Susan D. Anderson

Susan D. Anderson is History Curator and Program Manager at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and a member of the editorial board of California History journal.  Previously, she was Director of Collections, Library, Exhibitions and Programs at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, as well as Interim Chief Curator at the African American Museum & Library at Oakland, and Curator of Collecting Los Angeles at UCLA Library Special Collections. For decades, she has brought her scholarly interest in California’s hidden African American history to her writing, lectures and public history projects including exhibitions, podcasts and programming. A third-generation Californian, her mother and father’s families include founders of historic black churches, Washington Chapel AME Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, established 1898, and Bethlehem Lutheran Church in West Oakland, California, founded 1929. Susan is the author of Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History. At the Mesa, she worked on her book, African Americans and the California Dream, a first-ever history of California African Americans and their transforming impact on civic life in the state from the Gold Rush to Black Lives Matter.