A fearless voice for the community

Gloria Winston Al-Sarag, a longtime Rochester activist, columnist and political consultant known for her fierce loyalties and pull-no-punches demeanor, died Nov. 11 at age 79.

Winston Al-Sarag filled many different roles in her long career in public service and the public eye. She worked for Rochester Jobs, the Monroe County Children’s Center, ABC Head Start and Laborers Local 435, among other places.

She was perhaps best known as a journalist and commentator in the city’s Black press, most recently with the Minority Reporter. She also wrote for About…Time magazine, the Buffalo Challenger and the Frederick Douglass Voice.

“It’s a gift, you know,” she told me in a 2019 interview. “There’s no formal education or anything behind it, it was just a God-given gift.”

Winston Al-Sarag’s writing, often brash and opinionated, was informed by her deep roots in the community. She was born in Newport News, Va., on July 24, 1945, but moved to Rochester at age 4. She lived next door to Anthony Jordan, the famous Black doctor, and across the street from Mount Olivet Baptist Church, where her funeral will be held at noon Saturday.

In the 2019 interview she described herself as a wayward child, intelligent but unfocused and inclined to fighting.

 “I was a nerd, you know; I played violin, I was 5’8” at 12 years old,” she said. “I used to have to take my glasses off, put them in my violin case, and I threw down.”

Winston Al-Sarag attended School 3 and then James Madison High School, from which she was expelled and sent to a boarding school in Tompkins County. She returned to East High School two years later but dropped out after marrying and getting pregnant at age 17. She didn’t get her GED until 15 years later, in 1978.

She was forever appreciative of the intercultural Clarissa Street neighborhood where she grew up—she worked at the jazz clubs there as a young woman and had friends of all races—and was a main organizer of the Clarissa Street Reunion events that began decades later.

At the same time, she increasingly involved herself in civil rights and political work, through the NAACP as well as the Black Panthers. She recalled looking for houses with her husband, Wallace Taggart, only to see people remove “for sale” signs as they came by.

“We wanted to live out by the lake, so we used to take the Sunday rides, you know, looking at houses for sale, and I distinctly remember people pulling signs up out of the yard,” she said. “You know, they saw us looking or copying down information, they would literally come out and pull the sign up out of the yard.”

Winston Al-Sarag lived in the Washington, D.C., area for parts of the 1970s and 1980s, working on the political campaigns of Jesse Jackson and D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. She returned to Rochester for good in 1990, working mostly in workforce development.

In Rochester, she was best known for her column “Straight, No Chaser” and as a close ally of longtime State Assemblyman David Gantt and former Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, whose inaugural campaign she also aided.

“Gloria was very blunt; she was one of the realest people I knew,” City Council member Willie Lightfoot Sr. said. “She was very loving, very kind, but unapologetically honest.”

“I’ve been on both sides of that pen of ‘Straight, No Chaser,’ the good side and the bad side,” he added. “It didn’t matter if you were her friend, she was going to call it how she saw it and you had to respect that, because nine out of 10 times, her perspective was pretty accurate and may have been a viewpoint you may not have thought about.”

Winston Al-Sarag was at a Gantt gathering in an Albany hotel in 2017 when she was punched in the face by Robert Scott Gaddy, a Rochester-based lobbyist who’d had a falling out with the Gantt camp; he was upset with something she had written about him. He pleaded guilty to harassment and was fined $250.

“There was no one more loyal, no one that loved harder, no one that told you how she felt, how you should feel and what you should do, more than my adopted Aunt Gloria Winston Al-Sarag,” Warren wrote in Winston Al-Sarag’s obituary with Millard E. Latimer and Son Funeral Directors.

Winston Al-Sarag is survived by her two sons, Wallace Jr. and Michael, as well as four grandchildren and a great-grandson.

There will be a viewing from 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, at Mount Olivet Baptist Church, 141 Adams St., followed by a funeral service at noon.

Justin Murphy is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. He is the research and communications coordinator for Our Local History and a former reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle.The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing  [email protected]. 

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