This is the fourth and final in a series of articles by Michigan Advance throughout February celebrating Black History Month. 

In 2023, the Association of American Medical Colleges shared a survey which found 5.7% of U.S. doctors were Black, with the most common fields of practice among those respondents being obstetrics and gynecology, preventive medicine and child and adolescent psychiatry. 

Black Americans make up 13.7% of the U.S. population today, and face persistent disparities in health outcomes when compared to white Americans, including a shorter life expectancy by 5 years. According to KFF, these disparities are rooted in a long history of racist policies and structures that persist within health care to this day.

As we close out Black History Month, Michigan Advance is highlighting several health care workers who challenged and overcame educational and professional barriers. They gave back to their communities through their work inside and outside of the office. From operating the Underground Railroad, to pushing back on segregation, changing state and local policy, and uplifting community health, each of these individuals worked to chip away at inequity to bring greater health and dignity for all. 

Joseph Ferguson (1821-1877)

In 1869, Joseph Ferguson became the first African American man in Detroit and among the first in Michigan to earn a medical degree, graduating from Detroit Medical College, which later became Wayne State University. 

According to Wayne State University, Ferguson was born in Virginia in 1821 to free parents. He practiced barbering at a time when the practice included basic medical functions, later moving from Virginia to study Medicine in Pittsburgh, Penn. After apprenticing with a white doctor, Ferguson attended Cleveland Medical College from 1856 to 1857 before moving to Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, where he began his medical practice.

Ferguson also served as a conductor for the Underground Railroad, and was present for the meeting between abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown, where Brown shared his plan to raid the arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He was the signatory of an 1859 petition that led to the integration of Detroit Public Schools. He also provided community leadership and health care for African Americans during the Civil War. 

After the war in 1868, Ferguson was admitted to the first class at the newly opened Detroit Medical College, graduating in 1869. However, he could not practice at any Detroit hospital due to his race. He continued to advocate for the integration of Detroit schools and was one of the plaintiffs in Workman v. Detroit Board of Education, the Michigan Supreme Court case which confirmed that the state prohibited racial discrimination in Detroit schools. His son, William W. Ferguson, was the first Black student admitted to Detroit Public Schools, and would become the first African American lawmaker in the state Legislature.

Paul Cornely (1906-2002)

Known as a pioneer for health equity, Paul Cornely was born in the French West Indies, but grew up mostly in Detroit. While Cornely attended the University of Michigan Medical School, graduating in 1931, he was barred from working at the university’s hospital, as they did not hire Black doctors.

Cornely accepted a position at the segregated Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, and during his time there, the dean of Howard University’s College of Medicine offered to hire him to teach on the condition that he receive a doctorate in public health. In 1934, Cornely became the first Black man in the country to earn a doctorate in public health after returning to the University of Michigan and he would later be first African American elected president of the American Public Health Association.

While receiving his bachelor’s degree at U of M, Cornely was a member of the university’s Negro-Caucasian Club, which aimed to abolish discrimination against African Americans. According to the university, the group participated in sit-ins at lunch counters throughout Ann Arbor that refused to serve African Americans. During his graduate studies, Cornely examined how the medical community failed to provide adequate care to Black patients, who had significantly higher rates of mortality than white patients.

In 1956, Cornely cofounded the Imhotep National Conference, which used legal and political strategies to open segregated health facilities to African American patients. Cornely served as the local medical coordinator during the 1963 March on Washington. According to an article in the American Journal of Public Health, Cornely was a sponsor of the Medical Committee on Human Rights, and strongly supported the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s efforts to desegregate hospitals by strictly enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Ethelene Crockett (1914-1978)

After attending Howard University College of Medicine at age 28, Ethelene Crockett opened a Detroit practice 10 years later and became the first Black woman to practice obstetrics and gynecology in the city. She practiced medicine for 35 years. Shortly before her death in 1977, she was also elected president of the American Lung Association, becoming the first woman to hold the position.

According to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, which inducted Crockett in 1988, she directed the Detroit Maternal Infant Care Project from 1967 to 1970 and helped design and direct the Detroit Model Neighborhood Comprehensive Health Center, which delivered health care to low-income neighborhoods within the city. She also advocated for day care centers to support working women.

According to Crockett’s obituary in the Detroit Free Press, she led a 1972 campaign to liberalize Michigan’s abortion laws and opposed efforts to cut off state aid for abortion care. 

Albert Wheeler (1915-1994)

Earning his doctorate in public health from the University of Michigan in 1944, Albert Wheeler would go on to be the first Black man to receive tenure at the university with appointments in the department of microbiology and dermatology. 

