 1974 ordination pioneer to founder of womanist theology.
Princeton Theological Seminary: Cannon's October 24, 2017 keynote, 'Thinking with Our Hearts/Feeling with Our Brains' — one of her last major public addresses before her death in August 2018.
Union Theological Seminary convenes Cannon alongside Kelly Brown Douglas, Jacquelyn Grant, and Emilie Townes — the founding generation of womanist theology, rooted in Cannon's JCSTS formation, in one room.
The Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership (Union Presbyterian Seminary) — the center renamed for the JCSTS alumna after her death — hosts scholars on anti-racist biblical interpretation, the living edge of her legacy.
The Presbyterian Historical Society's Living History film project: Dr. Costen tells how she and James were thrust into the civil rights movement — sneaking MLK into Rocky Mount in a funeral procession, sitting in at segregated lunch counters — and how Black sacred music became her life's theology. She taught at JCSTS for 32 years.
First administrative dean of the Atlanta seminary (1969); 4th African American moderator of the UPCUSA (1982); co-moderator of the reunited PC(USA) (1983); 5th president of ITC (1983–1998). Organized MLK's 1962 Rocky Mount visit; founded Atlanta's first interracial Presbyterian congregation.
M.Div. 1973; ordained 1974 as the first African-American woman in the United Presbyterian Church; founder of womanist theology ('Katie's Canon'); Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Died 2018.
Third-generation Presbyterian pastor and JCSTS graduate who became Stated Clerk of the PC(USA) — the first African American to hold the denomination's top executive office.
M.Div. from ITC/Johnson C. Smith Seminary; director of the PC(USA) Office of Public Witness in Washington, D.C.; 20-year pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Durham, NC; Moral Mondays leader; author of 'Unbroken and Unbowed: Black Protest.'
Graduate who served as the institution's president for 40 years (1907–1947); won its accreditation and made it the first Black college in the South to offer professional teacher training.
Class of 1996; president of the seminary since 2010 and architect of its digital reinvention and 2025 rebrand.
On April 7, 1867, Presbyterians founded the Freedmen's College of North Carolina in Charlotte — an institution created specifically to educate newly freed Black people in the wreckage of the Civil War. The founders, organized through the Catawba Presbytery, believed education was the essential antidote to the poisonous effect of slavery. What began as basic literacy for freedpeople would, within a few years, grow a department for training preachers. That department is the direct ancestor of today's seminary.
Soon after its founding, the school was renamed Biddle Memorial Institute for Major Henry J. Biddle, whose $1,400 pledge got the college started. The gift came through his widow, Mary Baird Biddle, who gave the money in honor of her late husband. Fourteen hundred dollars sounds small now, but in 1867 it was the seed capital for one of the South's first Black colleges. The Biddle name would stick for more than half a century.
In these early years the seminary operated as a department of the university rather than a standalone school, and its mission had already widened from basic literacy to preparing teachers and preachers. In 1872 it graduated its first class — all of three students. Three graduates doesn't sound like much, but each one carried the school's founding conviction — that an educated Black preacher was a threat to the old order — back into communities across the South.
Biddle's football team met Livingstone College of Salisbury, North Carolina, in what is recorded as the first all-Black intercollegiate football game ever played. This belongs to the parent university's story — the seminary was still just a department of the school then — but it is part of the shared soil the seminary grew in. Long before the seminary had its own identity, it was part of an institution making Black firsts.
The Rev. Dr. Henry McCrorey, himself a graduate of the school, became president in 1907 and would hold the office for 40 years, until 1947. Under him the institution won full accreditation from the Association of American Colleges, and in 1919 it became the first Black college in the South to offer professional courses in education. McCrorey was a relentless fundraiser whose greatest talent was opening the wallets of white philanthropists — Andrew Carnegie, Jane Berry Smith, and James Buchanan Duke all gave on his watch.
Jane Berry Smith of Pittsburgh gave a sweeping endowment to the institution and paid for several new buildings on its 75-acre Charlotte campus, all in honor of her late husband, Johnson Crayne Smith. On March 1, 1923, the board of trustees voted to rename the school Johnson C. Smith University in recognition of the gift. The seminary, still a department of the university, took the Johnson C. Smith name with it — the name it carries, legally, to this day.
When James Buchanan Duke established the Duke Endowment in 1924, Johnson C. Smith University was one of only four educational institutions named eligible for its support — alongside Duke University, Furman University, and Davidson College — and the only historically Black one. That same year the North Carolina State Board of Education formally recognized JCSU as a four-year college. For a Black school in the Jim Crow South, standing in that company was both money and legitimacy.
