Growing up in Charlottesville, George Rutherford Ferguson, quickly learned and experience racial discrimination, but never was one to accept. His family moved from Charlottesville when it was time for him to attend high school, since blacks did not have access to public high schools. After finishing high school at then Virginia State College, in Petersburg, Virginia, he continued his education by taking college courses in business administration in preparation of his career.
In deciding which career path to follow, he decided against following his father's and his grandfather's footsteps, neither entering medicine or the ministry. His father, George Ferguson Sr., was Charlottesville's first black physician. And his maternal grandfather, John Mifflin Brown, was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who helped found Wilberforce University in Ohio and established Payne Institute in South Carolina, and Paul Quinn College in Texas. Brown Chapel in Selma, Atlanta; where Martin Luther King's celebrated civil rights march to Montgomery began, is named after Ferguson's grandfather.
George Ferguson entered the funeral business because of its lucrative potential and ability to serve the community. After a two-year apprenticeship in Richmond, he graduated from the American Academy of Mortuary Science in New York. Then in 1941, he moved back to Charlottesville to start his own funeral business on Page Street. He renovated the century-old brick house into working space and living quarters. The funeral home was located on the first floor and Ferguson lived on he second floor with his wife, Bernie, and daughter, Olivia. Later, he moved the business to Rose Hill Drive and finally to Ridge Street in 1974. Although Ferguson, the funeral director, did not follow the career paths of his father and grandfather, he did follow their passion for activism in the community. Ferguson recall's, "In the black community, the physician, the minister, the teacher, and the funeral director have tended to take a stand. In the white community, they're considered as servants: it's totally a different role."
Ferguson was a prominent figure in the fight to desegregate public schools in Charlottesville. He was president of the local chapter of the NAACP then; when his daughter, Olivia, and 11 other black students applied to attend white schools in the fall of 1958; the schools were closed from September to February to prevent integration. When the schools reopened in 1959, officials used another tactic to keep black children from white schools. Asserting that black students were too far behind their white contemporaries, administrators ordered them tutored at the superintendent's office. Olivia was a senior that year and became the only person to ever receive a high school diploma from Charlottesville City Schools instead of a specific school. Ferguson believed, "We had inherited this segregated school system, and when you inherit something and it isn't satisfactory, you start to dispose of it." "We wanted to integrate the schools because when people work together and play together, they learn to live with each other." "On a broad scope, it has helped the community."
Ferguson experienced his first racial insult at 10 years of age. It happened during a visit to a local grocery store on Main Street, when Ferguson did not understand a clerk who spoke to him. Ferguson said, "What?" And the clerk responded, "Don't say What? to me. I'm a white man." After young Ferguson left the store hurt and confused, he returned moments later with his father to speak with the manager about the incident.
That day Ferguson learned to stand up for himself and not to accept inappropriate behavior. "I was always trained to believe that nobody was any better than me and I wasn't any better than anybody else." Ferguson said, "that was instilled in me by my parents; that you can treat your fellow man with love and kindness; the pigmentation of your skin doesn't matter."
Ferguson learned more about segregation and discrimination when he attended a speech in Cleveland, Ohio given by W.E.B. DuBois, an NAACP founder and black protest leader. Inspired by the speech, Ferguson joined the NAACP at 15. Like his father, who was also active in the organization, Ferguson preferred to work behind the scenes and cared little for public recognition of his efforts. Ferguson explains, "There are a whole lot of things you do, and you just try to get them accomplished without a whole lot of whooping and hollering."
Ferguson was most proud of his involvement in the quiet struggle to desegregate University of Virginia hospital in 1954. "In the basement was where they kept all the Negroes." "When those wards got crowded, they'd put people in the halls - there was wind from the service entrance, it was noisy, and sometimes the pipes dripped - I can't say the care was inferior, but the accommodations were inferior." As chairman of the NAACP's legal redress committee, Ferguson and other members talked and wrote to then UVA's president Colgate W. Darden Jr. and the Board of Visitors. Two days later, black patients were moved to better wards upstairs and desegregation followed.
Although Ferguson felt activism was innate, sometimes the funeral business suffered because of his involvement in civil rights. "I know a number of people who were told not to call me by their employers because, 'he's active in the NAACP and he's trying to hurt folks." Along with decline in business, Ferguson also felt heat from threats against his wife and daughter during the intense days of civil rights. "I never had any fearanyway the only two things they could do were put me in jail illegally or kill me."
Despite his involvement in struggles against racism in Charlottesville, Ferguson did not have any feelings of bitterness about the "unique community". "I've always appreciated God's creation, and you can see it better in Charlottesville better than anywhere else."
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