When Rev. Roland Gordon died on April 13 after nearly half a century of leading the Ingleside Presbyterian Church, he left his congregation — and the larger neighborhood — bereft.
“He touched so many people in the community,” said Mike Allen, the church’s program director. “It’s incredible the impact he had.”
Vickie Hackett, who also works in the church office, has been part of the congregation since she was eight years old. “We were lucky to have him for 47 years,” she said.
Gordon's presence inspired this kind of dedication; people wanted to be around his warm, effusive and loving spirit.
Allen, 53, went to daycare up the street, started coming to the church at age 10 and used to play basketball in the church’s gym with Gordon, where he saw what may be Gordon’s greatest legacy take shape: a collage of Black heroes known as “The Great Cloud of Witnesses.”
Gordon started the collage in 1980 as a way to highlight the achievements of African Americans for youth playing basketball in the church’s court. They might not read a history book, he contended, but they would look up at the wall.
The first picture he pasted up was an image of Muhammad Ali. He kept adding to it, expanding the figures of Black excellence, from Nelson Mandela to Barack Obama, London Breed to George Washington Carver. Despite many offers of help over the years, he did all the cutting and gluing himself, creating a whole universe of heroes.
“The Black newspapers did not carry the kind of message that Roland Gordon carried in his facility.” —Mayor Willie Brown
When Allen first started coming to the gym, there were only a few figures lining the bottom and the top of the court’s walls. Now the collage spreads floor to ceiling, into the hallways and throughout all three levels of the Neoclassical church complex, built in 1923 by renowned architect Joseph Leonard. There’s a wall with the kings and queens of Africa, a Willie Brown room, a Michael Jackson room (Gordon grew up in Gary, Indiana, just a few blocks away from Jackson) and a Nelson Mandela bathroom. Susan Cervantes and Eugene White have been commissioned to complete murals of Civil Rights leaders as part of the artwork.
The gymnasium was an integral space for Gordon, because basketball was such an important part of his life. “He had a chance to make it to the league,” Allen said, “but he chose to be a pastor instead.” In his honor, Allen plans to start a pee wee league called the Rolling Gordon Basketball League for community centers to play together. The gym is also where Gordon’s folk art mural is most impressive in its size, stretching 25 feet to the ceiling.
Willie Brown, a close friend of Gordon’s, never anticipated a room would be dedicated to him. He called it an honor incomparable to any other.
“The Black newspapers did not carry the kind of message that Roland Gordon carried in his facility,” Brown said. One of the former mayor’s many previous jobs was working at a daycare program, and he would take children to Gordon’s church gymnasium. “It was always a great event for me to take the youngsters.”
“Black people were in love with what he did,” Brown said. “The attention they would pay to it, and inspect it — especially school-age kids — it was phenomenal.”
In 2016, the sprawling work of art covering nine surfaces of the church was given a landmark designation, which will protect and preserve it into the future.
Gordon began with magazine and newspaper clippings, but the folk art collage expanded to contain posters, plaques and photographs as well as the painted murals. It’s also a history lesson.
“It helped educate me,” Allen said. “If you want to know anything about our history, just come in here and look at the walls.”
He pointed to the wall where Gordon, known affectionately as “Rev. G,” had pasted newspaper clippings of slaves for sale. The walls document the history of the church, the Civil Rights Movement, prominent Black entertainers and African American San Franciscans through time.
“You could be in here 100 times a day, and still you'll see something different,” Allen said. The program director said Gordon’s vision was to turn the collage into a museum, a prospect the church’s board is now actively discussing.
Walking around the church today under its painted, pale blue sky, one has the sense that “witness” for Gordon meant not only a firsthand observer and creator of history but also someone who is watching over you, reminding you not to get involved with things you shouldn’t. Because if Gordon’s greatest legacy was his folk art mural, his greatest love was for youth and their future, which often played out and took shape on the basketball court.
“No one had a bigger heart than him,” Allen said. “There was no phoniness.”