By 1938 the institution had attained the status of an independent college, formally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and reporting to the General Assembly through the Board of Christian Education. The school had been all-male in its first decades and first admitted women to the freshman class in 1941. In 1944 it became a founding member of the United Negro College Fund, joining the collective fundraising effort that would sustain Black private colleges for generations.
By the 1960s the university was thriving but its seminary was dying. As the civil rights movement opened new careers to Black college graduates, fewer and fewer young Black men wanted to become preachers, and seminary enrollment collapsed. Two years after the university celebrated its 100th anniversary, the seminary faced the real possibility of closure. The department that had trained Black Presbyterian ministers since 1872 looked like it might simply vanish.
A national rescue effort led by alumnus James Costen pulled the seminary back from the edge. Instead of closing, the seminary separated from the university and relocated to Atlanta to join the Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of historically Black seminaries of different denominations. The move was formally endorsed in 1969 by the JCSU board, the ITC board, and the 182nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church. Costen became the first administrative dean of the Atlanta seminary — starting with four students and a small office in the basement of the ITC administration building.
In 1973 Melva Costen joined the Johnson C. Smith Seminary faculty at ITC, beginning a 32-year teaching career in music and worship that would change Presbyterian hymnody nationwide. That same year Katie Geneva Cannon graduated from the seminary with her Master of Divinity. One woman would teach the church how to sing; the other would teach it how to think about Black women. Both legacies trace straight back to the little basement-office seminary.
A year after earning her M.Div. from Johnson C. Smith Seminary in Atlanta, Katie Geneva Cannon was ordained in the United Presbyterian Church — the first African-American woman ever ordained in the denomination. She went on to become one of the founders of womanist theology, writing 'Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community' and holding the Annie Scales Rogers chair in Christian ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Her 1974 ordination cracked a door that generations of Black clergywomen have walked through since.
In 1981 Melva Costen became the first African American woman elected chairperson of the Advisory Council of Discipleship and Worship of the United Presbyterian Church. The next year her husband James was elected moderator of the 194th General Assembly — only the fourth African American to hold the denomination's highest office — and he moderated the 195th Assembly in 1983 as well. At the 1983 Assembly in Atlanta, James Costen and J. Randolph Taylor were elected co-moderators of the newly reunited Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), while Melva directed the choir for the historic reunion worship service. One seminary family, one weekend, at the very center of American Presbyterianism.
In 1983 James Costen became the fifth president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, the consortium his seminary had joined fourteen years earlier, and he served in that role until his retirement in 1998. He was later named President Emeritus. The boy from Omaha who had organized Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1962 visit to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and founded Atlanta's first interracial Presbyterian congregation ended his career running the largest consortium of Black seminaries in the country. He died in 2003; his and Melva's papers were processed by the Presbyterian Historical Society in 2022.
The 'Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms and Spiritual Songs' was published in 1990 — the first hymnal of the reunited PC(USA) — and it was Melva Costen who chaired the committee that produced it. She fought to make room in its pages for the musical traditions of the Black church, and Presbyterians nicknamed it the Blue Hymnal for its cover. A Johnson C. Smith Seminary professor had, almost single-handedly, decided what the whole denomination would sing on Sunday mornings.
The Rev. Paul Timothy Roberts Sr., a 1996 graduate of the seminary, became its president in 2010. He inherited a small residential Master of Divinity program inside a consortium, in a denomination losing members and a country losing interest in traditional seminary degrees. Over the next fifteen years he would dismantle nearly everything about how the school operated — and rebuild it as something no other seminary was trying. The throughline of his presidency is a single bet: that the future of theological education is digital, justice-centered, and open to people the old model priced out.
In the fall of 2012 the seminary launched a Community Engagement Fellows Program with the help of the Community Foundation of Atlanta, designed to form seminarians in Christian service and activism. The first class of fellows mentored neighborhood children, created a community food bank, and designed a quilting ministry for elderly women while studying demographic shifts in underserved parts of the city. That November students led the seminary's inaugural HIV/AIDS conference, 'Creating HIV/AIDS Competent Churches and Leaders,' drawn from a report adopted by the 219th General Assembly, with a follow-up conference in December 2013.
On June 30, 2014, after 45 years of membership, Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary disaffiliated from the Interdenominational Theological Center — and ended its Master of Divinity program along with it. The board called it a rebirth, not a retreat: residential theological education had grown too expensive, too debt-laden, and too disconnected from the people actually doing ministry. The seminary walked away from the consortium model to build something cheaper, more accessible, and aimed at a church that no longer looked like the one the M.Div. was designed for.
