Susan Gitt Gordon was born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a progressive newspaper editor. She married Edmund W. Gordon in 1948 in Philadelphia, and by 1954 the couple had moved to Rockland County. The Gordons were active residents of Pomona, and of the Skyview Acres cooperative community in which they lived, for more than fifty years.

          Dr. Gordon earned her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC, and practiced pediatrics from an office in Haverstraw from 1954 to 1958. In 1958, she became an associate professor of pediatrics, first at New York Medical College and then at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She taught at these two institutions and their teaching hospitals—Metropolitan Hospital, the Children's Hospital of the New York Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York, and Harlem Hospital, respectively—for twenty-five years.

          From 1978 to 1981, Dr. Gordon was a member of the National Panel on the Measurement of the Program Effects of Head Start. She served on the East Ramapo Central School District Board of Education for eight years and was board president for three of them. She also served on the boards of Nyack Hospital and of the Martin Luther King Multi-Purpose Center in Spring Valley. She was one of three women recognized in 2000 at the African American Chamber of Commerce of Westchester and Rockland Counties’ Women's History Month luncheon and, in 2006 she was honored, along with her husband, by the Rockland County Commission on Human Rights and inducted into the Rockland County Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

          Susan and Edmund Gordon’s children are carrying on their parents’ life work of promoting social justice, particularly as it pertains to health, education, and the environmental and material well-being of marginalized communities, through the CEJJES Institute and Library, based out of the couple’s beloved Pomona home. The institute gives special attention to the well-being of children and works primarily in collaboration with communities of color, particularly those of African descent.