Sanctuary for the Revolution: Glide Church and the Religious Infrastructure of Bay Area Activism

In this paper I consider how San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church became a vital space for radical organizing during the late 1960s. Building on my archival work with the Glide collection at the San Francisco Public Library, I demonstrate how Glide’s collaborations with Black Power activists, such as Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, grew out of its pastor’s conviction that to be Christian meant to live fully and openly with people who the wider society marginalizes, oppresses, and rejects. I first offer a history of Glide church and a brief biography of its most influential pastor, Cecil Williams. I then turn to Williams’ early years at Glide and describe how he transformed Glide from a respectable house of worship to a revolutionary space of spiritual celebration. Central to this transformation was Glide’s commitment to building a community of people who live fully and respond to the needs of their neighbors. This commitment, in turn, led Glide to forge relationships with Black Power organizations such as the Black Panthers. In the second part of this paper, I trace out the relationships Williams made with other progressive religious leaders, from Eugene Boyle to Jim Jones, as well as various radical organizations, from the Black Panthers to the United Farm Workers. In tracing these connections, I demonstrate that when revolutionary organizations needed spaces to hold their rallies, funds to support their work, or someone to mediate between them and the police, they often turned to religious leaders for support. As such, religious networks became a key part of the infrastructure of radical organizing in the Bay Area.

As a child in San Angelo, TX, Cecil Williams (1929-2024) attended an all-Black church affiliated with the segregated Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1963 Williams accepted a call to serve as “Minister of outreach” for Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco. When Williams joined the ministerial team at Glide he quickly built relationships with Black women and men organizing their communities in response to police brutality as well as segregation in schools and businesses. Whether it was organizing a boycott, helping with a picket line, or running a human relations training for police, Williams was down for the cause. 

In 1966 Williams became lead pastor at Glide and began implementing significant changes to the spiritual and liturgical life of the church. From taking down the cross in the sanctuary, to restyling Sunday services as “celebrations” and replacing hymns with Beatles’ songs, Williams transformed Glide into a dynamic, multiracial, multi-class community that would “say ‘yeah man’ to everyone.” Williams argued the Church needed to listen to its critics and make itself relevant to segments of society that had gone searching for liberation and salvation elsewhere.

Drawing on Harvey Cox’s definition of sloth as the sinful “torpid unwillingness to revel in the delights or to share in the responsibilities of being fully human,” Williams called for the Church to commit itself to what he called “a functional faith,” stating the church must “be about the very issues and projections and actions of life which bring liberation to the people.” As such, Glide built relationships with community groups who helped people become “a turned-on people—people who believe they have authority and power.”

Glide’s Fellowship Hall became a vibrant hub for organizations, from the Black Panther Party to the United Farm Workers to the Daughters of Bilitis, who set up “rap tables” and talked with Glide attendees on their way home from Sunday Celebrations. Glide directly supported these organizations’ work through bakes sales, offering space for organizing meetings, and, on occasion, providing a pulpit to speak from. Sometimes Glide collaborated with these organizations to hold protests, such as when Williams co-led a protest with a Catholic priest named Eugene Boyle in response to the kidnapping of Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale. At other times, Cecil Williams himself took up the cause of radical activists, and used his networks to support their work. In 1969 Williams developed an organization called the Committee United for Political Prisoners that helped raise awareness of the unjust incarceration of figures such as Huey Newton and Angela Davis, who considered Williams her spiritual advisor. CUPP meetings were held at Glide, and its sponsors included many of Williams’ fellow Bay Area ministers. When Bobby Seale was bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom in November 1969, Williams used CUPP to send out “thousands of letters” “asking for financial or moral support for Seale and others.” Williams wielded the respectability of his position as a minister to support the work of groups like the Black Panthers. This often involved building relationships with wealthy supporters, or, as happened in the wake of the police murder of Chicago Panther Fred Hampton, working with other religious leaders to mediate between the Black Panthers and the San Francisco police.

Glide’s organizing in support of the Black Panthers illustrates the vital role churches played in supporting the Black Power movement. Churches provided space for meetings and rallies, connected organizers to sympathetic community members, and lent radical movements the support of established religious leaders. Churches like Glide became vibrant nodes in the infrastructure of Bay Area radicalism. It is perhaps not surprising that, in 1973, the Black Panthers awarded Williams their “Service to the People” award. Most significantly, Glide Church illustrates how, if we want to have a full and accurate understanding of the Black Power movement, we must pay attention to the role religious organizations played providing spaces, offering supplies, contributing ideas, and serving as leaders in this movement.