Donald Sheffield Ferguson, M.D.

In 1942, Dr. Donald Ferguson became the second Black student to graduate from the KU School of Medicine, after facing many barriers to reach this achievement. Ferguson was accepted into the first two years of medical school at Lawrence in 1932, but he was denied admission to the clinical years because of his race. He pushed back, hired a lawyer and eventually gained admission to the clinical years in 1939. In 1942, Ferguson became the second African American to earn an M.D. degree from KU.

He served in both World War II and Korea, rising to the rank of major in the U.S. Air Force. He opened a private practice in Kansas City, specializing in dermatology and caring for primarily African American patients. Later in his career, he worked as a personnel physician for the Bendix Corporation. He was also active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.

Ferguson helped found the Queen of the World Hospital in Kansas City in 1955. The hospital treated anyone, regardless of race, at a time when non-white Kansas Citians had limited options when it came to accessing health care because of segregation. The hospital closed in 1965 as more clinics became integrated.

A struggle for respect and dignity

By James J. Fisher

The Kansas City Times (Kansas City, Missouri). Friday, November 10, 1989

Leavenworth Kan. –

This past Monday afternoon the man from the Department of Veterans Affairs walked up to the funeral car parked beside the small building where they hold services for old soldiers at the U.S. National Cemetery here.

It’s a place where the flag always flies at half staff and where “Taps” daily sounds across the hilly landscape, white-specked with tombstones.

Former reserve U.S. Air Force Major Donald S. Ferguson, doctor of medicine, and, above all, a mule-stubborn black man, would be buried that day on a knoll just at the cemetery entrance, the VA man told Juanita Ferguson, his widow. Any question, he said, well, just call this number.

“Oh, that’ll be just fine,” said Mrs. Ferguson, her eyes flicking to the south, to the hillock where her husband of more than 40 years would lie.

It all fit. Dr. Ferguson was home, halfway between Atchison County, where he was reared, and Kansas City, where he made his living. Halfway between tiny Oak Mills, Kan., where he was born, and the big university down in Lawrence, where he got his schooling. He had made the journey between those places so many times. He had come so far. Halfway somehow seemed right.

Dr. Ferguson, 82, died Nov. 1 at the University of Kansas Medical Center. It had been a difficult end – rheumatoid arthritis and complications.

He broke a barrier to blacks

But before that it had been a rewarding life: service in World War II and Korea, a good practice in Kansas City, helping in the establishment of the long-gone Queen of the World hospital, where amazingly for the time, the staff was integrated.

He was a quiet man, who suffered his last years without much complaint, who worked behind the scenes to make things better for folks, and who rarely spoke of the troubles he’d seen.

“He said down there at KU he lived weeks at a time on crackers, money was that short,” said a sister, Decima Boldridge of Atchison.

“Oh, Fergie was smart,” said Lucille Bluford, a KU classmate, “but we all thought he was a little bit crazy, trying to go to the KU medical school. Back then blacks went off to Howard or Fiske. Not KU.”

“How bad was KU then? Well, they had a requirement that all graduating seniors pass a swimming course. That was waived for blacks because they didn’t want us in the pool.”

Swimming didn’t matter to Dr. Ferguson, who as early as 1926 mad his purpose known when applying to KU. He wrote:

“I am working at the present and intend that I shall come to Lawrence the second semester. The course that I intend to take up is medicine.”

Ferguson was the son of dirt farmers who lived near Oak Mills, a place that then was just called No. 20, so named for the segregated school thereabouts.

He matriculated at KU in 1926 but took until 1929 to become a sophomore. It was work on the farm, go to school, work on the farm, go to school.

He graduated from KU in 1932, attended graduate school in 1933. Family memory is that in between he taught school, worked as a dining car waiter on the railroad, and farmed. Money was tight. To Ferguson, though, school was everything.

Back then, in the 1930s, KU was of two minds. It allowed blacks to take pre-med courses, attend classes, pay their money. But when it came to the third and fourth year clinical part, dealing with – “touching” is a better word – the patients, the line was drawn. It was suggested that blacks go elsewhere.

And the medical school gave short shrift to blacks anyway. They were treated away from the white patients in what were called “barracks,” two 1924-era buildings that were, by all accounts, pestholes.

By 1938, however, the new “Negro” Pavilion was under construction. A debate arose over its name, with some blacks outraged, others calling for a name that would memorialize early black physicians in the community or nation.

Instead, KU took the easy way out, naming it after a nearby street: the Eaton Pavilion, or, as it is known now, “E” building.

Ferguson took all the pre-med courses. And in 1938, when he was 32 years old but still referred to as “boy” in the bureaucratic correspondence that swirled around him, he insisted on being admitted to the medical school.

His grades were good enough, he wrote. He sent his $25 registration fee, adding “I know my race will need me in the future and I want to be as great a service as possible.”

Ferguson’s application threw the state of Kansas into a tizzy. He would not be the first black admitted to the school. That honor would go to another black, a Phi Beta Kappa, a handsome man who Dean H.R. Wahl wrote had agreed to the various protocols demanded by the school in regard to race. No touching.

But Ferguson was the second. And he was just a little different. He was a black man. His photograph showed that. He looked like what he was -- the son of a farmer. A field hand, the kind of man who 25 years later would be registering to vote in Alabama, marching on Washington, walking across the bridge with others in Selma.

But in 1938 and 1939, Ferguson was out front. And all alone.

“Mr. Ferguson is of a different type,” wrote Dean Wahl. “One that will insist on being taken to the white patients.”

Ferguson endured. He demanded in a quiet, no-nonsense way. And he received, with help from then-governor of Kansas, Walter Huxman, who told the Kansas Board of Regents that blacks were people, too.

But Ferguson was the real hero, the striver. Talking to family members and friends produces a singular image of Dr. Donald Sheffield Ferguson, KU Med Class of 1942, as a man of persistent, powerful dignity, a man who wanted only what was due any Kansas son of farmers – his rights.

“He was meant to be what he wanted to be,” said Ellsworth Boldridge, a relative. “It was that simple.”