“It was against the law to go to the library,” Dr. Cannon told The Charlotte Observer in 2005. “I couldn’t play on that swing. By 4 or 5, I was wondering: ‘What did we do as black people that was so bad? A good God would not do this.’ ”

As a girl she worked alongside an aunt cleaning and cooking in a white family’s home, the best job she or her aunt could hope for at the time. In 1963 she heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on television, but those stirring words did not alter her day-to-day reality.

“I really thought we were going to be free,” she said. “But nothing really changed.”

She came to see education as her only way out of a limited life. Graduating from Barber-Scotia College in Concord, N.C., in 1971, with a degree in education, she enrolled at the Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

The typical course of study for a woman at the center at that time led to a master’s degree in Christian education, but instead she pursued a master of divinity degree.

“It was like being E.T.,” Dr. Cannon recalled in a video made when she received the Excellence in Theological Education Award at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) general assembly this year. “People weren’t hostile; it was just that you were an extraterrestrial being. ‘We’ve never seen one like you.’ ”

She earned her master of divinity degree in 1974 and became the first black woman to be ordained in the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, a branch of the church that has since merged into the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

She continued her education at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, earning a doctor of philosophy degree there in 1983. It was a period of intellectual ferment at the seminary, and Dr. Cannon was very much a part of that, bringing an academic’s rigor to the questions she had first asked herself as a child and finding that much of what was heard in churches, including from black male ministers, marginalized the experience and wisdom of black women.