The Davis Family

The Davis Family History

The Davis Extended Family. John Preston Davis is seated on his grandmother's lap. 1905

Right to Left Back Row: Dr. William H. Davis , Julia Hubbard Davis, Rev Everett Harris , John Bull Davis, Leslie Davis, Charles Robert Right to Left first Row: William Davis, Susan Bates Davis, Everett G Harris , Sara Louise Davis, John P, Davis ( seated on his grandmother's lap), Rachel Harris , Ella Bull Davis

On the new century's eve, in June 1899, William and Julia Davis, packed their chattel goods and with their infant children, Sara and William, boarded the colored car of a coal-fired train in Louisville, Kentucky. They were riding north, to Washington, D.C., that shining city on a hill whose gleaming beacon of refuge and hope beckoned a generation of post Reconstruction black Americans. In Washington, William and Julia Davis found a swampy metropolis with most of its street still unpaved. It would be nine years before Henry Ford's Model T automobile competed with horse-drawn vehicles carrying people through the capitals streets.

Most Washingtonians older than 50 had seen the flickering camp fires of combat-weary Union troops bivouacked along the Potomac Rivers Virginia banks and they remembered that bad Good Friday night of April 14, 1865, when Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, as the president sat in his Ford Theater box watching London-born actress Laura Keene's performance in Our American Cousin.

After Congress freed Washington slaves in April 1862, before the Civil Wars end, black people seeking the federal governments protective embrace rushed to the capital, escaping the South's increasingly malevolent racial climate. Black Americans were fleeing lynchings and the escalating terrorists activities of the Ku Klux Klan, hooded nightriders organized by six former Confederate Army officers in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Though Washington was geographically a southern city - just a few miles South of the Mason-Dixon Line - it was not "of the South" because it was the seat of a victorious government whose war against the Confederacy to save the Union, was ultimately transformed into a conflict that crushed the slave oligarchy and with it a way of life to which most white Southerners had grown comfortably accustomed. Despite its strong Northern political ties, however, it would not be until the 1950 s that the city would shed its shroud of southern ambience, thinly veiled southern sympathies and social customs that cast it in the nations popular mind as "just a sleepy little southern town."

In Washington, the Davises and other black immigrants relied on extended networks of kinship and relations they forged to bridge the barriers of distance and loneliness in their new, but foreign metropolis. Many established immigrant black families took in friends and relatives until the newer arrivals earned enough money to get on feet, providing their own accommodations. These boarding houses held social events that united friends and former neighbors in harmonious social settings where new comers received hearty welcomes when they arrived with fresh and intimate news about the folks back home.

The Davises attended social events at the Kentucky Boarding House on S Street NW, operated in a two-story brick row dwelling by two Louisville women, the widowed Mrs. Nan Wheaton and her spinster sister, Frances Bacon. There they ate and enjoyed regional food favorites like Kentucky fork-whipped beaten biscuits, socialized, and sent information to Kentucky friends and relatives about the progress of black people in the nation's capital and the prospects for federal government employment in Washington.

Harvard University-educated historian Carter G. Woodson described this black flight to Northern and Midwestern cities, as a "Migration of the Talented Tenth," a travel phenomena igniting the largest folk movement in American history. This southern departure of black people, a trickle in the late 1800 s during Reconstruction, was a stream by 1900. Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore each had more than 50,000 black citizens while Washington, D.C. boasted the fastest growing, most economically thriving black community of any American city, drawing the best and brightest of this migratory population. Shortly after my Davises 1899 arrival Washingtons citywide population of 90,000 black residents included 50 physicians, 10 dentists, 30 lawyers, 400 teachers and about 90 ministers.

For William and Julia Davis, their children and other newly arriving black families, Washington was hardly provincial. City life was immeasurably different from life in their native Southland where the newly sown seeds of ugly, explicit racial animosity germinated by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson, decision were taking deep root. It was the notorious Plessey decision that changed the way black Americans would live for the next half-century.

There were other incentives calling upwardly aspiring black people to Washington. The classrooms of Howard University coupled with prospects of secure white-collar federal government employment were powerful magnets for black southerners eager to abandon the tough, backbreaking labor of rural southern farm life. Howard University had been training black and white professionals since 1867 and its graduates were using their educations and professional status to lift themselves and their families socially and economically.

William and Julia Davis' first Washington home was a two-story red brick row house on 10th Street NW, a block named Strivers Row. because of the many upwardly mobile African American families seeking educations and holding government jobs who lived there. It was a neighborhood on the fringe of LeDroit Park, the formerly all-white community where established Old Guard black Washingtonians like the Bruces, the Langstons and the Terelles lived in elegant Second Empire, Italiante, Gothic Revival and Queen Anne homes. It was a close-knit colony of nearly 800 African American families just a few blocks from Howard University's wrought iron gates.

Many members of Washington's black middle class were kindred to the 18,000 high-yellow mulattos and quadroons who lived in the city or in nearby areas of Maryland and Virginia - many of them were free people of color - before the Civil Wars end. They comprised a small group that moved quietly toward goals of comfortable lives while creating ladders of education and economics whose rungs would allow their children to reach even higher levels of achievement.

