At its best, San Francisco has been a city of refuge, an island of tolerance, and a laboratory of social justice. One local church was an epitome of these ideals well before the civil rights movement, the Summer of Love, before the gay rights movement of the 1980s, and much before the current social justice movement.
That church is now a step away from becoming a local landmark.
The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples opened in 1944 and was one of the first interracial, interdenominational and intercultural churches in the country, led by a Black academic and pastor from Washington, DC, and a local white minister.
Last week, the city’s Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to give the church, on lower Russian Hill, an official landmark designation. The Board of Supervisors will make a final decision at an upcoming meeting.
“I want to say on this issue, we are together [as a] congregation, mind and heart of one accord, and we pray for this commission,” said Dr. Dorsey Odell Blake, the church’s presiding minister, during the recent hearing. “We’re prayerfully hoping for the designation. It’ll be very meaningful for us, and I think for the city and the nation.” (Church officials declined to comment for this story.)
The church’s fascinating history involves cross-country correspondence, international trips, and a bit of luck that brought one of the country’s most respected Black religious leaders to the Bay Area.
In 1943, Dr. Alfred G. Fisk, a white philosophy professor at San Francisco City College (now SF State) and a local Presbyterian minister, started to meet with colleagues to discuss how they could best bridge the divide “of understanding among the varied races, cultures, and faiths presented in American society,” the church wrote on its website.
The Church For the Fellowship of All Peoples on Larkin Street. (Exterior: Alex Lash. Interior: SF Planning)
Fisk reached out to Dr. Howard Thurman, a Black theologian who was the Dean of Chapel at Howard University in the nation’s capital, and asked if Thurman could recommend a student or colleague for a co-pastor role at the church.
What Fisk was proposing was radical for its time, and he needed Thurman’s help.
“We don’t want [the church] to be in any sense run by whites ‘for’ Negroes,” Fisk wrote to Thurman on Oct. 15, 1943. “It should be of and by and for both groups.
“We are committed to a real equality between the races in all aspects of church organization,” Fisk continued. “The boards of the church, the choir, the Sunday School and its staff will all be of mixed character. The co-pastors will have absolutely equal status and will alternate Sundays in preaching and in taking other parts of the service.”
Miracles can happen
It turns out Fisk’s proposal was something that Thurman and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, had already been discussing in great detail. Instead of recommending someone else, Thurman offered himself.
Fisk was stunned by Thurman’s offer to preach and was initially uncertain if the project could “measure up to the coming of so ‘big’ a man,” Fisk wrote to Thurman.
Fisk wrote that miracles can happen and that “finances would come, and a bigger building, and a work which would be significant, not only here but also to the whole nation,” to Thurman on October 30, 1943.
The fact that we’re still talking about the legacy of the Fellowship Church, and the chance to honor them by doing this is just amazing.
Peter Fitzsimmons
Thurman was granted one year of leave from Howard University and agreed to move to the West Coast to preach alongside Fisk.
The inaugural service for the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples was on Oct. 8, 1944. More than 400 people of all races attended the service, according to the Chronicle.
With Thurman’s prominence, the church quickly gained popularity, and even gained members from afar who couldn’t attend services, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
At first, the church struggled financially. It moved several times before finding a permanent home at 2041 Larkin Street in 1949 with help from Arthur Crosby, a prominent Quaker in Philadelphia, who chaired a national committee to secure funds for the new building.
Thurman, who passed away in 1981, viewed his time at the church as the apex of his career, something “he was most fond of, most proud of, and he was sure that it would be his most enduring legacy,” according to his biographer, Peter Eisenstadt.
Thurman left in 1953 and the same year was named one of Life Magazine’s 12 greatest preachers of the 20th century. He moved back east and took a position as the first Black dean of Boston University.
Thurman’s wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, was also nationally significant. One of the first Black graduates of Oberlin College in Ohio, she was an editor, historian and lecturer and advocated the world over for universal emancipation.
While in San Francisco, Bailey Thurman led the church’s Intercultural Committee and co-led a delegation to one of the earliest UNESCO conferences, convened in Paris in 1949. Bailey Thurman passed away in 1996.
‘I went on to be challenged’
The church’s architecture features tall, two-story smooth stucco walls with a large bell tower extending from its south side. Inside are wooden pews and stained glass windows, but it’s unlikely the building would be up for a landmark designation without the history that took place within its walls — and the legacy of the people who were a part of it.
“I was there [at] age eight, [and had] the opportunity to hear Dr. Howard Thurman and be confused by his incredible words, as they ushered the kids upstairs to the sanctuary and then back downstairs to the church school,” said Peter Fitzsimmons during the recent HPC meeting. “I went on to be challenged by Sue Bailey to express or explore my creative side, especially in the arts and acting.”
Fitzsimmons spent a significant portion of his life working with the church, and as an adult he helped put on jazz concerts there and established the Fellowship Theatre Guild alongside Felix Justice.
“The fact that we’re still talking about the legacy of the Fellowship Church, and the chance to honor them by doing this is just amazing,” he added. “And I wanted to thank you.”