♪♪♪ Handoff into the center of the line.

They break a little bit over right guard and get out a little bit farther down to about the 42 yard, maybe the 43 yard line above California on that one.

So right now, a steady drive, Luke Beckett makes a stop for the Bears.

Ive been the broadcaster for Cal football for the past six decades and have, well, certainly witnessed a lot of great moments here at Memorial Stadium.

Through the University of Californias long history, a number of legendary All-American players have worn the blue and gold.

And when you look at it from a historical perspective, it started way back in 1918 with Walter Gordon.

Walter Gordon's legacy started on that football field at... at Cal when he became the first black football player at Cal.

This is all collegiately.

Off the football field, he was a renowned boxer and wrestler and a Pacific Coast champion in both sports.

And back in those days, you know, whether you are an athlete or a student, you had to qualify.

You know, they didn't do favors for athletes back in... in the teens.

And as an African-American, you know, he had to be pretty special.

And he was playing full time on offense and defense.

And remember, they didn't have the padding that they have today either.

Leather helmets and their padding would be very, very minimal.

And so it was a completely different game.

And the ferociousness of it was a very significant factor.

And they'd be able to compete game after game and for several years as well under those kind of conditions.

Boy, that was tough.

David: To understand this era in which Walter Gordon was a student here at Cal...

So, so few universities and colleges in the United States had any black students.

Joe: Everything about Walter Gordon's time at Cal was something that it's like, are you kidding?

This really happened?

When they would go on a road trip, Walter could not stay with the team.

He had to stay in a separate hotel.

He often had to travel to the city that they're playing in, in a separate conveyance.

Dave Newhouse: The first time the country probably heard about Walter Gordon was on the Walter Camp All-America team in 1918.

His all-American team was the definitive team.

That was it.

Joe: So the only time you would ever hear about West Coast football would be if you read it in the newspaper.

But Harvard and Yale and Penn and Brown and Rutgers, those were the schools that people cared about in college football in that era.

Now, Walter Camp, his all-American team, was the definitive team.

He would pick first team, second team, third team, and most of those All-America teams were players from the East Coast or Midwest.

And on the first team was Paul Robeson, the great actor, singer, activist.

And he played for Rutgers and he made the first team twice.

He was like about 63 ”, 220.

He played the line.

He was huge for those times.

Walter Gordon 61 ”, 200 pounds, was picked on the third team.

He was the first West Coast player ever selected by a Walter Camp all-American team, and he had contributed to Cal's early greatness in... in football.

Liam: So when Walter Gordon graduated from college around 1919, Berkeley was a much different place.

And so Walter Gordon was coming out of college into a world that was a huge upsurge in, uh, the KKK, for example, and not just in the Deep South, but even in the East Bay here.

For a little while, the police chief of Oakland was a member of the KKK.

There was Ku Klux Klan parades in Richmond, and I believe there was even a cross burning or two in the Berkeley Hills.

And so a lot of people, you know, the white majority were trying to hold things back.

And so he knew that he wanted to go to law school and become a lawyer.

David: The training of black lawyers was completely outside of the... the white university world.

There were virtually no black students at law schools in the United States in the early part of the 20th century.

Other than Howard, which of course was a-a, uh, historically black college.

Liam: August Vollmer is known as the father of modern policing because he really revolutionized the idea of what a police force was supposed to be.

He also was really quick to embrace emerging technology and so as soon as he saw the potential for using radios, for example, for a place to communicate, he really embraced that.

He really was one of the founders of the whole concept of criminology.

So, August Vollmer first became aware of Walter Gordon because of Walter Gordon's status as a star athlete.

When August Vollmer hired Walter Gordon, there were some white officers on the force who were appalled by that decision.

They told Vollmer, We're not going to work with a black man.

And they basically told Vollmer to not hire Gordon.

Vollmer didn't blink.

He said, okay, guys, uh, you can leave your badges on my desk on the way out.

It's been nice working with you, but you're not wanted here anymore.

And those guys who were opposing Gordon's employment changed their mind pretty quickly.

And, uh, learned how to work with him.

And so a lot of the incidents that he was involved in that ended up making the newspapers were things like getting in high speed car chases and shootouts with bootleggers, rum runners during the Roaring Twenties, the Prohibition era.

Dave: You know, when I was working at the Oakland Tribune, I read some clippings about Walt-Walter Gordon.

I mean, he was out there in shootouts.

He was kind of like Wyatt Earp.

I mean, he's firing away and people are firing away back at him.

He didn't flinch from trouble.

Liam: Walter Gordon's life during the 1920s is almost unbelievable In... in reading the stories of Walter Gordon, it seems like he almost had superhuman strength and stamina.

