As MSU Today later recounted, William G. Anderson could look from his second-story medical office in Albany, Georgia, and see young Black citizens being turned away as they tried to register to vote. Dr. Anderson, the osteopathic surgeon who became the Albany Movement's first president and later the American Osteopathic Association's first Black president, died on August 16, 2026, at 98, according to The DO.

Medicine and civil rights were two expressions of the same pursuit in Anderson's life: wider access. He opened a practice when hospital doors in southwest Georgia were closed to him, organized a citywide movement when voting and public facilities were not equally open, and later used national medical leadership to create opportunities for students and physicians. The settings changed from an Albany office to Detroit hospitals and university lecture halls, but the work kept returning to who was allowed in.

William Gilchrist Anderson was born in Americus, Georgia, on December 12, 1927. He entered Fort Valley State College at 15, and in 1944, at 17, enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served as a Hospital Corpsman during World War II, an early role in health care that preceded his return to college. After the war he earned an undergraduate degree from Alabama State College for Negroes, now Alabama State University, in 1949.

The route to medical school led north. Anderson enrolled at Des Moines Still College of Osteopathy and graduated in 1956 with a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree and certification in surgery. He completed an internship at Flint Osteopathic Hospital in Michigan, then returned to Georgia. In Albany, he was denied hospital privileges, so he built a family medicine practice of his own. His waiting room filled even though the local hospital would not admit him to its medical staff.

The county clerk's office occupied the floor below his practice. From above, Anderson saw Black residents face intimidation and rejection when they attempted to register to vote. He and his wife, Norma, joined the demonstrations. Anderson later recalled that after one early march he returned to his patients while Norma was arrested. Their participation joined the daily obligations of a medical household to a growing local campaign for citizenship.

In November 1961, local ministers, student organizers, women's clubs, voters' groups and other community organizations formed the Albany Movement and elected Anderson president. He and Norma drew on friendships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy to bring national support to the campaign. Anderson helped lead nightly mass meetings in churches as marches and arrests multiplied. In July 1962, with King jailed for taking part in the demonstrations, Anderson carried the movement's case onto national television as King's substitute on Meet the Press, according to Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

The Albany campaign sought change across an entire city's public life. Later historical assessments credited it with increasing Black voter registration, encouraging protests in neighboring communities and helping speed the desegregation of Albany's public facilities. Anderson's place in that work rested not on a single speech, but on organization: bringing local groups into one movement, calling experienced allies, sustaining mass meetings and representing the campaign beyond Georgia.

After Albany, Anderson moved to Detroit and accepted work as a house physician at Art Centre Hospital. In 1964 he became the first Black surgical resident in the city's history. He went on to maintain a group surgical practice until 1984, while also taking on the education of future physicians. He was among the early faculty members connected to the institution that became Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine and remained a faculty member and adviser across much of the college's history. He later held teaching and administrative posts at osteopathic medical schools in California, Michigan and Missouri.

That long medical career eventually placed Anderson at the head of the profession that had given him an opening. After two decades on the American Osteopathic Association's Board of Trustees, he became the organization's first Black president, serving in 1994 and 1995. He also served on the Des Moines University Board of Trustees from 1973 to 1977, became an emeriti trustee in 1996, and sat on the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners board from 2003 through 2014. In 2009, Des Moines University presented him with its highest honor, the Pioneer of Osteopathic Medicine Award.

Anderson turned his own access to education into durable support for others. In 1998 he established a scholarship fund through the American Osteopathic Foundation for osteopathic medical students committed to leadership and minority health-care needs. Its first award, for $5,000, came in 2001, and the fund continued to support students in the years that followed. At Michigan State, he helped launch the Slavery to Freedom lecture series in 2001, bringing civil-rights leaders and scholars to campus. The series eventually took his name. He described community care and opportunity for future doctors as duties, a formulation that joined the two halves of his public work.

He also preserved the story in books. Anderson and Norma, who died before him, published an autobiographical work together in 2004. His second autobiographical book appeared in 2025, with its proceeds directed to the scholarship fund. Their family grew to include five children, 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Des Moines University president Angela L. Walker Franklin recalled that even after his many firsts, he remained generous with his time and committed to the university and its students.

The record Anderson built remains visible in several places at once: in Albany's civil-rights history, in Detroit's surgical profession, in the physicians he taught and advised, in a scholarship that opened doors for medical students, and in a lecture series that keeps civil-rights history in public conversation. Together, those works carry forward the principle that connected his office above the county clerk to his place at the head of American osteopathic medicine: institutions could be changed, and access could be widened.