Draft:John M. Dorsey, Jr.

John Morris Dorsey, Jr. (July 29, 1927 – March 20, 2022) was a pediatrician and community leader in Southeast Michigan. Dorsey practiced medicine for 65 years, first in Adrian, then in Beverly Hills and Bingham Farms. He once estimated that in the course of his career he had conducted nearly 400,000 office visits. Dorsey was also active in public affairs, leading a group in 1968 that successfully advocated in favor of a fair housing referendum in Birmingham, Michigan, and thereafter serving on that town’s City Commission.

Dorsey was born in Iowa City, Iowa, to Mary Carson Dorsey and John M. Dorsey, a psychiatrist. The family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1930. From 1935 through 1937, the family lived in Vienna, Austria while Dorsey Sr. was studying under psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The family returned to Ann Arbor in 1937, and in 1940, moved to Highland Park, Michigan.

Dorsey attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills and Highland Park High School. He enlisted in the Navy in 1945 and served in the Naval Reserves from the end of World War II until 1950. He earned his M.D. from the College of Medicine at Wayne University (later Wayne State University) in 1953. In 1957, following his internship and residency, he practiced pediatrics in Adrian before moving to suburban Detroit in 1959 and co-founding a practice there. He remained active in that practice, now known as Beverly Hills Pediatrics, until December 2021.

Dorsey was well-known in the area. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was medical consultant to ABC-owned WXYZ-TV, and appeared regularly on broadcasts during that time. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a guest columnist for the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. His patients and colleagues appreciated him for his curiosity, cheerful demeanor and encyclopedic knowledge gained through his decades of practice.

Outside of his medical practice, Dorsey in 1968 spearheaded a successful referendum in support of a fair housing ordinance adopted in 1967 by the City Commission in Birmingham, Michigan, the first referendum supporting fair housing in an all-White town in the United States. On the strength of that success, Dorsey was elected to the Birmingham City Commission in 1969, where he served for three years. Dorsey also served on the Boards of Trustees of Cranbrook Schools and Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills. In 1971, he co-founded Common Ground, a crisis intervention center then located in Birmingham, and headed its free medical clinic for several years. He also was a charter member of the General Motors Medical Committee for Automotive Safety in the 1990s.