Dave: And the tales of his heroism there are just amazing, you know, he protected the streets of... of Berkeley.

He didn't have easy shifts.

He wasn't-- he didn't have a desk job.

He was out on the street.

Liam: And at the same time that he's working, catching criminals, you know, chasing people all around the East Bay, he was going to law school earning a law degree.

So he's pioneering all these fields at the same time, which is just astonishing.

Thelton: When Walter Gordon attended Boalt Hall Boalt Hall was one of the top law schools in the country.

And the top law school in the western United States.

Liam: At the same time, he's working as an assistant coach and chief scout for one of the greatest college football teams of all time, definitely of their era.

Joe: You know, the Cal Bears greatest time in all their history was the Andy Smith era in the late teens for Cal football.

He had... he had years where they had-- the opposition or even scored a touchdown against them.

They had game after game where they would shut teams out.

They went to the Rose Bowl constantly.

They had great teams.

They were the team on the West Coast, period.

USC was not a factor.

UCLA was not a factor.

It was Cal football.

Dave: And Cal football back then was no joke.

They were the premier team on the coast, you know, the wonder teams who didn't lose a game for five years from like 1920 through the ‘24 season.

They dominated the college scene in the early twenties.

Looking back on Walter Gordon's life, how you do as much that he did all at once...

He's on the Berkeley police force.

He's going to Cal Boalt.

I mean Cal Boalt, that's not easy.

Liam: Ah, uh, apparently, he only slept a few hours a night and he continued that pace for years.

So it's just unbelievable that he was able to accomplish so much.

Thelton: Let me tell you how Walter Gordon went to law school, worked as an assistant football coach, and then come up and study enough to graduate near the top of his class is superhuman.

Ed Gordon: My grandfather loved Berkeley.

It was a place where he became a part of a community that was evolving at the time.

And I think between being a member of the police force and going to law school, he came to the realization that the best way to advance African-American life in this country was through the law.

Bernard Kinsey: So he goes on and opens a practice to help black folks and indigenous people in the Berkeley-Oakland community.

And he was also a police officer.

I mean, how many times you gonna have somebody that's a lawyer and a police officer at the same time and as a black man, you know, patrolling, going to a courtroom?

I mean, it's just... it just shows you what kind of, uh, person he was.

Susan Anderson: Walter Gordon was very well known in Berkeley and beyond, uh, because of his role at UC Berkeley, because of his practice as an attorney and also because of his association with the white establishment.

Liam: So during that era, Berkeley was kind of divided into two parts.

There was the hills and the university, which was more white, more upper class.

And then there was the West Side which was a lot more industrial.

Uh, this was really the only part of town that black people and other people of color were allowed to live in.

There was, you know, all kinds of racial housing restrictions.

So black people were fighting just for the right to be served.

David: This entire period was so difficult for black Americans to break out of the Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow Society that followed them everywhere.

Annc: Chamber of Commerce officials are seeking constantly to make Berkeley a finer place to live.

Susan Anderson: Berkeley was a racist city.

It was a segregated city.

Discrimination was rampant.

Berkeley did not have even one black employee.

Wasn't just, no black teachers.

There wasn't even a janitor in the Berkeley school district.

And white residents were working to keep parts of Berkeley lily white.

And one of the parts that, uh, white residents were most adamant about keeping white was the area around Cal, the premier public university in the state.

Jeffrey: My grandfather was a big, big sports fan.

He just loved all sports, although he wasn't very athletic himself.

My grandfather was kind of a mans man.

He helped, uh, form the, uh, Sigma Phi fraternity.

He got his law degree in 1914, at Cal.

I mean, he was a-a Shriner and a mason, and, uh, was always a member of various, uh, service groups.

And, uh, I-I understand he actually met Walt Gordon through the twenties, uh, when Papa Warren was a- a D.A.

in Alameda County.

And so they ended up working together in law enforcement.

Ed: And I think he saw in my grandfather an individual who was like-minded.

Jeffrey: Walt Gordon was a policeman, so he's rounding up bad guys and trying to prosecute them.

And so he- he's liked on both sides of the fence.

And yet he and Papa Warren remained fast friends during all of this.

Susan: Walter Gordon was a conservative man.

He did not really want to push any boundaries.

Liam: And Walter Gordon went from being just a lawyer challenging discrimination to the president of the NAACP.

Ed: And, uh, his work within the NAACP as it began, uh, really is tied to the other things that were going on in the African-American community.

Specifically, you have the rise of, uh, both the NAACP, which is a national movement, but it was also countered by the Back to Africa movement of Marcus Garvey.

