John Warren Davis was an American educator, administrator, scientist, author, civil rights activist and international representative.
Background
John Warren Davis was born in Milledgeville, Georgia. He was the son of Robert Marion Davis, a grocery store clerk in Savannah, Ga. , and Katie Mann, a laundress. When he was five and one-half years old, he was sent to Americus, Ga. , to live with elderly relatives, the Reverend and Mrs. Sylvannus Carter, as a result of financial exigencies in his large family. Carter, an itinerate Baptist preacher and an important black community leader during the 1890's, exerted a significant impact on Davis's formative years. With segregation still a constitutionally mandated principle and lynching a commonly used control mechanism, Davis learned from Carter the value of a life of noncombativeness without servility and of intellectual achievement without arrogance. This became his ladder to success.
Education
The Carters sent Davis to the McKay Hills Elementary School and to Atlanta Baptist College, a high school for black youths. In 1903 this was exceptional: only a generation earlier it had been illegal to educate blacks. In 1907, Davis was admitted to Morehouse College in Atlanta, a leading institution for educating blacks. He supported himself with summer jobs at the Chicago stockyards and janitorial work at Morehouse. Following graduation from Morehouse in 1911, Davis enrolled as a graduate student in chemistry and physics at the University of Chicago.
In 1911 he returned to Morehouse as a teacher; he later became registrar, serving until 1917. Morehouse awarded him an M. A. degree in 1920.
Career
Davis's intellectual abilities, social skills, and religious contacts brought him to the attention of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and beginning in 1917, he was executive secretary of the Twelfth Street branch of the YMCA in Washington, D. C. By 1919, when West Virginia State College was seeking a new president, Davis was appropriately positioned for such a job.
Although only thirty-one years old, he was hailed as a diplomat who could work with both blacks and whites. As president of West Virginia State College for thirty-four years, Davis developed contacts with important legislators and interest groups. He used their support to expand the college's curriculum, including liberal arts courses, like drama and theater, that served to meet cultural needs of the entire state. His successful leadership was due also to his appointments of both staff and faculty. This in turn attracted students of the highest intellectual caliber. As a result, West Virginia State College won regional accreditation in 1927: it was one of four African-American institutions so recognized at that time.
During World War II, Davis established technological training programs at the college and set the stage for integration of black and white students. A Civilian Pilot Training Program for the college was authorized in 1939 by the government, and a Reserve Officers' Training Corps was established in 1942.
Davis was aided in his earliest endeavors by the political contacts of his first wife.
Davis's second wife was active in promoting the total program of the college. A well-educated teacher and administrator who had a master's degree from Columbia University, Ethel McGhee had been dean of women at Spelman College in Atlanta. Together, the Davises created at West Virginia State College an integrated environment for all the social, cultural, political, and educational functions that the college offered. Contacts with presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman resulted in significant opportunities for Davis to develop his favorite theme: that racism was the weakest link in democracy.
In 1948, Truman issued an executive order integrating the armed services, as Davis had hoped. Davis retired from the presidency of West Virginia State College in 1953 and was immediately appointed head of the Technical Cooperative Administration in Liberia. When the United States Supreme Court declared segregation in education unconstitutional in 1954, however, Davis reentered the educational arena. Encouraged by Thurgood Marshall, he agreed to direct the newly established Department for Teacher Information and Security of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
For the next twenty years he used the litigation process to help protect black teachers and principals; he used the economicprocess to secure funds to educate blacks in colleges and universities nationwide. This latter goal was aided by the establishment in 1964 of the Herbert Lehman Educational Fund. This program's finances expanded as a result of its sponsorship by Mrs. Herbert Lehman, an NAACP board member with tremendous political, educational, and financialpower, and of the public relations efforts of Davis.
A supplementary program was begun in 1972. Named the Earl Warren Legal Training Program, and with Davis as director, it made a concerted effort to recruit, educate, and activate a cadre of highly competent black attorneys to defend black students and educators.
During Davis's lifetime this program enabled more than eight hundred students to attend law school. At age eighty-four, Davis moved into advisory and consultant positions within these organizations.
Achievements
Davis's leadership had resulted in integration of educational activities even before 1954, and in educating litigators to protect emerging civil rights. Together these accomplishments contributed to Davis's goal of both a diplomatic and a positive end to segregation.
