An activist and educator rooted in Black history

David Anderson, a teacher and activist who used storytelling to build strength and resilience in Rochester’s Black community, died Aug. 13 at age 96.

He had been ill for some time, according to his son, David Anderson Jr., and died after a short stint in hospice. He was diagnosed with dementia nearly a decade ago and also suffered a stroke earlier this year.

His funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at Linehan Chapel on the campus of Nazareth University, where he taught for many years.

As a young man, Anderson was an active participant in Rochester’s boisterous civil rights movement, helping shape the direction of Action for a Better Community and the Urban League of Rochester. He spent most of his working years in the more prosaic field of community and parent engagement within the Rochester City School District. In the second half of his life, he reached thousands of children and adults through storytelling, impersonating Frederick Douglass and the Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Anderson nearly always wore a pin portraying Sankofa, a symbol from the Akan language of Ghana that means “go back and fetch it.” He took it as a nickname and a guiding philosophy: to root oneself in history and use it for good in the present.

“Like the Akan people, Dr. Anderson worked tirelessly to manifest his steadfast belief that the lessons from history—all the lessons, especially those that cause the most discomfort—must be preserved and revealed to serve as a guide to the best possible future,” Rochester Mayor Malik Evans said in a statement.

Anderson was born April 28, 1930, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to parents who had moved there from Alabama. He was the only one of his parents’ nine children who survived infancy. His mother and father had little education growing up and were devoted followers of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, two factors that greatly influenced his own life trajectory.

Anderson came to Rochester in 1956 to study at Rochester Institute of Technology. He earned a degree in photography while also taking part in civil rights activities on and off campus, including organizing a local picket of Woolworth’s drug store to protest its discriminatory hiring practices throughout the country.

After graduating he sought a job at Eastman Kodak but was told that his photography degree and experience as a photographer in the U.S. Air Force were insufficient qualifications. Instead, he moved to Syracuse, earning a master’s degree in education and working for the Syracuse City School District (his doctorate degree, in educational administration, came from Union Institute in Cincinnati in 1975).

Anderson returned to Rochester in 1965 at the urging of Walter Cooper to take a job at the just-founded Action for a Better Community. In 1967, he switched agencies to become deputy director at the Urban League of Rochester—an agency that, at the time, was considered by some to be a tool for the city’s conservative white leadership to blunt more radical demands from civil rights organization Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today or FIGHT.

The question came to a head in 1970 when Anderson and four other employees were abruptly fired, laying bare a schism in leadership and setting off a widely publicized controversy that effectively immobilized the agency for several years. The circumstances were murky, including allegations of inefficiency and financial mismanagement. At the same time, it seemed Anderson and his allies had been pushing for a more activist approach than some saw fit.

One of the experiences that energized him at the Urban League was the fight against lead poisoning. He organized a squadron of teen volunteers to sample peeling paint in the city’s poorer neighborhoods and then present on their findings—namely, that up to 8 percent of inner-city children had significant lead exposure as infants. By chance, a man named Alex Matthews saw their presentation in 1968 and recognized that lead poisoning likely explained the symptoms that his 2-year-old daughter, Wanda, was showing.

With the Matthews family as his partners, Anderson campaigned vigorously for legislation to reduce the harm of lead poisoning. In addition to working with the local press, he wrote an article in an academic journal describing the Matthews case in highly personal terms.

“This paper is first, last and only partly about Wanda,” he wrote. “Even now, a child, another black child is being killed.”

After being fired from the Urban League, Anderson took a job as director of School Parent Advisors to the Neighborhoods, a federally funded program within RCSD that was meant to help bridge the school-community gap. After the program was eliminated he moved to the district’s parent and community involvement office, where he remained for more than 20 years.

His wife, Ruth Anderson, was also a career educator in RCSD. The two married the day after Christmas 1966 and would have celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary this year. In 2023, the district renamed School 16 on Post Avenue for the Andersons.

Anderson’s father died in 1980. As a form of therapy he began listening to, and then performing, versions of African and African-American stories. He began to perform in city schools and community events, including Kwanzaa celebrations he helped to organize.

When his RCSD position was eliminated in 1992 he transitioned full-time to history and storytelling. That year he published his first children’s book, “The Origin of Life on Earth: An African Creation Myth,” and followed it with “The Rebellion of Humans.” He and his wife co-founded the Blackstorytelling League of Rochester in 1994. For the next three decades it brought them and other storytellers into countless classrooms and community spaces across the region.

“We have stopped telling the stories to our young people. They won’t know unless they are told,” he said in 2007. “The more we know about ourselves and the history that’s usually sloughed over, the more we can expect from each other.”

The Andersons also had a company called Akwaaba: The Heritage Associates, that led historical tours and used historical re-enactors. Anderson often portrayed Black Union soldiers from the Civil War—but many people came to know him best in the role of his hero, Douglass.

“The library downstairs is just full of Frederick Douglass books,” David Anderson Jr. says. “Everything he saw about Frederick Douglass, he vacuumed it up.” In 2017, he was named to the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission.

Anderson was passionate about relaying the experiences of enslaved people in the United States. Some of his stories incorporated aspects of his own ancestors, including his grandmother and great-uncle.

“I must reach back and try to grasp the elements of my culture, understand and let what I’ve learned pass through me,” he said in 1992.

Starting in 2007, Anderson was a visiting scholar at Nazareth, where he often worked with students and faculty members on projects related to what he called “Afro-Rochester.” He often collaborated with Timothy Kneeland, director of the university’s Center for Public History, including a comprehensive exhibit on the Underground Railroad.

“The stories were always meant to teach and empower so that we don’t keep the same system that we were born with in place,” Kneeland says. “He always wanted to make people more powerful.”

Anderson is survived by his wife, Ruth; two sons and a daughter; and one granddaughter.

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.

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