The Rev. Cecil Williams, a charismatic pastor who transformed a declining church in San Francisco's run-down Tenderloin neighborhood into a vibrant hub of worship, activity and community service, died Monday at his home in the city. He was 94 years old.
His death was announced by the Glide Foundation, an offshoot of Glide Memorial Church, where he spent more than 60 years transforming the church as pastor and spiritual leader.
Mr Williams spoke of the need to be “radically inclusive” and said that meant building communities to alleviate suffering and break the cycle of poverty.
“This place is what it is because of people who love us unconditionally,” he said in a recorded sermon. “We don't put up any barriers. Even if we're different, we're all similar.”
He added: “We are going to break down all barriers and let you know that we love you and accept you.”
That open door extended to drug addicts, the homeless, and the LGBTQ community. He performed same-sex marriages decades before same-sex marriages were legalized in the United States.
“Cecil helped build the lesbian, gay, and transgender movement,” said Cecile, executive director of the nonprofit Tenderloin Housing Clinic and author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. says Randy Shaw, author of 2015). “When police were arresting gays and lesbians in bars, they had a place in Glide.”
Mr. Williams created a sensation inside and outside the church. He was a founder of his 1964 Ministerial Council on Religion and Homosexuality and was welcomed by church groups such as Huckleberries for Runaways and the National Sex Forum. He hosted Black Panther events and lobbied for the release of left-wing activist and professor Angela Davis from prison in 1970.
He made Glide a home for the anti-war movement and served as chairman of Citizens Alert, a 24-hour hotline for people experiencing police harassment and violence, especially those from marginalized communities.
In 1974, Mr. Williams acted as an intermediary between Patty Hearst's family and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the extremist group that had kidnapped her.
Fifteen years later, he convened a conference to find a solution to the crack cocaine epidemic that was devastating black communities.
“We've been through slavery, but this is a new kind of slavery,” he told the Oakland Tribune in 1989. “We have seen in the streets how our brothers and sisters are suffering. We are here today to pick up the pieces.”
Mr. Williams, along with his wife Janice Mirikitani (she was San Francisco's poet laureate from 2000 to 2002), built Glide into a bastion of social services, including free meals, child care, and testing for HIV and hepatitis C. These are intervention programs for violent incidents and programs that help women recover from different types of trauma. Legal clinic. and a walk-in center for people in need of housing, hygiene assistance, and emotional support.
Glide Foundation also partnered with another foundation to build 52 low-income federal housing units near the church.
Williams told USA Today in 1995, “The true church is where there is real groaning and moaning, on the brink of life.”
Albert Cecil Williams was born on September 22, 1929 in San Angelo, a segregated city in central Texas. His father, Cuney Earl Williams, was a janitor in a white church, and his mother, Sylvia Lizzie Best, was a teacher and later ran an employment agency. His maternal grandfather was enslaved.
His mother told Cecil early on that he intended to become a minister. According to one story, she gave him the nickname “Lev” when he was two years old.
“Someone is going to be this family's pastor, and it's you,” he wrote in his joint memoir with Mirikitani, “Beyond the Possibilities: 50 Years of Creating Fundamental Change in the Community.” As he recalled her statement, he remembered her words. Glide” (2013).
At age 12, he suffered a frightening nervous breakdown, which he attributed to “my family calling me a 'pastor'” and the actions of white people who “confirmed my powerlessness.” It was caused by contrast, he writes. After recovering, he became a pastor and focused on leading a church that embraced people of all colors.
Mr. Williams earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Huston-Tillotson College (now the University) in Austin, Texas in 1952. That year, he, along with four other black students, integrated Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. He graduated in his 1955 class.
For the next eight years, he served as pastor at churches in Hobbs, New Mexico, and Kansas City, Missouri. He was a lecturer at Huston-Tillotson University. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.
When Williams was appointed to Glide Church, then part of the United Methodist Church, in 1963, he knew people referred to the Tenderloin as “the last ring of hell.” There are many homeless, poor, and troubled people and their boarding houses. And a brothel.
But the first time he walked through its downtown district, he wrote, he had a different vision. “I saw the most blessed place on earth.”
Mr. Williams brought changes to the conservatively run church founded in 1929 as the Glide Memorial Mission Center by Lizzie Glide, the wife of a wealthy cattle farmer. (The name was changed to Glide's Memorial Methodist Church in 1939.) He removed all crosses from the sanctuary as a message emphasizing life rather than death. “We all must be crucified,” he said.
Mr. Williams, a persuasive speaker, added a cheerful choir and house band. He grew membership from double digits to thousands. Along the way, he became one of San Francisco's most prominent religious figures through his social programs and fundraising efforts. Mr Shaw said he had “personal relationships with the ultra-wealthy”.
Williams worked with Dianne Feinstein, who served as mayor from 1978 to 1988, and is a friend of fellow San Francisco native and future Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who described him as a “spiritual person.” He called him a giant.
Glide raises more than $50 million annually through lunch auctions with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, including the final $19 million in 2022. (Mr. Buffett's wife, Susie, had tipped off her husband about her church's countless good deeds.)
Mr. Williams is survived by a daughter, Kim Williams, and a son, Albert Jr., from his marriage to Evelyn Robinson, which ended in divorce in 1976. stepdaughter Tianne Feliciano; She has three grandchildren. and one step-grandchild.
Ms. Mirikitani started working for Glide in 1965 as a temporary typist, was promoted to director of church programs, and then became president of the Glide Foundation in 1982, when she married Ms. Williams. She passed away in 2021.
Mr. Williams retired as pastor in 2000, but remained the church's spiritual leader in other roles and as chief executive of the foundation. He officially left the church last year.
Marvin K. White, the church's minister of blessing, or senior pastor, said in an interview that Mr. Williams' physical decline over the past decade served as a message to the congregation.
“When I came here as an intern, he was an able-bodied man and he was walking around the pews,” he said. “Then he got on a cane and took up less space. Then he used a walker, so I had to help him stand up. He was visibly unsteady. He was leaning forward so much that he almost fell over, and he was in his final appearance in a wheelchair.
“Every time he backed off and made himself smaller, he asked us to fill that space,” White said.