Susan: Elizabeth Gordon was an activist herself and her involvement in civic life and social life is actually very typical for black women.

She and Walter Gordon were an extraordinary couple.

Walter Gordon was doing more things than most people do in several lifetimes, but they still are an example of how black couples operated when he was head of the NAACP in Alameda County.

Ed: My grandmother's role was both, uh, as a partner to my grandfather, but also sometimes as, uh, almost an enforcer.

She was a woman who had grown up with a- an almost pre-feminist independence.

And so she really had a, uh, real sense of place.

And she infused that into her children.

And one of my grandfather's, uh, most important sort of principles was that criminals began in the home and that you had to, you know, good parents were the best defense against crime.

My grandparents had a bottomless pit or a bottomless well of energy.

It was just nonstop.

Susan: In the Bay Area, the NAACP was formed in 1915 and it was immediately involved in campaigns against lynching.

And the NAACP, by and large, in the Bay Area and in other places, local chapters were led by people who were anti-communist.

William Hastie: There were all sorts of organizations, frankly, left wing organizations, who were joining in the civil rights efforts of the twenties, thirties, forties the fifties.

In fact, Walter Gordon had communists and left wing groups who were trying to influence what he was doing when, uh, he was, uh, in connection with the... uh, the police department and other activities.

Susan: Were...

Were looking at a specific historical period, the Great Depression.

We're looking at the failure of capitalism for the American people.

Liam: So Walter Gordon was in an absolutely unique position during his time as the president of the NAACP because he was actually friends with some of the white political leaders that he was challenging.

And he was very focused on this idea that change would really only come about through the courts, through changing laws, through legal challenges.

John Burris: I- I think Walter Gordon, probably when viewed more as an Uncle Tom, doing that period of time, uh, because he had ability to get along very easily, uh, with the white community, he was respected by them.

He had been an all-American, but he had been a police officer.

So he understood and could talk their language.

In many ways, he was a bridge.

He was a bridge to the African-American community.

And some of the people in the African Community, would have thought that he was not aggressive enough, he was not, uh, vocal enough and certainly was not the kind of advocate that they would like to have had.

Liam: So other people, at the, um, NAACP even were sometimes critical of him because when they wanted to push a little bit harder, he would sometimes hold back.

There were a lot of its leaders who were very skeptical about him coming into the leadership because of his association with the white establishment.

Nikki Jones: Certainly at that time, theres a... a deep distrust among black people, um, for the white establishment and to see, uh, a black man rise to the position that he... he rose to, um, based on the vouching and... and sponsorship of... of elite white people, that is going to reinforce that suspicion.

Liam: C.L.

Dellums, who was just a titan of, you know, the civil rights struggle in terms of the unionization in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the vice president when Gordon was the president of local NAACP.

Susan: And C.L.

Dellums, for some reason, when he looked at Walter Gordon, he saw something different than the rest of the leadership.

He saw somebody who could get them access.

John: Walter Gordon, um, as a lawyer, uh, practicing lawyer, became very active in the NAACP, too, in that period of time.

He had a sense of rationality, a sense of a coordinating the issues and bringing them to the point where everyone could understand them.

William: But there were virtually no black lawyers who were active in civil rights work and successful in civil rights work, that didn't have some affiliation with the National Lawyers Guild.

The National Lawyers Guild was a left wing organization, uh, that was committed to change in a variety of areas, uh, but including racial change.

In this case, an emergent civil rights movement in the United States represented a target for the Communists and the social organizations to get a foothold in America.

You had efforts by the American Communists, uh, to try and take over the burgeoning black civil rights or emerging black civil rights movement.

These were organizations that, in my view, uh, were seeking to take control for their own purposes, that were not necessarily the purposes of the civil rights organizations.

Like the National Lawyers Guild or whether it was the Scottsboro Boys or... or particular events that occurred in that period.

Dr. Cornel West: But it's around a struggle with the Communist Party because the Communist partys adopted the Scottsboro Boys as a kind of symbol of just how barbaric the American empire was, its predatory capitalist orientations and its hatred of black people.

Bernard: Any black person back in the 30s, 40 ‘s, 50s that challenged the system, they, first thing they said that you had to be communists because you could not possibly think about America any other way then but being communist.

Nikki: The term communist becomes a way to mark people and a way to mark black people.

Right?

As... as criminal, as... as anti-American, as threats.

So to be called, to be classified as a... as a communist came with consequences for... for... for black people.

Dr. West: The Communist party is in struggle with NAACP over the Scottsboro boys, both of them working together at each others throats.

NAACP doesnt want to allow the Communist party to use these brothers as an excuse for a massive indictment of America.

