William G. Anderson: A lifetime of testing the waters

“Sometimes you have to test the waters, and you’ll find the waters are not as cold as perhaps you thought they would be.” – Dr. William G. Anderson

ALBANY— Dr. William G. Anderson, the pioneering surgeon and civil rights leader who helped found the Albany Movement, died Aug. 16 at age 98, closing a remarkable chapter for the communities, movements and institutions he spent nearly a century helping shape.

In Albany, where efforts were already underway to preserve the deteriorating home from which Anderson helped make history, his death brings renewed significance to the question of what his generation leaves behind. But Anderson’s legacy extends far beyond the places that can be preserved and the historic firsts that can be counted.

Perhaps the most enduring part of his legacy is also the simplest: what his life can teach us about moving forward when the way ahead is uncertain.

William G. Anderson spent much of his life becoming the first black man to do things no black man had done before. Curiously, he rarely described his life as though that had ever been the plan.

He became Detroit’s first black surgical resident. He became the first African American president of the American Osteopathic Association. He led the Albany Movement and helped bring Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy to southwest Georgia.

Told that way, Anderson’s story can sound like a succession of barriers deliberately sought and triumphantly broken — a man who set out to make history and, in fact, did. But that isn’t quite what the record shows.

Again and again, Anderson seems to have found himself in moments where someone had to go first. Sometimes he volunteered. Sometimes he was asked. Once, remarkably, he drew the short straw.

Still, he went.

“Sometimes you have to test the waters,” Anderson once said, “and you’ll find the waters are not as cold as perhaps you thought they would be.”

And that just may be the simplest way to understand his profound life. When Albany’s black-led organizations coalesced into the Albany Movement in November 1961, Anderson was elected president … not because he had spent years positioning himself to lead a civil rights campaign, but primarily because he was new in town.

His outsider status was in fact the strength other men may have lacked; Anderson had no long-standing business relationships white Albany could use as leverage against other black leaders. His private medical practice also gave him some insulation from the economic retaliation that could devastate others. In a very literal sense, Anderson had less to lose. He accepted the presidency knowing that was part of the reason he had been asked.

Anderson never seemed particularly interested in turning that circumstance into a legend about himself. And in that same pattern later described portions of his path into medicine and movement leadership as work he “hadn’t exactly chosen,” but that circumstances thrust upon him anyway.

He did not need history to remember him a certain way in order to know who he was or what he was there to do. There was work to do. He was in a position to do it. So he did.

Perhaps no moment captures that pattern better than one of the strangest episodes of the Albany campaign. In the summer of 1962, Anderson was jailed alongside King and Abernathy as demonstrations continued. King was determined to remain behind bars until the demonstrators were released. But the movement had been offered something it badly needed: a national television audience on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Someone had to leave jail and defend the Albany campaign before the country, facing a panel that included defenders of segregation.

So the three men drew straws. King held them in his closed fist. Anderson lost. He left jail, prepared for the appearance in a single night and went on national television. It is an almost absurd way for a defining public moment in a national civil rights campaign to have been assigned. Anderson did not campaign for the opportunity. He did not declare himself the obvious spokesman. History pointed at him with a short straw. He accepted. 

What makes that moment more than a colorful civil rights anecdote is that the same pattern followed Anderson long after the cameras left Albany. Two years later, there were no mass demonstrations, jail cells or television studios. There was an operating room.

In 1964, Anderson became Detroit’s first black surgical resident, breaking another barrier with a scalpel instead of a picket sign. He spent the next 20 years in surgical practice, and more than two decades doing the largely unseen institutional work that preceded another historic first: becoming the American Osteopathic Association’s first African American president in 1994.

Even Anderson’s account of how he entered osteopathic medicine in the first place carried the same undertone. He did not describe it as a carefully plotted career strategy. A close friend of his father’s — one of the only black osteopathic physicians in the South — suggested that he apply. Anderson went, took the test and was accepted the same day.

Decades later, speaking to fellow physicians, Anderson described the challenge before him without grandeur.

“There was no such thing as a black physician in my town, certainly not a black osteopathic physician,” he said. “So I had some work to do.”

Not a destiny to fulfill. Work to do. Anderson did it.

None of this means Anderson mistook danger for discomfort. Sometimes the water was every bit as cold as it looked.

In 1963, the federal government indicted Anderson on conspiracy charges carrying the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence. He later described the prospect of spending decades in prison as something that felt like death — and the eventual lifting of that threat as something approaching resurrection.

He also encountered discrimination inside the institutions supposedly preparing him for a career in medicine, including a hospital that would not assign him white patients until Anderson directly challenged the practice. The dangers he confronted were not imaginary. Neither were the consequences, and that distinction is significant.

Anderson’s lesson was never that fear was foolish, or that every intimidating barrier disappears once someone finds the courage to approach it. His own life supplied too much evidence to the contrary. His lesson was that fear could not tell you, by itself, what was possible. The only way to know was to move forward.

That may be the more useful inheritance Anderson leaves behind now that the final chapter has closed.

His legacy can easily be measured in titles and firsts: civil rights leader, surgeon, educator, national medical leader, Albany Movement president, first black surgical resident, American Osteopathic Association’s first black president. But reducing Anderson to those achievements risks missing the quieter pattern underneath them that is as relevant and needed today as it ever was.

He was not the son of a physician preparing to inherit a profession. He was not a preacher preparing to lead a movement. He did not appear to spend his life preoccupied with becoming the best, the fastest or even the first. Again and again, he simply found himself standing at a threshold where something needed to be done.

A medical school. A segregated hospital. A civil rights movement. A jail cell. A television studio. An operating room. The presidency of a national medical organization.

Sometimes Anderson volunteered and sometimes somebody else pushed him toward the threshold. Once, King held the choice in his fist and chance decided for them both. But the pattern remained consistent. Anderson kept stepping through.

Fifty-eight years after the federal government indicted him, the U.S. Attorney’s Office formally apologized to Anderson, calling him simply “this great man.” By then, he had spent most of a lifetime without waiting for history to justify the choices he had made. Perhaps that is why his old advice about testing the waters feels less like a motivational phrase than a description of the way he lived.

Anderson never said the water was warm. He simply refused to let its temperature decide whether he stepped in.