In 2015 the seminary went 100% digital, becoming one of the first theological schools in the country to abandon the residential model entirely. Its new educational model was competency-based — learners demonstrate ministry skills at their own pace, at a fraction of traditional seminary cost — collaborative, and customizable. In a June 2016 'Minute for Mission,' Roberts laid out the math driving the change: nearly half of seminary students weren't interested in ordination, only about 50 of the roughly 400 African American Presbyterian congregations could afford full-time pastoral leadership, and graduates were starting ministry buried in debt. Students became 'learners' and faculty 'learning partners,' a deliberate signal of the school's non-hierarchical philosophy.
The seminary teamed up with the Presbyterian Board of Pensions to create a CREDO conference designed specifically for African American Presbyterian ministers, held October 22–28 at the Roslyn Retreat Center in Richmond, Virginia. CREDO's purpose is to replenish ministers' spirits and help them rediscover the passion behind their call — and this edition named the harder truth outright: a space for Black ministers 'to address the more challenging realities of being African American in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).' Travel, room, and board were covered, removing the cost barrier that keeps so many from that kind of renewal.
The seminary marked its 155th anniversary with a year-long commemoration and fundraising drive built around the 1550 Partners Fund — inviting gifts in multiples of 155, from $15.50 to $15,500. President Roberts framed the anniversary as a launchpad rather than a birthday party: 'a prime opportunity to catapult the next phase of curriculum development and community engagement.' By then the school's identity had fully settled into its new shape — rooted in Black liberation theology, delivered entirely online, and aimed at what it called 'whole networks of workers for faith and justice.'
Early in 2023 the seminary launched a reparations initiative to bring Black churches and institutions together around a national dialogue on racial reparations, funded by $90,000 in grants from the Ford Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. It also became the fiscal sponsor of Seeing Whiteness for Anti-Racist Action (SWARA) and ran two certificate programs: the five-month Drum Major for Justice in public theology and the ten-month Lead Change in church leadership. That September the school lost its matriarch — Dr. Melva Wilson Costen died on September 8 at age 90, and hundreds gathered in person and online for her celebration of life on September 16 at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. Her eulogist said it plainly: 'Her song is not ended. She's just singing in a different key.'
In April 2025 the school began doing business as the Justice Center for Sacred Theological Studies — keeping the JCSTS acronym while retiring 'Johnson C. Smith' from public use. President Roberts was direct about the reason: 'We will always honor Ms. Jane Berry Smith,' he said, but 'our public name needs to reflect our work more accurately' in a moment of national assault on DEI and human rights. The legal name still carries Johnson C. Smith, and the rebrand — designed by Atlanta's Twenty and 3 Agency — came with a refreshed program rollout and a new 'Justice Walkers' initiative. The PC(USA) counts it as one of its twelve theological institutions, in good standing.
In January 2026 Roberts delivered the opening plenary at the Association of Partners in Christian Education's Annual Event in Pittsburgh, charging the room to 'generate a love that's more fierce than the harms that confront us.' On September 6, 2026, he returned to the Day1 radio pulpit — Episode 4250, 'A New Earth and a New Heaven,' preaching Exodus 12 to a national audience and telling the story of leading a seminary back from near-collapse. A school that once held four students in a basement office now speaks, weekly, to the whole church.
There are no rivalry games because there are no games: JCSTS has never had an athletics program, in Charlotte or Atlanta, residential or digital. The contest this school has always played is a different one — asserting, in its own words, that the African-American heritage of the church is every bit as vital as the history symbolized by 'Geneva gowns and Scottish kilts,' and that the diaspora's reading of Scripture is a corrective the wider (and whiter) Presbyterian church needs. If there is a rivalry, it is with the church's own complacency — and the seminary has been winning that argument, one ordination and one hymnal at a time, since 1872.
No band program of any kind — this is a graduate theological seminary with no athletics, no marching tradition, and no concert ensembles. Its musical identity lives in worship instead: the Melva W. Costen Institute of Worship, Preaching and Sacred Arts, named for the professor who chaired the committee behind the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal, carries the school's conviction that Black sacred music is itself a form of resistance and theological education.
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No Greek-letter organizations. JCSTS is a small graduate seminary — first residential, now fully online — and fraternities and sororities were never part of its institutional life in Charlotte or Atlanta.
