14 Facts About Rena Karefa-Smart

Rena Joyce Weller Karefa-Smart was an American religious leader and theologian.

Rena Karefa-Smart's Jamaican-born father was an ordained clergyman in the AME Zion denomination; her mother was a leader in churchwork as well, as national president of the AMEZ denomination's Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, and as president of the Connecticut State Union of Women.

Rena Karefa-Smart trained as a teacher at the Teachers College of Connecticut, where she was the youngest member of the graduating class of 1940, and played softball and volleyball.

Rena Karefa-Smart earned a master's degree in religious education from Drew Theological Seminary in 1942.

Rena Karefa-Smart completed a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1945, studying with H Richard Niebuhr and Liston Pope.

Rena Karefa-Smart earned a Doctor of Theology degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1976, the first Black woman to do so.

Rena Karefa-Smart was a leader of the World Student Christian Federation.

Rena Karefa-Smart was an ordained Episcopal priest and a minister in the AME Zion denomination.

Rena Karefa-Smart taught at Hood Theological Seminary for two years as a young woman.

Rena Karefa-Smart served the Episcopal Diocese of Washington as an ecumenical officer, and associate in the Center for Theology and Public Policy.

Rena Karefa-Smart attended the first and second assemblies of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and 1954, and worked to create the WCC's Program to Combat Racism.

Rena Karefa-Smart taught Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, and was the first female professor to gain tenure there, in 1979.

Rena Karefa-Smart received the Yale Divinity School's Lux et Veritas alumni award in 2017.

Rena Karefa-Smart's son died in 1988, her husband died in 2010, and she died in 2019, at the age of 97, in Rancho Mirage, California.