In an interview clip, Wheeler noted that when he and his wife Emma decided to move to Ann Arbor in 1944, segregation and discrimination were “pretty bad,” and that if they stayed, they were going to try and change that, focusing on issues of housing discrimination.

According to the University of Michigan Library, Wheeler was among the founding members of the Civic Forum, the precursor to the Ann Arbor chapter of the NAACP. Joining with the Ann Arbor Democratic Party to form a coalition known as the “civil rights” party, the groups successfully urged the city of Ann Arbor to establish a Human Relations Commission, to investigate discrimination in the city. In 1961, Wheeler submitted a proposal to the Michigan Constitutional Convention that resulted in the establishment of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, the first of its kind in the U.S.

In 1975, Wheeler was elected as Ann Arbor’s first Black mayor, where he established the Human Services Department and a Fair Rental Practices Commission, both of which responded to exclusionary housing practices keeping Black residents from moving to the city. 

Charles H. Wright (1918-2002)

Founder and namesake of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Wright was born in Dothan, Alabama in 1918 and attended Alabama State College, obtaining his medical doctorate from Meharry Medical School in 1943.

He practiced general medicine in Detroit for four years, beginning in 1946, before leaving to complete a residency for obstetrics and gynecology at Harlem Hospital in New York, where he had previously worked as an intern and pathology resident. He completed the program in 1953.

According to Meharry Medical College, Wright was one of the first African Americans granted privileges to practice at Hutzel Hospital in Detroit. He spoke out against discrimination at Hutzel, writing a letter to U.S. Sen Phil Hart of Michigan, advising him not to send a dime of $600,000 appropriated to the hospital for renovations.

According to the Detroit Historical Society, Wright was a lifelong member of the NAACP and spearheaded the African American Education Fund through the Detroit Medical Society to fund medical training in the United States for Africans. In 1965 he served as a physician during civil rights marches in Louisiana. He also wrote “The National Medical Association Demands Equal Opportunity: Nothing More, Nothing Less” a history of African American health care in Detroit. 

Natalia Tanner (1922-2018)

Born in Jackson, Miss., Natalia Tanner earned her medical degree in 1946 at Meharry Medical College. She completed her residency in pediatrics at the University of Chicago and pursued additional training at Meharry Medical College’s Hubbard Hospital, after which she and her husband moved to Detroit. 

While Tanner broke barriers as the first African American woman fellow of the American Association of Pediatrics, the first African American board-certified Pediatrician in Detroit and the first Black physician on staff at the segregated Children’s Hospital of Michigan, the U.S. National Library of Medicine notes that Tanner repeatedly confronted discrimination throughout her career. 

Detroit historian Jamon Jordan shared that in the years before her death, Tanner said that patients were still placed in segregated wards during her early years at the hospital, and that her credentials and concerns were taken seriously until she out-performed her white colleagues.

In 1969, Tanner took the initiative to improve communication between the various organizations working to improve children’s access to health care. Tanner herself served on the executive board of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, the National Committee on Adolescence for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and chaired the pediatric section of the National Medical Association and established a liaison committee between the three groups. 

William G. Anderson (1927-Present)

As the president of the Albany Movement in Georgia, William G. Anderson, led demonstrations against segregation, as efforts of local civil rights groups like the NAACP intersected with those of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1961.

In an interview with Susan M. Enright, former president of the American College of Osteopathic Internists, Anderson said, “I’m a criminal and proud of it,” referring to his arrests for civil disobedience. 

Before enlisting in the Navy during World War II, Anderson pursued a premedical education at Fort Valley State College. He completed his medical degree at the Des Moines Still College of Osteopathy and interned at the Flint Osteopathic Hospital in Michigan, returning to practice in Southwest Georgia.

While he was denied privileges to practice medicine in a hospital due to discrimination, Anderson opened his own family medicine practice. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Anderson’s practice flourished and expanded to include a partnership with Harlem Cut-Rate Drugs, which allowed Black patients to have their prescriptions filled without the indignities they could face at the city’s white-owned pharmacy.

Through the Albany Movement, Anderson worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy to lead demonstrations. The movement was dissolved in 1962. 

Afterwards, Anderson accepted an appointment at Art Centre Hospital in Detroit, remaining active in the civil rights movement, including serving as a member on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s board of directors. He would later serve as a faculty member and adviser at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, among a number of other positions he held throughout his career. 

Anderson was also the first African American to serve as president of the American Osteopathic Association.