When the Rev. Cecil Williams took over leadership of Glide Memorial Church in the 1960s and began transforming it into a national powerhouse for social justice and nonprofit services, he became an early ally of Tenderloin residents who were then among the city’s most marginalized: gay men, lesbians and transgender youth.
In the 1960s, San Francisco was still “a pretty conservative town” and police, supported by City Hall, regularly targeted gathering spots for LGBTQ men and women, arresting them for merely being social. As part of Williams’ mission to welcome the poor and disenfranchised into his Tenderloin congregation, he began allowing LGBTQ groups to meet at Glide and to even host drag balls.
Williams’ message of inclusion prevailed into the 21st century, and not just for the LGBTQ community. Under Williams’ leadership, Glide has been at the forefront of many civil rights causes that have shaped Bay Area history.
Rev. Cecil Williams, cofounder of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, Calif., who was photographed on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2018 at a proposed safe injection site for intravenous drug users, died Wednesday, April 22, 2024, at the age of 94. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
With the Texas-born minister’s death Monday at age 94, at the retirement community he resided in just blocks away from the church, colleagues and members of his church took time on Tuesday to contemplate a legacy that “is far greater than people realize,” said Randall Shaw, the director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic.
The church is “the soul of the city,” said Pam Noli, a 30-year member who serves on the board of directors. She said Williams approached everything he did with “unconditional love,” while Frank Williams (no relation), who first attended his first service at Glide in 1976, said he was a “beautiful, loving man” who was always ready to help people going through hard times.
Frank Williams spoke after visiting the church’s sanctuary and kneeling in prayer before photos of the minister arrayed on the stage. Frank Williams said the minister, the grandson of a slave who was raised in the segregated South, embodied the spirit of Christianity. His mission was “to love everyone, the same thing as Jesus did,” Frank Williams said.
For the church leader, the lessons of the Bible and his experience with racial segregation made it clear that he didn’t want to live with hate and “separation” in his life.
“If you really understand, it seems to me, the liberated gospel, the liberated acts of Jesus, it would mean that we would take any hatred out of our hearts,” Williams said in a 2013 interview with NPR. … “Take judgment out of your acts and put love there. That’s what needs to be there.”
For some 60 years, Williams, his late wife Janice Mirikitani and other church leaders transformed a once conservative urban church into a world-renowned provider of social services and a congregation known for its raucous services featuring a boisterous choir, a blues/gospel house band and a progressive, “liberation theology” based on helping the oppressed. He reportedly had crosses removed from the church, saying they represented death when religion should celebrate life.
Williams’ charisma, politics and tireless work on behalf of the needy made him an outsized figure whose popularity and influence exceeded the Bay Area. His services became a magnet for the powerful and famous, including Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Bono and Warren Buffett. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, it was Williams who was brought in to try and negotiate her release.
As the congregation grew to more than 10,000, Williams helped oversee a wide range of community outreach programs that have provided support to hundreds of thousands of poor and marginalized residents in the city. They include HIV/AIDS invention and screenings, substance abuse treatment and programs for women dealing with homelessness, domestic violence and mental health issues.
Glide may be best best known for its daily free-meals program for the unhoused and hungry, which served 500,000 meals during the 2020-21 fiscal year. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, the program becomes a festive event for participants and volunteers, when the church is known to serve up to 2,500 meals of ham, turkey and other fixings.
“He was the fiery minister who was urging people to get involved in stuff and fighting for justice and not mincing words about things,” Shaw recalled. Glide Memorial Church announced in 2020 that it was cutting ties with the Methodist Church, in order to proceed independently with its charitable and spiritual work.
In a statement, San Francisco Mayor London Breed also credited Williams with being one of the early champions of supportive housing and “wraparound” services for those in need.
“His kindness brought people together and his vision changed our city and the world,” she said
The church originally opened in 1929 by Methodist philanthropist Lizzie Glide. By the mid-1960s, membership was suffering as White congregants fled the increasingly rough neighborhood for the suburbs, said Shaw, who wrote a book on the neighborhood’s history.
Williams opened the church up to jazz music, hippies, addicts, the poor, poets and “anyone else who wanted to come,” according to a PBS profile. He also hosted political rallies and services, including speeches by Angela Davis and the Black Panthers.
Most notably, he made the-then radical decision to open up his church to LGBTQ people.
‘”It was a queer sanctuary before churches did that at all,” said Noli, who pointed out that Williams performed same-sex weddings in the 1970s, decades before same-sex marriage became legal in the United States. She now estimates that about half the congregation is gay. Williams, she said, always was “all about social justice, all about equity.”
Staff writer Jason Green contributed to this report.