As Black History Month came to a close, we wrapped up with a look at one more Central New York luminary. Doctor Sarah Loguen Fraser is among Syracuse's most impressive leaders, but seldom known outside the medical field. She was a trailblazer in the late 1800's who refused to let societal norms of the time hold her back.
Loguen attended Syracuse University Medical College, or what is currently known as Upstate Medical University. Now, her portrait watches over students studying there in the library at Weiskotten Hall.
Susan Keeter is the artist who painted the portrait. She also co-authored a book about Sarah Loguen and two other female doctors in the 1800s. Keeter said the last name Loguen might ring a bell for anyone familiar with Syracuse history.
“She’s part of the first family of Syracuse,” said Keeter. “One of the first black women doctors in America was the daughter of Bishop Jermaine and Caroline Loguen, whose home was [Syracuse’s] main station of the Underground Railroad. Doctor Loguen was born in 1850 – that’s important because it’s the same year as the Fugitive Slave Law.”
The evening before her birth, her family held a meeting to organize abolitionists against the impending Fugitive Slave Act, a law allowing slave owners to enter free states to reclaim escaped slaves.
Dr. Rick Wright, a professor emeritus at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, said in the 1800’s, southern plantation stakeholders were very powerful in Congress.
“They said, ‘we’ll let the new states come in as free states, but we want the ability to go north to any escaped slave, which is our property. We want to have the legal ability to go north to get them and return them to slavery,’” said Wright. “That was the compromise of 1850.”
Sarah’s father, Reverend Loguen, was a fugitive slave himself. Her mother, an active abolitionist, traveled to help 1,500 slaves get to freedom in her lifetime. As the fifth of eight kids, much of the cooking and medical aid fell to Sarah.
Keeter said she thinks Sarah Loguen learned her bravery from her dad who escaped slavery “Doctor Loguen said, ‘I don’t need my freedom purchased because I was born free’, and wrote scathing letters to his former enslavers, who wanted him to come back and buy his freedom. [It was] at great personal sacrifice, because they would not free his mother if he didn’t pay for his freedom.”
That tenacity appears to be genetic. In her jointly written book “Three 19th Century Women Doctors,” Keeter talked about Sarah Loguen’s grandmother, Jane McCoy. She was born and lived free until 1978, when at seven-years-old she was kidnapped outside her home in Ohio.
“It makes me cry every time I think about it,” Keeter said, while stifling back tears. “She was playing in the yard with some friends and somebody in a wagon just came in and grabbed her.”
Keeter says the child’s name was changed to “Cherry” and she was sold into slavery in 1798. Ten years later, at age 17, Keeter says she was raped by the slave owner’s son and gave birth to Jermaine followed by two other children by the same man.
On her mother’s side, Sarah’s great grandmother was white – making Loguen biracial. Mary Ann (Polly) Fowler was a French Canadian who raised four sons with her free-African-Native American common-law husband, Charles Stomm in the late 1700’s.
Both of Sara Loguen’s parents were driven to seek justice through education at the Oneida Institute, where they first met.
Her family opened schools for minorities and enrolled Sarah into classes by age five. As a naturally gifted student, she learned Shakespeare, chemistry, French, and German. But Susan Keeter said it was a life lesson outside of the Syracuse railway station that decided her professional fate.
“She witnessed a wagon accident where a little boy got run over, and she was appalled by the number of people who just walked by or ran away,” said Keeter. “She went running around looking for a doctor and that was the moment where she thought, how I can really help is to become a doctor.”
With the intellectual support of her family’s physician and fellow abolitionist, Dr. Michael Benedict, Sarah applied and became the first African American woman to graduate from Syracuse University’s Medical College at age 22.
“She’s among the first very few African American women to graduate from medical school, and the fact that she graduated from upstate,” Keeter pointed out the fact that she was the first black woman to graduate from a co-educational medical school was a big deal. “The academic standards were more rigorous.”
Syracuse was among the top medical programs, offering similar strict studies to Harvard and the University of Chicago.
Dr. Simone Seward is the Director of Community Engagement and Learning at Upstate. She appreciates personally and professionally seeing Doctor Sarah Loguen’s portrait greeting students as they enter the library.
“Doctor Sarah Loguen Fraser has really been inspirational to not only to the institution, but our students of color who come through this space and can see her represented through this portrait,” said Seward. “It's really a monumental experience for the students to come in and see someone who looks like them, who represents what they could be.”
Nearly 150 years later, the doors open far more often for students who not only look like Sara Loguen, but share her work ethic.
Zuri Williams is a third year medical student at SUNY Upstate Medical University and the 2025 winner of the Doctor Sarah Loguen Fraser Scholarship.
In her application essay, Williams’ shared the moment that made her commit to becoming a doctor.
“I ended up seeing this little boy laying in the street. He had just been hit by a car and I just remember people yelling and screaming ‘get help’,” Williams recalled of a revelation almost identical to Sarah Loguen’s. “In that moment, seeing that no one [could] help him and the helplessness I felt, I knew I didn’t want to be in that position anymore. I wanted to pursue medicine.”
The scholarship is $10,000, which Williams said she appreciates immensely, estimating her school loan debt will climb to near $100,000 by the time she graduates with her medical degree.
Undetered, Williams is focused on helping people who look like her. “I am very passionate about black maternal health and women’s reproductive rights.” She is considering becoming an obstetrician and embraces individuality, because, “at the end of the day, we were created to serve, we were created to be great. I think everyone should have the opportunity to do so. Whatever your passion is, follow it.”
That advice describes the way Sarah Loguen lived. In her life’s work, she practiced medicine in Philadelphia, then Boston and Washington D.C. – where she opened her own medical practice under the name Dr. Loguen in 1879 with the help of her father’s friend and her Godfather, Frederick Douglass.
He introduced to her future husband, a pharmacist named Charles Fraser who lived in Santo Domingo at the time, now called the Dominican Republic. Married at age 33 and professionally established, she added her husband’s name and became Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser.
Doctor Fraser passed the medical boards in six months to become that country’s first female physician.
When she died, she received a small obituary mention in the local Syracuse paper, but the Dominican Republic celebrated her life’s work with a Catholic High Mass and flags flown at half mast for nine days. It was their way of commemorating Dr. Loguen Fraser, the country’s first female doctor.
In 2000, SUNY Upstate and the city of Syracuse celebrated Dr. Fraser’s life, naming a street after her and dedicating the portrait that now hangs in the library at Weiskotten Hall.
