San Francisco Street Renamed to Honor City's First Black Firefighter

For 12 years Earl Gage Jr. was San Francisco's only Black firefighter.

Gage was hired by the San Francisco Fire Department in 1955 at age 28 after graduating from UC Berkeley. During his time at the department Gage pushed to improve racial diversity, despite facing a torrent of racial abuse from his colleagues.

Gage will now be memorialized in the city's Western Addition, after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to name a block-long street in the city after him last week. The section of Willow Street between Buchanan and Laguna Streets is to be renamed Earl Gage Jr. Street.

The Texas-born firefighter retired from the department in 1983, and died in 2017 at the age of 90. That's when the president of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association, Sherman Tillman, thought of the street naming idea, per KQED.

“I think looking at a person who could go through all the things that Earl Gage did, and still have love for his fellow man, it's just inspiring,” Tillman told KQED. “Everyone needs to know that type of story. Everybody needs to know that type of love in a person that could withstand all the hate and anguish, and the ‘We don't want you,’ but still overcome it.”

2020 has seen a national reckoning on race and how we commemorate figures from the past, after the historic resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Schools, streets and even ski resorts across California and the country are in the process of changing their names.

During Gage's tenure at the department he faced a series of racial abuse. Fellow firefighters soiled and threw out his mattresses and refused to sleep on a bed after he had slept there. Gage would bring his own mattress in his car and carried it in and out of the different stations, according to his daughter Blondell Chism.

“He set out to be just a person in the fire department — who happened to be a Black person — and really wanted to be seen that way, even though the society was set up very differently. I think that being said, he stood his ground for 12 years and kept pushing.” Chism told KQED.

The level of racism and threats directed at Gage resulted in him moving from fighting fires to serving as director of community services, becoming the first Black man to hold a departmental command position. There he improved the diversity among staff and also launched two departmental programs, field trips for children to visit fire departments and seasonal holiday decorations at firehouses.

Andrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: [email protected] | Twitter: @AndrewChamings

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