And the Communist party is critical to NAACP because they think theyre not strong and militant enough because they know the barbarism thats taken place in terms of these young brothers being, uh, you know, manipulated and falsely charged and so forth.

And so it was one of those very tension-ridden coalitions that collapsed over the plight of these precious brothers who were being in so many ways, um, uh, scapegoated.

Susan: I think it might be hard for us to understand sometimes how extreme that situation was.

And the Communist Party was able to definitely increase its size and its influence during that time.

But another reason they were able to do that is because that out of all American political parties, they were the one party that stood for black equality and they said it.

And the NAACP, by and large, in the Bay Area and in other places, local chapters were anti-- the... led by people who were anti-communist.

Berkeley where all this was taking place with Walter Gordon and others, was the home of what became one of the best known African-American leaders in the Communist Party USA, William Patterson.

There was a radical, actually, tradition and heritage in Berkeley, and the NAACP raised a lot of money in California.

African-Americans in California were actually a fairly affluent group of people compared to the rest of the country.

Walter White was the head of the national NAACP based in New York, and he had a close relationship with the branch that was based in the Bay Area.

He and Walter Gordon knew each other personally, and they definitely worked together in these early years in the anti-lynching campaigns.

As a very fair skinned black man, he was able to pass for white and go down into Georgia and other places and witness lynchings.

His tenure as president of the National NAACP was characterized by the campaigns against lynching.

This was a time when there... when there was a rise in lynchings and not... it was not confined to the South.

These mob- white mobs, uh, wreaking violence against black people and black property, a rise in lynching.

It was it was a time of emergency.

Dr. West: And what was Ida B. Wells-Barnett concerned about?

American terrorism.

Lynching.

50 years, every two and a half days, some black child, a black woman, a black man hanging from some tree that southern... black bodies swaying in the southern breeze.

And so Walter White finally adopts an anti-lynching posture to support an anti-lynching bill.

He works with the grand Walter Gordon together.

Susan: If you look at Walter Gordon, his views, he obviously was an anti-communist, just out of the box.

Liam: He did not want to have rabble rousing protests.

He did not want to have riots.

And I think this is one of the reasons why he was very worried about the communist influence on the black civil rights movement and the NAACP of this era, because he saw that the Communists influence might convince black people to, you know, do things that might get them in trouble in terms of, you know, political uprisings and things like that.

And he thought that would backfire.

Ed: Anybody who represented anything remotely tied to social change, tied to civil rights was going to be tarred with that brush.

And even though he was not in any way, uh, involved, um, there were people who were.

John: The life that Walter Gordon led is quite remarkable.

He was a real renaissance man during that period of time.

There were not very many African-Americans who had this kind of leadership role and had this remarkable different level of skills.

Paul Robeson is about the only person I can think of during that period of time.

Bernard: And the way I think about a Walter Gordon, he was Paul Robeson before Paul Robeson was Paul Robeson.

Here's a guy that becomes, uh, all-American.

And these parallels with Paul Robeson are just striking.

And they call Paul Robeson a renaissance guy.

And I think you can put Walter Gordon in that same, uh, same category.

Dr. West: Paul Robeson was a star.

You know, he's an actor.

He's a singer.

He was the most famous black man in the world in 1939.

I don't think there's a figure in the history of the American empire who could claim the title of Renaissance man more than the great Paul Robeson already got an integrity that can't be violated.

And a deep conviction that can't be undercut.

Thats what we talk about when we talk about Paul Robeson and, uh... uh, Walter Gordon had his own kind of fire, his own kind of integrity, his own sense of how you bear witness in the face of a vicious white supremacy.

It's just that he's much more tied to the mainstream, the establishment.

He's willing to work with a Republican Party, Republican Party that was much more progressive.

On the one hand, he could be inside of the establishment, almost like the spook who sat next door.

But at the same time, he's part of an oppositional movement in the NAACP, fighting for civil rights, fighting for desegregation.

So he's going to be president of the NAACP.

And the establishment is trying to use Walter to neutralize the black radicals.

He knows that they tried to use it.

And yet at the same time, he's trying to create enough space so that the NAACP can fight against lynching, can call for desegregation.

You still had Jim Crow Junior in Oakland and Berkeley and you still had segregation.

It just wasnt legal it was de facto.

And the NAACP was fighting that segregation, you see the anthem of black people is lift every voice.

They lift every echo.

So if you lift every voice, people find their voice.

Walter Gordon found his voice.

He never gave up on black people.

He never gave up on... on... on wanting to help.

But he did it in his own way.

Dave Newhouse: Walter Gordon did some amazing things as a coach, assistant coach at Cal for... for 24 years.

