Ingleside Presbyterian Church leader, artist behind an expansive mural-collage and Ingleside Community Center founder Rev. Roland Gordon has died.
Rev. G, as Gordon was called by generations of community members, was hospitalized a few weeks ago. He was 82.
Through pastoring at his Ocean Avenue church, Gordon provided countless acts of community service over the years, including organizing local clean-ups, holding food banks and hosting youth and senior programs. One of his most lasting, at least for Mike Allen, may be opening the Ingleside Community Center in 1986.
“His main concern was making sure that this program in the community center continues to do what it was set out to do,” said Allen, who’s worked for the center since 2007. “His main concern was just having somewhere safe for him to be to come to.”
Allen, 53, had known Gordon since he was 12 years old, back when “just the lower half of the gym had pictures.”
Gordon was the fifth of nine children and was raised in Gary, Ind. In 1967, he graduated from Baldwin-Wallace College, where he excelled at basketball. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and discovered a need to create art as well as peace. In 1978, while a student at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, he accepted the challenge of leading Ingleside Presbyterian Church.
Over the years, Gordon adorned the majority of the church’s interior with the collage called the “Great Cloud of Witnesses,” a project that was started to help inspire the Black youth who came in to play basketball by hanging a photograph and magazine story about Muhammad Ali on the wall. It later grew to cover nearly every wall inside, save the sanctuary, with Civil Rights Movement heroes and Black athletes and stars.
In 2023, Gordon received a Bay Area Jefferson Award and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award for extraordinary service to local communities. Last year, the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Daniel Lurie recognized Gordon for his decades of service to the community and beyond.
EJ Jones, Lurie’s director of community affairs, was born and raised in the neighborhood and watched Rev. G at work.
“He supported generations of community with love, wisdom and hard work,” Jones said. “He will be missed.”
Supervisor Myrna Melgar worked with Gordon over the years, and her office is preparing an in-memoriam tribute for a future Board of Supervisors meeting. She admired his work as a peacemaker and recalled his work to unite the African American and Asian American communities during the pandemic.
“If we had more people like Rev. G in the world, it would be a better place,” she said. “I am heartbroken.”
Gordon was instrumental in decorating the berm of the Balboa Reservoir with large logs that spelled “Love Is The Answer.” When the Phelan Loop bus terminal was redeveloped, Gordon was instrumental in naming its open space “Unity Plaza.”
“His legacy is the ‘Great Cloud of Witness’ mural-collage that he started and worked on for half a century,” said Woody LaBounty, president and CEO of San Francisco Heritage and a former columnist for The Light.
LaBounty got to know Gordon in the early 2000s for a history project and, more recently, helped designate the church as a city landmark, both inside and out.
“At Ingleside Presbyterian, he really stepped up to try to find ways to make the neighborhood better for the kids, and he's maybe the most important unsung artist in the city,” LaBounty said.
