"I think I'm one of the few people alive today who was actually held by someone who was enslaved: My great-grandmother was born enslaved around 1859;
she lived to be a ripe old age."
-- Alice Green, 2021
Alice Green, photographed at the University at Albany in 2022. (Photo by Patrick Dodson / UAlbany)
We mourn the passing of our friend and fellow writer Alice Green, who died suddenly at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany on Tuesday, Aug. 20. She was 84.
Join us as we pay tribute to the life and legacy of author and advocate Alice Green
4 p.m. Sunday, September 29
Palace Theatre 19 Clinton Avenue Albany NY 12207
Doors open at 3 p.m. Free and open to the public.
Donate to the Dr. Alice P. Green Memorial Fund
Alice was founder and executive director of The Center for Law and Justice and worked for decades fighting for civil rights and racial justice in Albany and across New York. She was also an accomplished writer who told her authentic story in books, essays, articles, speeches, and letters to the editor.
A longtime collaborator and frequent guest at the Writers Institute, she and her husband Charles Touhey established the Carl E. Touhey Foundation -- named after Charles' father -- which funds many of our events and programs bringing writers of color to local schools in underserved communities. Alice also worked with us to produce a four-week symposium on race relations and police reform in 2020 and more recently, to create a therapeutic journaling program for at-risk teens.
William Kennedy, Executive Director of the New York State Writers Institute:
“In the 1960s, the early days of JFK's and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and the Neighborhood Group Movement, Alice Green was a tough-minded social worker at Trinity Institution, working to make those national programs function for the impoverished people of Albany, which they did.
She left Trinity after some years but continued as a fighting presence during the endless decades of struggle for Civil Rights and on into Black Lives Matter.
She was central to the battle to establish a Civilian Review Board of police matters, and with her husband Charles, built many affordable houses in Arbor Hill and other parts of the city. She was involved with countless people who had run-ins with the police, out of which she established the Center for Law and Justice in the South End. Her life was singular -- given over to people in trouble, including people in prison. She was a spokesperson for voiceless blacks, a guardian angel for the whole city. Alice Green was a great soul."
Paul Grondahl, Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute:
“It is with profound sadness that we mark the passing of renowned civil rights activist Dr. Alice P. Green, a personal friend for three decades. Our beloved Alice was a mentor and role model to generations. She led by example and was a standard-bearer for racial equality, defender of social justice and warrior against systemic racism.
It was my honor to walk side-by-side with Alice during Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations; on visits to incarcerated people in state prisons; to pay respects at curbside memorials to victims of gun violence; and into classrooms where she imparted wisdom and words of encouragement to troubled teens.
When people asked Alice why she continued to work relentlessly into her 80s for social justice, she’d reply with a stanza from a Nina Simone song she borrowed as the title for her memoir: ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.’ ”
Alice Green discussed her memoir We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Social Justice with Paul Grondahl at the University at Albany's Page Hall on Wednesday, January 26, 2022. (Photo by Patrick Dodson / UAlbany)
Just two weeks ago, Alice attended our Touhey Foundation-sponsored event with 2024-2025 National Youth Poet Laureate Stephanie Pacheco. The event was held at the Alice Moore Black Arts and Cultural Center in Albany, named after Alice's grandmother.
Alice shares her portable fan with poet Stephanie Pacheco following a reading at the Alice Moore Black Arts and Cultural Center in Albany on July 29, 2024. (Michael Huber / NYS Writers Institute)
A lifelong learner, Alice earned several degrees from the University at Albany: a doctorate in criminal justice, three master’s degrees – in education, social work, and criminology -- and a bachelor's degree in African-American studies. She helped establish the Paden Retreat for Writers of Color in Essex County, published in numerous scholarly journals and in 1999, with UAlbany Professor Frankie Bailey, she co-authored the book Law Never Here: A Social History of African American Responses to Issues of Crime and Justice, (Greenwood Press). The two also co-wrote Wicked Albany: Lawlessness & Liquor in the Prohibition Era (2009) and Wicked Danville (2011 History Press).
In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, Alice collaborated with the Writers Institute to produce "A Time for Reckoning: Confronting Systemic Racism, Seeking Justice and Reimagining Society," a series of conversations over four weeks in Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, culminating in a special hour-long program that aired on WMHT-TV's "New York NOW" on October 26, 2020.