Joe Starkey: His credentials as a coach were outstanding.

That's why they used him as their advance scout so often in looking at the other teams, because he had a real feel for the game.

Dave: I read where he could go scout a football game and not have to write too much down because it was all committed to his memory and he had this acute mind, this, you know, that he could see something and he didn't necessarily even have to wr- write it down, that he imparted great information, pertinent information that helped Cal win football games.

Joe: I mean, he was an assistant coach going from Andy Smith.

I mean, that's a period of more than two decades that he was involved with the Cal football program.

I mean, he really if he wanted to be, I think, uh, could have been a sensational head coach at either the pro or college level because he understood the X's and O's so very, very well.

Ed: Football was a large and important element of the Gordon family for a long time, but one of the more interesting things was that my grandmother would travel with him on his scouting trips and would be assigned by him to count the number of steps that the quarterback on the opposing team would take when they dropped back to make a pass.

Dave: There was one incident in Walter's career at Cal athletically that stands out because there was racism at that time, even between the rivals and Cal and Stanford, you know, had boxing teams.

He was a renowned boxer and wrestler and a Pacific Coast champion in both sports.

And Walter was this premier heavyweight pugilist.

And Stanford would not compete against Cal because they didn't want to fight a black.

Jeffrey: My father, Jim Warren, he went to Cal in, uh... uh, 37 to 41, and Walt Gordon was his coach.

In, uh, 1941, here's Walt Gordon.

He's an assistant coach.

And his son, Walt Gordon Jr. is on the team.

And Georgia Tech makes it known to Cal, they're not going to play Cal if Walt Gordon Jr. is in the game.

Joe: Georgia Tech was a big deal in those days.

They went to bowl games on a regular basis.

In that era, by the way, they were known as The Ramblin Wreck, and now they're scheduled to play Cal and they don't like the fact that Cal has a black player and they are particularly upset about this, uh, fact to the point that they will not play the game if a black player is allowed to play on the Cal team.

Jeffrey: So what does a father do?

What would a man do in that time?

And I don't think any of us have any idea what it was like to be black in 1941, or the thirties or the twenties when you had to negotiate all these situations.

Joe: And so they got, uh, saved in many ways, if you want to put it that way, because it was also the weekend of Pearl Harbor.

So Pearl Harbor, the bombing at Pearl Harbor canceled the game.

So we'll never know for sure whether or not Cal would capitulate or not.

And so there was no Cal, Georgia Tech football game.

And I guess we shouldn't be that surprised with a Southern school, particularly in the 1940s.

David Oppenheimer: Earl Warren is, a this just doesn't exist today, he is a liberal Republican, is then elected governor of the state of California, is talked about as a possible president of the United States.

He is a pro civil rights Republican.

And some of that pro civil rights policy that you see in Earl Warren comes out of this close friendship that he had with Walter Gordon.

Jeffrey: Earl Warren was the favorite son of California when he was governor.

He was really good at getting along with people.

Papa Warren loved the law.

He was a politician.

He was a governor.

A very good man, followed the law, but he was also very human.

And so one of his first things as governor was the zoot suit riots, which had to do with Mexican-Americans who wore zoot suits.

So they had a riot where servicemen came down to an Hispanic community and everybody was thinking, these Mexican-Americans are not patriotic and they're not enlisted in the armed forces.

And there was a riot down there.

John Burris: During the early 1940s, there was the Zoot suit riots that took place in Los Angeles.

And the governor then asked Walter Gordon, uh, to come in and do an investigation, uh, into that incident.

This is very, very important because what the governor was looking for was someone with credibility.

Jeffrey: So LAPD was going to be in charge of the investigation of the zoot suit riots.

Well, Papa Warren never trusted them.

Papa Warren was always fearful of the LAPD.

City council was corrupt.

The Board of supervisors were corrupt, the sheriff was corrupt.

Everything was corrupt.

John: So it- basically he needed someone like Walter Gordon to really offer some, uh, insight and credibility into it.

And he did so at the interest of serving the governor and trying to be helpful to the people who were involved, because at the end of the day, they needed someone who could objectively evaluate what happened and... and offer up some opinions that... that sort of offset some of the negative press that had been given.

Jeffrey: So Walt heads up the investigation and it turns out that it wasn't the way, just like today in the news that it really happened, that it wasn't a bunch of Mexican-Americans who were being unpatriotic.

That wasn't what happened.

And then the senator, Jack Tenney goes and puts Walter Gordon on a list as a communist, because back then everybody thought anybody who defended Minorities, whether they be Mexican-American or African-American, was naturally a communist.

And this was all a Russian, uh, plan to undermine America.

