The story of Walter A. Gordon is a story of firsts. First Black football player at UC Berkeley, and its first All-American. First Black graduate of what was then called Boalt Law School. And the first Black police officer of the Berkeley Police Department.
Gordon, born in 1894 in Atlanta, Georgia, as the grandson of enslaved people, moved with his family to Riverside in 1904, according to a bio on BlackPast. Besides being a trailblazing athlete, officer and student, he would also go on to become an attorney, a football coach and scout, chairman of the California Adult Authority and later governor of and federal judge for the U.S. Virgin Islands.
A new PBS documentary All American — The Walter Gordon Story, which includes interviews with Gordon’s family, civil rights experts and advocates, tells “the little-known story of Walter Gordon,” as the film’s intro page says.
Berkeley native Doug Harris, a former All-American college basketball player, former Golden State Warrior and former executive director of Athletes United for Peace, who has made several movies about notable Berkeley residents, produced the documentary.
“It was an incredibly difficult documentary to make because of the mere fact that so many things were happening simultaneously,” Harris told Berkeleyside of Gordon’s variform career. The film premiered at UC Berkeley in Jan. 20, hosted by Chancellor Carol Christ, and is running on PBS throughout February for Black History Month.
Gordon began his adult life as a prolific athlete, playing offense and defense in football at a time when pads were relatively skimpy, and was also a boxer and wrestler. But despite his prowess, since he was Black in the era of Jim Crow, he would not be permitted to stay at the same hotels as the rest of his team when they traveled for road games the years that he played, 1916-1918.
Even as he endured the country’s legacy of segregation, he became the first West Coast player selected for a Walter Camp All-American Team.
Following college Gordon went to work for BPD under August Vollmer, the city’s first police chief who first learned of Gordon due to his athletic career. White officers vowed not to work with Gordon, but Vollmer did not relent in his choice, and white officers eventually did, according to the documentary. At the same time, Gordon was attending law school and working part-time as a scout and assistant coach for his old football team at UC Berkeley.
“How many times are you going to have somebody who’s a lawyer and police officer at the same time? As a Black man, patrolling, going to the courtroom, it just shows you what kind of person he was,” Bernard Kinsey, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, philanthropist and Black history coordinator, says in the movie.
After law school Gordon opened a law practice while still working as a police officer before retiring his badge in 1930, according to BlackPast. That was where he met then-Alameda County District Attorney and later Gov. Earl Warren and, even though Gordon worked as a defense attorney, the men became friends.
Berkeley itself was segregated at the time, with Black residents typically forced to live in the western flats. There was a heavy presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the East Bay, including the one-time police chief in Piedmont, Burton Becker.
“Black people were fighting just for the right to be served,” Liam O’Donoghue, an East Bay historian and producer of the East Bay Yesterday podcast, says in the movie.
Walter Gordon’s wife, Elizabeth, would travel with him on scouting trips, assigned to count the number of steps quarterbacks would back up after snaps. Ed Gordon, the Gordons’ grandson, said his grandmother was “almost an enforcer; she was a woman who had grown up with an almost pre-feminine independence.”
Kinsey said there was a “misconception” at the time that Black people were Communists. But Gordon, like many local NAACP leaders at the time, was in fact anti-Communist, Susan Anderson, an African American historian, says in the movie.
“He was a real renaissance man during that period of time, when there were not many African Americans who had this kind of leadership role,” Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris says in the movie.
When state Sen. Jack Tenney put Gordon’s name on a list of Communists, Warren “wrote this passionate letter to Sen. Tenney and said, ‘You’ve got to take him off this list,’” according to Warren’s grandson, Jeffrey Earl Warren.
“That’s a serious thing for a white brother in a high place,” Cornel West says in the film.
In 1943 Warren sent Gordon to Los Angeles to investigate the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” out of skepticism that the Los Angeles Police Department and city officials there would investigate fairly, Warren’s grandson says in the movie. The same year Warren appointed Gordon to the Board of Prison Terms. Gordon would later chair the California Adult Authority and help shape the state’s parole system.
“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,” Ed Gordon said of Warren.
Gordon spent more than a decade in the U.S. Virgin Islands, beginning when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him governor in 1955. President Franklin Roosevelt had intended to make Gordon a federal judge there and, after Roosevelt’s death, President Harry Truman appointed Gordon to the position, which he held for 10 years.
After Gordon retired his judgeship, he returned to Berkeley, where he served on the Berkeley Housing Authority, the Redevelopment Agency and the Alameda County Grand Jury, Harris said.
Gordon’s return coincided with protests at UC Berkeley, the rise of the Black Panther Party and anti-Vietnam War protests. “The Berkeley that he left was completely different from the Berkeley that he returned home to,” Harris said. “He came back and hit the ground running just the same.”
In 1975 Gordon was selected for the College Football Hall of Fame.
Harris’ film raises the question: How much better are things for Black Americans, and especially Black Berkeleyans and Black UC Berkeley students, than they were just over a century ago, when Gordon played for UC Berkeley?
Nikki Jones, a Cal professor who specializes in African American communities, policing, racial and gender disparities, criminal justice and violence interventions, offers a possible answer toward the end of the 57-minute film.
“There’s probably more Black students on campus now than there were 100 years ago, but there’s fewer Black students on campus now than there were 30 years ago,” Jones says in the film. “I hear from Black students who tell me that they confront white students who still think that they are not as good as them.”
Harris said he got the idea for a film on Gordon while doing a film called Fair Legislation — The Byron Rumford Story. Rumford was a UC Berkeley alum, Berkeley pharmacist and Northern California’s first Black legislator, whom Gordon had mentored. He has worked on several documentaries and other films focusing on the Bay Area. Some are profiles of UC Berkeley alums and other people connected to the school, including Gene “The Dream” Ransom, a basketball standout killed in a freeway shooting in 2022, and Pete Newell, a former basketball coach.
“I try to tell interesting stories on people who’ve been overlooked, and Walter Gordon is a prime example,” Harris said. “How could someone like that be overlooked?”