In a 2021 interview with the Times Union, she discussed the roots of her activism.
I think I'm one of the few people alive today who was actually held by someone who was enslaved: My great-grandmother was born enslaved around 1859; she lived to be a ripe old age. Even though I was very young, I still have this vague memory of her.
But when I realized that my great-grandmother was owned by someone, that really hit me — because she was owned the way people own cattle, pigs, cows and things like that. And something seemed to be wrong with that.
I also had a maternal grandmother who was a sharecropper in the South, and she taught me about being active. She was a leader in her community, even though she had been raised as a sharecropper.
And then I had the experience of my parents who lived in the Jim Crow South, and particularly my dad, who was very fearful of the criminal justice system because, during that particular time, there were efforts to re-enslave people: There was a contract lease system that basically grabbed young men off the street, incarcerated them and then leased them out to businesses. So my dad decided to go north.
For more than 10 years, Alice led a study group discussing Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book that spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. She was delighted to lead our conversation with Alexander at The College of Saint Rose in Albany in 2022.
Alice Green and Michelle Alexander at The College of Saint Rose in Albany in 2022. (Paul Grondahl / NYS Writers Institute)
Alice used the pen and her voice to call out injustice for decades. She founded The South End Scene in 1977, one of the longest-running African American newspapers in Albany. “We started with a mimeographed newsletter called 'The Voice of The South End.' They were distributed to people in housing projects and pretty much throughout the South End," Green told WAMC Northeast Public Radio. "And people would start reading and talking about issues that were presented. It was also a way of informing people about programs at Trinity Institution and other places in the South End.” (Copies of The South End Scene and other letters and documents from her career are kept in the University at Albany Special Collections.)
In 2023, Alice wrote a second memoir, Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks (Sept. 2023), an account of her childhood and young adulthood as one of very few Black residents in the tiny hamlet of Witherbee, Essex County, where her family grappled with poverty and racial issues in the mid-20th century.
1976: A visit from Rosalynn Carter
In the 1970s, Alice directed Trinity Institution, a youth and family services center in Albany’s South End. When Jimmy Carter came to Albany during his presidential campaign in 1976, his wife Rosalynn Carter visited with Alice.
"Dear Alice, I enjoyed my visit to Trinity Institute very much -- and admire the work you are doing. If Jimmy is successful in his bid for the Presidency, child care will be one of my top priorities. Sincerely, Rosalynn Carter. April 2, 1976" (Courtesy: Charles Touhey archives)
Alice's two memoirs,We Who Believe in Freedom (2021) and Outsider (2023)
In recognition of her commitment to social justice and advocacy and her ongoing service to underserved communities, Alice and Charles were honored as a University at Albany Citizen Laureates in 2022.
“The entire University at Albany community mourns the loss of a great advocate, philanthropist, and educator," said UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez on Tuesday. "Alice Green’s name has long been synonymous with the fight for justice and equity in the Capital Region a nd beyond. She will be remembered as a tireless advocate for justice for people in marginalized communities and a believer in the transformational power of education.”
1999: A letter from Hillary Rodham Clinton
A letter from her father-in-law, Carl Touhey
2022: Using words to help at-risk teens
Alice Green shows her personal journal and other family mementoes to students in a therapeutic journaling class at Northern Rivers’ Neil Hellman School in Albany The program is in place at several sites in underserved Albany communities and is overseen by the Writers Institute with a Touhey Foundation grant. It was conceived by Alice to bring healing to at-risk teens struggling with trauma and emotional problems. Photo by Paul Grondahl
2023: Speaking with college students
Alice was frequently asked to speak with college students about her life and activism. Here she talks with University at Albany students in Professor's Debernee Privott's class in the fall of 2023. After the visit, Alice sent this note: "Debernee, I adored your students; they are so sharp and inquisitive. I love it."
Videos from our archives
June 7, 2024
A conversation about the Black history of the Adirondack Mountains with Alice Green and historian Amy Godine, the author of The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Nov. 2023).
February 3, 2022
Alice Green reads from her memoir We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Social Justice (2021) and discusses her life experiences and policy views..
June 2021
Alice shares a story from her childhood in the Adirondacks.
June 3, 2020
Alice Green and Leon Van Dyke talk with Paul Grondahl about the protests across America following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and their perspective on the history of disappointment and righteous anger that black Americans feel toward the police.