Dr: West: So what happens is Walter Gordon still told the truth about the zoot suit case, and they put him on the communist list.

They put him on the blacklist anyway.

If ever there was a brother who was not a communist, thats Walter Gordon.

Jeffrey: Papa Warren really admired Walt Gordon.

So he wrote this passionate letter to Senator Tenney and said, “You've got to take them off this list.

You cannot have him on this list.

This is the most honest, worthy, justifiable man I've ever known.

” Dr: West: That's a serious, courageous thing for a white brother at a-- in a high place.

He knows Walter Gordon is a... is a man of integrity, so he writes a letter as governor to get him off the communist list.

Ed Gordon: And it was the job that he performed during that commission that I think led Earl Warren to see that he would be an appropriate person, at least to represent the law enforcement aspect of changing the California penal system.

John: Earl Warren, understanding how the prison, uh, system was developing at the time, wanted someone, Im certain, with his kind of experience.

But more importantly, he had thought about these issues because these were issues that directly related to his practice.

So he knew about human suffering.

He knew about human crime.

Ed: And in 1943, Earl Warren put my grandfather on the California Parole Board.

In 1944, the Prison Reorganization Act created the adult authority, and my grandfather was one of the three founding members of that committee.

And I think he saw in my grandfather an individual who was like minded in that he didn't just see prisoners as people that you threw away or that they were just put in a... a cell and you threw away the key, that there was a point to trying to change people's lives.

Dr. West: And you got your precious child coming out of jail.

And it couldn't be some right wing white brother who's sitting up there who refuses the parole and Walter Gordon is there and said, Ima give your child another chance.

That makes a difference in people's lives.

Ed: When the adult authority was originally created, it was meant to be a three person committee with a rotating chairman.

When my grandfather was made, the chairman, that stopped and for nine years he remained in that post as the chairman of the adult authority.

John: The Board of Prisons dealt with people who were in custody for crimes that they had committed or not committed.

And he was a person who had experience, uh, dealing with, uh, criminals.

So you have some empathy for the kind of lives that they have lived and probably and... and had some concerns about the length of sentences that people receive went to state prison, and whether or not there was anything he could do about it.

Ed: His idea was that you um... you had to relate to people and that if you could relate to people and begin to understand their stories and get them to understand that you care about them, that was the way that you would begin to address some of the issues of... of, you know, the... the underlying causes of crime.

Nikki Jones: I think that the idea of indeterminate sentencing was to be more clear and more transparent.

Right?

And to address some of the abuse of discretion.

At the time, people were really hesitant, uh, you know, to embrace indeterminate sentencing but Walter Gordon believed that it was a more, uh, realistic way to deal with people who were in prison, and also that it would encourage the ideal of the system, uh, rehabilitation, which certainly wasn't the ideal that was embraced by everybody.

John: And if you think about it, he understood African-Americans were being sentences to-- for... for crimes longer than... than whites were at that period of time, and that they had sentences that... that were extremely unrelated sometimes to the crime that had taken place.

So this presented a wonderful opportunity for him to do something about that.

And so the, uh, the governor, Earl Warren, seeing that he had this kind of experience, really decided to take advantage of it.

Ed: My grandfather was a member of the Commonwealth Club and spoke to it often.

Uh, he was the main spokesman for the adult authority and was well known from his football days.

Radio Annc: I next present, the chairman of the Adult Authority of the state of California, past president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Mr. Walter A. Gordon.

Walter Gordon: It is my considered opinion that Governor Warren should be returned to office for many reasons.

Governor Warren has consistently importuned the legislature to pass a Fair Employment Practice Act, his support of equal opportunity to all citizens and the earning of a living.

Ed: He was a gregarious guy who just he liked people and he felt he had something to say.

And he was going to go out there and say it.

Dr. West: His best friend, one of his best friends, Earl Warren now Chief justice.

Do you think that his magnificent influence on Earl Warren could help produce under the Warren court, Brown V. Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court decision calling for the desegregation of education in the history of the country?

Bernard Kinsey: No one can think about America without thinking about Brown versus Board.

It required every city, every state, every county to change their laws.

All of this coming out of the same struggle of equality for black people to be looked and viewed legally the same as... as White.

Jeffrey: Remember, Brown versus Board of Education had been argued when Chief Justice Vinson was the Supreme Court Justice.

And in those days, they thought it was going to be five-four in favor of uh, upholding Plessy V. Ferguson in favor of segregation.

And so Papa Warren realized that whatever was going on down South and the school segregation, you know, cases, it was just wrong.

