George Oscar Ferguson

George Oscar Ferguson was a professor in the Education School at the University of Virginia.

Career

Early Work

Ferguson was born in Leesburg, Virginia. He attended the College of William and Mary. He worked on his dissertation at Columbia University with eugenicists that included James McKeen Cattell and Edward Thorndike. Ferguson’s main work was a book titled “The Psychology of the Negro” that was published in 1916. In it, he argued for the use of intelligence tests in Virginia that would determine the natural abilities of its residents. The tests would allow for the state to educate black and white people differently which would lead to increased social harmony.

University of Virginia

Ferguson joined the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, called the Curry School of Education at the time, in 1919. At the university, William Henry Heck was one of Ferguson’s mentors. As a professor of the Education School, Ferguson taught hundreds of students that black people were naturally intellectually inferior to white people and therefore were socially inferior. These students would eventually become educators throughout Virginia. Edwin A. Alderman supported these ideas. Alderman thought Ferguson’s research had practical applications and advocated for it to be applied to state laws.

Later in Ferguson’s career, Lawrence Thomas Royster, another professor at the University of Virginia, attempted to confirm Ferguson’s work through anthropological and psychological investigations.