About David

David Simon Greene (1945- ) began exploring his talent as an artist in 2017 at the age of 71, following ten years of increasingly severe health issues, including battles against three kinds of cancer. His life’s work as an educator encouraged adults to reflect on and learn from their experiences. In this, his first formal exhibit, David presents paintings that are reflections of his own life and work in New York, West Virginia, and Ohio as a community organizer, factory worker and adult educator.

David was born in Brooklyn, NY, educated at Brooklyn College (B.A. 1966) and the University of Maine (M.A. 1968). In 1967, he joined the “War on Poverty,” as a Volunteer in Service to America (V.I.S.T.A.) and was assigned to work on a community organizing project in the southern coalfields of West Virginia, which became his home for the next 19 years.

In 1968, as employment continued to decline in the coalfields, David helped unemployed families in Boone County successfully fight for a free and reduced-price school lunch program for their children. David and the mothers traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress in support of legislation which established the first Federal program for free and reduced-price school lunches. In 1969, David joined with others to form the West Virginia Welfare Rights Organization (WVWRO). He became the first State Organizer of the WVWRO, dedicated to teaching people their rights and helping them to organize for a better life.

As federal funds were withdrawn from anti-poverty programs, David became unemployed himself. He turned to industrial work to support his young family, first as a miner and then as a worker in an auto plant. David was active as an educator in his unions (The United Mine Workers of America and the United Auto Workers). In 1979, his educational work with union workers became the basis of the Southern Appalachian Labor School (SALS) which he founded with Dr. John P. David of the West Virginia Institute of Technology. At SALS, he met his second wife, Janet Wells Greene, who was hired as the first faculty member of the school. The couple married in 1980 and lived in southern West Virginia until 1986, when both changes in funding and the severe economic downturn in the coal industry led them to seek work elsewhere.

David found work in Newark, Ohio, where he worked briefly for a subcontracting firm as an electrician at the Owens Corning Plant and later as a counselor for the Center for Alternative Resources. In 1987, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. Both David and Janet worked and went to school. In order to obtain his teaching license in Adult Education, David worked as a GED instructor by day and took night classes at City College of New York, a division of the City University of New York. (CCNY/CUNY). He received his teaching license in 1989. David was employed for 22 years as a teacher by the New York City Board of Education. He served as a member of the Delegates’ Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers from 1988-2008. In 1996 he was named Educator of the Year by the Literacy Assistance Center of New York for his outstanding contribution to the field of adult literacy. 

He retired in 2008 and returned to Newark, Ohio, in 2009. In addition to battling cancers, he co-founded the Freedom School in Licking County and wrote Unfit to Be a Slave: A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2015), a book about education for social change.