And school sponsored segregation was, in his mind, clearly unfair Ed: And he got a lot of grief for that, obviously, and particularly even from President Eisenhower who said, “If I had known you were going to be like that, I never wouldve picked you.

” And Earl Warren said, “Well, that was because people werent paying attention to who I was.

And if they had looked at who I was, they wouldnt have been surprised.

” Jeffrey: The question is why did he have the sensitivity that he had?

Papa Warren grew up poor in Bakersfield, then he went to Cal.

So, he didnt have any experiences with Blacks.

and everybody thought he was a traitor.

They called him a communist.

And of course, they thought he just wrecked the country because he wanted to integrate the schools and felt that it was unjust that you could not have, uh, government-sponsored integration.

And Papa Warren was always big about were making progress.

And so Papa Warren was able to deliver a nine-love decision, which he felt the United States needed.

Dr. West: The Warren Court did more for black people than any other court in the history of the American judiciary.

Thelton: Warren's sensitivity that he brought to the Brown versus Board of Education came from his friendship with Walter Gordon.

I think he understood, uh, black people in a way he wouldn't have had he not been lifelong friends with Walter.

Bernard: All of that came down, all of that came out of this one law, this same idea of... of leveling the playing field in America, because everything that's happening is country has happened because black people have been the point of the spear in terms of changing laws that were wrong.

Carol Christ: Walter Gordon's impact on this university was extraordinary.

And in 1955, Walter Gordon was the first black man to receive the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Award.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler was a legendary president of the University of California back in the days when the University of California was just one campus in Berkeley.

So it was a big deal getting the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Award.

Jeffrey: You know, Brown versus Board of Education was 1954 and then in 1955 Ike appointed Walt Gordon to be governor of the Virgin Islands.

William: The real reason he was selected was because of his close, very close relationship with Earl Warren, the very powerful Republican chief justice of the United States.

Warren was a huge admirer of... of Walter Gordon.

Ed:There was a serious situation that evolved when my grandfather was being vetted for the governorship and that involved his sister in law.

She had been involved in radical causes for a couple of decades.

And when the FBI carried out their investigation, that came up and he knew that these influences were taken seriously by people like McCarthy or others who were, um, at that time deeply involved in anti-communist efforts.

Jeffrey: So heres Papa Warren, Chief Justice of the United States, Walt Gordon holding up his right hand to swear him in as governor of the Virgin Islands.

Dr. West: So, the Virgin Island is a satellite country of the American Empire.

And that means in fact that you disproportionately shape the destiny of the precious people on those islands or in those territories.

So, you can even end up appointing governors of a Virgin Island without an election, without the Virgin Island brothers and sisters themselves voting.

William: When Roosevelt came in, Blacks were starting to emerge, uh, as significant factors in the thirties.

And my father was selected to be uh, one of the solicitors attorneys with the Department of Interior.

And one of his first assignments was to work on the development and evolution of something called the Organic Act for the US Virgin Islands, which was basically the legal framework that brought the Virgin Islands into the American legal system.

After his work on the early stages of the Organic Act with the Department of the Interior, uh, Roosevelt decided that he was going to appoint my dad as the first Black federal judge, uh, in the Virgin Islands.

And with Roosevelts death, uh... uh, Truman came in and Truman appointed him as governor of the Virgin Islands.

It's clear in my mind and based on my sense of politics, this is not something that Roosevelt would have done at that point, because Roosevelt, uh... uh, was not looking to favorably on my father.

Now, that's the process that caused huge controversy because there were a whole lot of members, uh, who did not want a black appointed to anything.

In 1955, Gordon was, uh... uh, selected, uh, to become governor of the Virgin Islands, and a lot of people were really surprised.

They didn't know much about Walter Gordon.

Dr. West: The folk in Virgin Islands dont know him.

He aint never been there, but hes governor.

Why would they want to put the brother way off in the boonies in the Virgin Islands?

William: The Virgin Islands were in our, uh, the most highly concentrated African-American territory.

By that I mean political territory in the United States with that came, and still does to some extent, uh, some issues that are somewhat unique.

The percentage of people of color in the Virgin Islands is so high that you wouldn't be surprised if people said, well, there's no issue.

The problem with that is it's not just color.

Theres also the question of prejudice based on degree of color, light skinned and dark skinned.

There's also the question of how educated you are.

One of the difficult things that my dad faced and that Walter Gordon faced is neither of them was [Virgin Islands dialect] “born here, ” which is the Virgin Island way of saying neither one of them was locally born.

And the Virgin Islands unicameral legislature uh, could close ranks on just a few things.

One of them was us against them.

And the governors who were not from the Virgin Islands face that as much as anyone.

