Ferguson, William Webb (1857-1910)

Mr. Ferguson was born in Detroit, Michigan; the son of Dr. Joseph Ferguson, a pioneer of Black Detroit. As a child he peddled newspapers on the streets of Detroit. His life, from his birth, was shroud in test cases concerning civil liberties. He was a precocious learner of the three Rs: Reconstruction, Reunion, and Reading the law.

He attended the only school for segregated Blacks, in 1865, in Detroit; the Colored School No. 2, taught by Fannie Richards, the only Black teacher of the State at the time. He was the head of his class in all grades. He graduated the Detroit High School.

William Webb, plied the skill of a printer. In 1883 he founded the Ferguson Printing Co. He brought suit in Ferguson v. Gies (1890), contesting racial discrimination as a social construct. In court, he was Represented by the D. Augustus Straker of South Carolina who was elected to the SC State Legislature three successive times beginning during Reconstruction.

His defense weighed heavily on a Michigan Statute of 1885, No. 130 enacted, which outlawed discrimination in accommodations, buttressed by the 14th Amendment, according to Attorney Straker that expressly forbid such practice, and the case was put on for locution. The case made national news and was dubbed at the time the Great Civil Rights Trial. The Michigan Supreme Court Judge in both cases decreed that Ferguson was treated unjustly-though the jury in the first sided with the defended Mr. Geis. Judge Gatner derided Chief Justice Taney in this trial, as “fallacious and contrary to the principles of law then claimed to exist.” Then in the second trial, the court concluded that in “Michigan there must be and is an absolute, unconditional equality of white and colored men before the law. The white man can have no rights or privileges under the law that are denied to the black man,”socially or politically. It would seem that the Michigan jurist, Judge Morse disregarded the protean words of Justice Taney.

In 1892 Ferguson made history and became the first Black elected to the Michigan State Legislature serving in the Michigan House of Representatives gaining 22,000 votes. He Represented the 1st District encompassing then what was known as the Black Bottom community in Detroit on the lower eastside of town, from 1893-1897. He died January 6, 1910 in Detroit, Michigan.

Sources
J. Clay Smith, Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Paul Finkelman, Martin J. Hershock, and Clifford W. Taylor, The History of Michigan Law (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006); Dictionary of African American Biography by Rayford Logan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982; The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Main Library, William W. Ferguson, Vertical File
Contributor, Burgess Foster, Norwich University