Bobby Kennedy and John Engler were bookends in the life of Joel Ferguson.
Ferguson, who died Saturday at 85, was born in 1938 and raised in a working-class family on Lansing’s segregated near west side.
He remembers the station wagon from the Lansing Country Club, roving through Black areas of the city, including by his own house on Chelsea Street, picking up Black employees and taking them to work at the all-white club.
“It was like a plantation,” Ferguson said.
A graduate of Sexton High School, he served in the Marines before earning an elementary education degree from Michigan State University in 1965. He went to work for the city as playground director at the old Main Street School, on what is now Malcolm X Street near Everett Drive close to where Interstate 496 was yet to be built.
One Lansing resident, Bradford Jess Dothard, recalled Ferguson in a 2016 article as his “mentor.” Ferguson, he said, put a net onto what had been a bare basketball hoop and blacktopped the gravel court where Earvin “Magic” Johnson later got his start.
“He was respected by a lot of people,” Dothard said. “Of course, some of the people called him Uncle Tom, but he tried to change things for the better. He taught us young Black men a lot.”
Ferguson recalled being “in the middle of it” when civil unrest broke out in Lansing for two nights in August 1966. A 50th-anniversary story in City Pulse described it this way: “Two days of chaos on Lansing’s near west side escalated from rock throwing to gunfire and flying Molotov cocktails, drawing a small army of 300 cops from Lansing, East Lansing, MSU and other units into the neighborhood.”
“Everybody was in the streets,” Ferguson recalled. “I got a phone call and I went down there.”
Ferguson shrugged off any credit for quelling the riots — “Riots stop,” he said. “You can’t get out there and raise a bunch of hell for days on end.” But his efforts on the streets and then his advocacy for more summer youth programs burnished his reputation for leadership. The next year, he became Lansing’s first African American to be elected to the City Council.
Robert F. Kennedy came to Lansing in April 1968 in his brief bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee (He was assassinated about two months later.) At 28, Ferguson was mid-Michigan campaign manager for the left-leaning younger brother of President John Kennedy.
During the visit, he accompanied Kennedy on the drive from the airport to downtown’s old Jack Tar Hotel along with state party Chairman Sander Levin and Gov. G. Mennen Williams. Kennedy spent the drive talking to the two of them. But as they reached their destination, he said Kennedy asked him, “’Who are you?’ “I said, ‘I’m your guy in mid-Michigan.’ “’He said, ‘How am I doing?’ “I said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Humphrey’s got labor, McCarthy’s got the students, and you have me.’”
Then Ferguson escorted Kennedy to the ballroom via the kitchen, where he introduced him to all the staff. How did he know them? “I had been shining shoes there for years,” said Ferguson.
In the ballroom, Ferguson said he went to sit down when a national campaign official told him he had to introduce Kennedy.
Why? “None of the party leadership would,” he said, “because it would look like an endorsement.”
Appearance over, Kennedy asked Ferguson if he was going to the airport to him.
“I said to him, ‘No.’ He looked stunned and he says, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘You already have me. Why don’t you get someone you need?’ “He smiled, and it meant a lot in my career because then the word spread from him that I was pretty sharp.”
Twenty years later, Ferguson managed civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s surprise victory in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary. That year, he was elected to the Democratic National Committee. He served for 20 years, until he sided with Hillary Clinton for president against Barack Obama in 2008. The Clinton administration had been good to him as Ferguson established himself as a developer, and Ferguson repaid the Clintons with his loyalty.
“Ferguson’s indisputable business success speaks both to his savvy and his uncanny knack for leveraging his considerable political influence to win lucrative real estate development deals,” City Pulse editorialized in 2020, “most notably his successful effort to persuade former governor Jennifer Granholm to let him build a new headquarters for the Michigan State Police on the downtown Lansing riverfront, a less-than-optimal location that turned out to be an expensive boondoggle.”
Ferguson’s crowning achievement as a developer was the Red Cedar District on Lansing’s east end in partnership with Columbus developer Frank Kass. The father-and-son team of Leo and Chris Jerome originated the idea, and Ferguson seized on it. What was to be a partnership devolved into a bitter dispute, with the Jeromes claiming Ferguson and Kass had stolen their plans.
As Ferguson’s reputation grew, he ran successfully for MSU trustee in 1986. Its longest serving member, he was its chair for 12 years.
His dedication to the board was so important to him that he turned down a lucrative opportunity to serve on the Greektown Casino’s board. In doing so, he rejected about $210,000 in stocks and benefits and $85,000 a year in compensation for attending six meetings annually. A state law prevents elected officials from being on casino boards.
The Larry Nassar affair — something he once dismissed as the “Nassar thing” in a radio interview — was his undoing.
City Pulse political columnist Kyle Melinn wrote, “Ferguson’s perceived public callousness toward the sexual assault victims of Larry Nassar and his behind-the-scenes maneuvering to bring former Republican Gov. John Engler to lead MSU on an interim basis have not endeared him to the groups, like the education unions, the UAW, progressives and the trial attorneys, who have previously supported him.” Engler, governor from 1991 to 2003, had taken the state in a decidedly right-leaning direction. The state Democratic Party turned to other trustee candidates in 2020.
As he acquired success, Ferguson purchased a classic mid-century-modern home. It was on Cambridge Road. His back yard bordered on the Country Club of Lansing — which had sent cars to his childhood neighborhood to pick up workers. Ferguson was a member. He could drive there in his Bentley to dine and play golf.
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