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The Atlanta seminary's first 'campus' was a small office in the basement of the Interdenominational Theological Center's administration building, with four students and one dean. From that spare beginning it grew over four decades to roughly 60 full-time Master of Divinity students on the ITC campus.
On June 30, 2014, the seminary disaffiliated from the Interdenominational Theological Center after 45 years, giving up its physical home on the ITC campus. The board framed the departure as liberation — freedom to build an affordable, accessible model instead of maintaining a residential plant the school could no longer fill.
The seminary went 100% digital, replacing classrooms with an online competency-based learning platform where learners demonstrate ministry skills at their own pace. The platform — not a building — is the campus now, built to reach adult learners across the country who could never relocate to Atlanta or afford residential tuition.
The school rolled out cohort-based certificate programming, including a Community Organizing Certificate that drew 56 learners in one cycle — 37 white, 14 African-American, two Hispanic, and one Asian — a deliberately multiracial classroom for a historically Black institution. A second cycle launched in Baltimore, taking the model on the road.
The seminary initiated its Drum Major for Justice certificate in public theology, a five-month program schooling clergy and laypeople in racial oppression and activist strategy, drawing on Black and womanist theology, liberation theology, and Indigenous peoples' theology. Graduates describe it as one of the most transforming learning experiences of their lives.
The school structured its curriculum into four institutes: the Melva W. Costen Institute of Worship, Preaching and Sacred Arts; the JCSTS Leadership Institute; the Institute for Diaspora Studies (African traditional religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the African roots of world faiths); and the Amani Institute for peace, mediation, and creation care. Programs rolled out strategically through 2022.
The ten-month Lead Change certificate launched, aimed at church leaders — including new-worshiping-community planters, LGBTQ leaders, people of color, and neurodivergent leaders — who need theological grounding but can't pursue an M.Div. or D.Min. Weekly sessions are highly interactive, centering voices the traditional seminary model rarely centered.
With $90,000 from the Ford Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation, the seminary built the convening infrastructure for a national Black-church dialogue on reparations — listening sessions across the country testing whether faith communities were ready for a national effort. It also became the fiscal sponsor of Seeing Whiteness for Anti-Racist Action (SWARA).
The April 2025 rebrand to the Justice Center for Sacred Theological Studies brought a new public identity, a rebuilt web presence at theojustice.org (with jcsts.org continuing), and program refreshes through the calendar year — including the newly announced Justice Walkers initiative. The school lists its current Atlanta address as 1328 Peachtree Street NE.
The school runs the Good Trouble Series — trainings and resources for speaking up and redeeming the soul of America, named for the late Congressman John Lewis's famous charge — alongside the Exhale Community, a regular online gathering for faith-rooted conversation, renewal, and justice work that has hosted authors, pastors, and scholars from across the country.
A deliberately lean operation — the digital model runs on a small core team plus 'learning partners' (the school's term for faculty) and cohort facilitators rather than a traditional residential faculty. No athletic director or coaches: there is no athletics program.
1996 JCSTS graduate; president since 2010. Theologian, educator, and writer who led the ITC break, the digital pivot, and the 2025 rebrand; preaches nationally (Day1, NEXT Church) and writes on reparations, voting rights, and worship as resistance.
Leads program design including the Lead Change certificate; the public voice of the school's justice-centered curriculum in denominational press.
Longtime Presbyterian peacemaker and former General Assembly moderator who handles advancement and co-leads the school's jubilee and economic-justice work.
Joined the faculty at ITC in 1973 and directed the Center Chorus; chaired the committee that produced the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal; directed the choir at the 1983 reunion of the northern and southern Presbyterian churches; later visiting professor at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. The school's worship institute bears her name.
Founder of KINETICS, a social-impact communications firm; joined the board in March 2017 as the school recruited trustees who 'champion innovative solutions to today's pressing problems.'
Architect of the 1550 Partners Fund during the 155th anniversary — the multiples-of-155 giving campaign ($15.50 to $15,500) that funded the school's anniversary-year push.
There is no quad, no dorm, no homecoming game — campus is a screen, and the student body is pastors, musicians, activists, lawyers, teachers, and retirees scattered across the country. What binds them is the school's founding conviction, restated for the digital age: that the African diaspora's reading of Scripture is a corrective the whole church needs. Cohorts are intentionally multiracial and multidenominational — one organizing certificate ran 37 white, 14 Black, two Hispanic, and one Asian learner — and the classroom norm is peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical, and blunt about power.