So with all of that said, one of the issues that a governor faces is what are the opportunities for people of the Virgin Islands?

Uh, what is the ability of the islands to... uh, to... to assist people who have low or very little income?

You know, you don't find money on the streets.

Uh, sometimes you need government assistance.

One of the funny... one of the funny issues that I know people in the Virgin Islands talked about all the time was jobs.

Ed: There were the issues that were involved that divided the politics in the Virgin Islands, whether it was the question of how to get labor or whether it was the question of where to get that labor, and finally, the question of water.

The water was the issue that drove him nearer to the edge of wanting to quit, and that was because there were too many interests involved, too much money involved.

And my grandfather only served one term as governor and I think a big reason behind why he declined a second term would have been politics.

He did not enjoy politics and the U.S. government did not want to spend a dime if they could avoid it.

The second being the people, the people of the islands themselves.

He knew that they wanted to elect their own representative.

So in 1959, President Eisenhower appointed my grandfather, the U.S. federal judge for the district of the Virgin Islands.

The federal judge for the Virgin Islands had a lot more influence and power and it was more in line with his philosophy of integrity, of service and of change that could be achieved through the law.

Dr. West: Walter Gordon, one of the most complicated brothers that, come along in a long, long time.

Thelton: Walter Gordon was a true all-American in... in the best sense of that word.

He was all-American as a citizen.

He was one of the top citizens.

Bernard: And we have, uh... uh, a saying that we use called the Myth of Absence.

The myth of absence says that we as black people are invisible presences in this country.

And it basically says that a Walter Gordon could live and die and we not know about him in the... in the common practice of reporting in this country.

Dr. West: Let us always appreciate, the Walter Gordon's because they have a role to play.

John Burris: It's heartbreaking to know that you have this university with 28,000 students, really smart African-American students coming out of high schools.

And for whatever reasons, they're not getting into U.C.

Berkeley.

That to me, the danger and the problem with all of this is, it effects the future generation.

Nikki: And so one way to think about this is 100 years later, are things better at Cal for black students than they were 100 years ago?

Um, well, there's probably more black students on campus now than there were a hundred years ago.

But there's fewer black students on campus now than there was 30 years ago.

John: The white population voted on at least, uh, more than one occasion to limit, um a- affirmative action uh, at UC Berkeley and other UC schools, and thats a public policy decision that the community has made, unfortunately, that... that represents an attitude here that everyone appreciates, least the white community knows, that education is a key to the future.

Carol: I remember when I was meeting a few years ago with a group of black students and they-- one of the first things they said to me is we walk through Sproul Hall and all we see on the walls-- there are lots of pictures of Cal history on the walls are white faces.

Nikki Jones: So what does that mean?

It means that people on campus and I hear from black students who tell me that they confront white students who still think that they are not as good as them.

Right?

Who don't want to have them in their study groups.

Right?

That they don't feel a sense... a deep sense of belonging on the broader campus.

Hardy Nickerson: I've had...

I've had three kids come through Cal.

Audience: Thats right.

Hardy: Alright?

They did not have the same experience as I did, along with B. McGee and Majett.

Alright?

They did not have that experience.

They were alienated, they felt alienated here on campus.

Thelton: These are times in which people are denigrating the ability of blacks and racial relations are at... at... at an all time low.

And its not enough just to have athletes going to university.

Its important for us to have other professions there that come out of there, including as, uh me, and lawyers and physicists and all other kinds of professions that people need in order to make a town move and make a country move.

And for us not, uh, preparing students and graduating students, that means theres not going to be as many, uh, thinkers, critical thinkers out there as there should be.

Bernard: And there are just so many instances of remarkable black people having done so much and got little or no, uh, recognition for it.

So the quest we always ask is if the myth of absence is operating then, is it operating now?

And It is.

Nikki: We understand that it is not only our experience, but it's a collective experience of blackness.

Uh, and so that would suggest that we haven't moved very far and there's still a lot of work to do.

Carol: We have to rewrite our history to include in it all the forgotten heroes, to enable our young people to understand who has gone before them and who can be their models.

It's critically important, I think, to know about Walter Gordon today in these trying times, who overcame the things he came to excel at every step of his life.

Dave Newhouse: Walter Gordon, just as one of Cal's great early alums and maybe one of its greatest alums.

When I think of Walter Gordon.

I think of Jackie Robinson.

I...

I think Walter Gordon was the Jackie Robinson tenfold.

Carol: He's such an extraordinary person.

He is indeed a forgotten legend.

Nikki: You can look up and... and... and see this history of people who have won.

Right?

And be motivated by that.

So I think there's something to be learned from spending time with that history and with figures like Walter Gordon.

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