Church a portrait of S.F.’s black heritage
The heritage of San Francisco comes in a thousand pieces, like a collage of many colors, a wall full of pictures of one of the city’s extended families.
A good example is inside the Ingleside Presbyterian Church and Community Center on Ocean Avenue, just down the street from City College. The walls, the doors, even the ceilings are covered with pictures and paintings, part collage and part mural.
The Rev. Roland Gordon, the church’s pastor, calls it “The Great Cloud of Witnesses,” a citation from the Old Testament. Most of the paintings and pictures are of African Americans, but the message is universal and inspirational, as you might expect in a church.
Gordon stood in the church’s combination basketball court and community room and talked the other afternoon. Except for the floor, nearly every inch was covered in pictures: inventors, politicians, preachers, athletes, writers, musicians, even classmates from his high school days.
He wants to use the images to inspire people, particularly young people, to make a difference. “I tell them, ‘Look. Look. You name it, they did it, and you can do it too.’ ”
He drops his voice lower, like the preacher he is. “You can do it, too. But you gotta work.” he said.
The Rev G., as he likes to be called, is 73 now, and his hair is turning gray. He has been at the Ingleside church for 38 years, has seen the congregation grow and change and change again.
When he came to the Ingleside, the church was down to only four members, but Gordon built it up to one of the most vibrant African American congregations in the city.
Gordon realized that the key was to reach out to young people, and he used pictures to do it. He thought the kids were not so much interested in reading about black history. He put up a couple of images of Muhammad Ali, pictures and magazine covers. It was as if a light went on.
The first pictures became dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. He covered the walls, the ceilings, even the bathrooms, everything but the big sanctuary with its wooden interior dome. There were hundreds of thousands of pictures.
“Maybe a million?” he was asked. Gordon laughed. “It’s a lot,” he said.
There are larger paintings in the gym and community room, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth, of course, but also Robert Demmons, San Francisco’s first black fire chief. Thousands of faces looking down: A cloud of witnesses.
Gordon also developed a basketball league, a food program, a boy’s academy named for Thad Brown, the city’s late tax collector. The church also has a computer center in a room named for Willie Brown, the former mayor and speaker of the Assembly who also writes a Sunday column for The Chronicle, as well as a good friend to the Ingleside church. “He’s a great man,” Gordon said.
All of this is inside a 93-year-old neoclassical church that stands on the south side of Ocean Avenue like a gray eminence. Late last year, Ingleside Presbyterian and its mural collage was named an official city landmark by the Board of Supervisors.
“This church is important to the story of the city,” said Mike Buhler, executive director of San Francisco Heritage, an organization interested in San Francisco’s architectural and cultural identity.
The Ingleside church has seen big changes in the city’s culture and identity. It was organized in 1907 and, by the mid-1920s, had become a church with a mostly white congregation. After World War II it changed again, and when Gordon first preached there in 1978, the Ingleside district — and the church — had a major African American flavor.
“This area used to be 60 percent black,” Gordon said. “Now it’s different.” The neighborhood is representative of the black exodus from San Francisco.
“People sold their homes for good money and moved away,” he said.
The real estate website Neighborhood-Scout says the Ingleside is more than 60 percent Chinese now, and the businesses along Ocean Avenue have a distinct Asian flavor.
Still, Gordon said, his church is the heart of the Ingleside. Its community programs continue to serve the neighborhood, but the clients are different. “Our food bank is 90 percent Asian,” he said, “and our Self-Help for the Elderly program is nearly all Asian.”
But membership in the historically black church has dropped to fewer than 60 members. This concerns Gordon, but he has unquenchable faith.
“We will rebuild,” he said. It’s part of the church’s heritage.