The Davises 10^th street neighborhood was within walking distance of U Street NW, the capitals rapidly growing turn-of-the-century black business and glittering entertainment district with its theaters, restaurants, night clubs, barber shops and dry goods stores, on the fringe of seamier 7th Street, NW, an area of Jewish-owned pawn shops, flop houses, back alley gin joints, nickelodeons and three popular pool rooms, the Ideal, the Silver Slipper and the Southern Aid Billiard Parlor.

U Streets architectural pride was the five-story True Reformers Building, a Romanesque-styled edifice with 18-foot-high arched windows extending from the first to the second floor and a roof crowned with an ornately tooled tin frieze of swags and wreaths in a neighborhood of otherwise modest two-story edifices. The building was the dream-come-true of the Rev. William Lee Taylor whose grandiloquent title - National Grand Worthy Master of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of the True Reformers- belied his small physique. It was constructed in 1903 with black money - $45,900 - by black hands and designed by John Lankford, the citys first registered black architect.

The Davises Northwest Washington neighborhood, known today as Shaw, was home to a small group of black families whose sons and daughters were destined to make important contributions to black American progress in music and the arts, literature, law and medicine, government and religion, education and the military. Their closet neighbors and friends included men and women of high accomplishments and professional achievements.

Dr. Frances Rollin Whipper, one of the nation's first black female physicians lived at 511 Florida Avenue NW. She came to Washington in 1885 with her daughter, Ionia R. Whipper, who also became a physician after graduating from Howard University Medical School in 1903. Other physicians living in the neighborhood were John Washington, Sidney Sumny, Edmund Wilson, Charles A. Tignor and Algernon B. Jackson. In 1884 Washingtons black physicians, barred from membership in the District Medical Society, founded the Medico-Chirurgical Society, the nations first black medical association. That action was an early indication that black people intended to found their own professional institutions when excluded from those in Americas mainstream.

Dr. Wilson Bruce Evans, and his daughter, Americas first internationally acclaimed opera singer Lillian Evans Tibbs, known professionally as Madam Evanti, lived in the neighborhood near the families of future jazz musician and bandleader Duke Ellington and Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard University historian.

Benjamin O. Davis, born in 1877 and destined to become the nations first black general and his son, B.O. Davis, Jr. who would also become a general and a leader of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, black aerial aces who broke the color bar in World War II winning a string of impressive victories against Germanys crack Luftwaft, lived at 1721 S Street NW.

Other neighborhood residents included Americas first black Rhodes Scholar, Harvard University graduate Alain Locke, a Howard University professor and a founder of the Harlem Renaissance along with Renaissance writers poet Langston Hughes, and novelists Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fischer and other black writers and artists who spent extended periods of time - Hughes at the LeDroit Park home of his late great uncles relatives and Hurston and Fisher on the campus of Howard University - in the capital city before going to Harlem in the 1920s.

Dr. Charles Drews, medical research contributed to the development of blood plasma and his leadership role in the Blood for Briton drive saved thousands of Allied lives during World War II. He was raised in the nearby neighborhood of Foggy Bottom before his family moved across the Potomac River to Arlington, Virginia in 1921.

Charles Hamilton Houston who, as dean of Howard Universitys Law School would play an instrumental role in the education of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and who then designed the legal strategy that would be used after his death to dismantle American apartheid in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v Board Education, lived there.. Attorney Fountain Peyton, one of the city's first black lawyers, lived at 330 T Street NW., a house once owned by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and his wife. Howard University professor Dr. Ernest E. just, a 1907 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College and a renowned genetic biologist, lived at 412 T Street.

One of Washington's most accomplished couples of the time was Robert and Mary Terrell, prominent and outspoken leaders of black Washingtons society. Mary Terrell, the daughter of a prominent Memphis, Tennessee family, graduated from racially liberal Oberlin College, even though her father had urged her not to attend college. He told her a college education was of no value to a black woman.

Robert Terrell came to Washington from his native Virginia in 1867 at the age of ten. He attended the prestigious Groton Academy in Massachusetts and was one of seven magna cum laude graduates in Harvards class of 1884. He was the first black Harvard student to deliver a commencement address. Mary Terrell, who characterized Washington's black society as "society, spelled with a capital S" in her book, Colored Woman in a White World," was noted for her participation in activities to win equality for women. In 1897 she was one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women and she worked with suffragette Susan B. Anthony in the National Women's Suffrage Association, frequently picketing the White House, to gain for women the right to vote. She was one of the first black women to serve on the city's school board.

In the 1890 s Robert H. Terrell became one of the first black members of Washington's Board of Trade. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia, and despite strong racist opposition from southern senators at his nomination hearings, he was confirmed by the United States Senate and became the city's first African American judge.

The Davises other neighbors included the family of Robert Clifton Weaver, who in 1965 would become President Lyndon B. Johnson's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the first African American to serve as presidential cabinet member. Weaver's father was a postal clerk, a position with middle class status at the time, and his mother was a schoolteacher. His maternal grandfather, a Harvard University graduate, was a prominent Washington dentist.

Other Davis family friends included Edward and Helen Brooke, whose son, Edward W. Brooke, Jr., born in 1919, would in 1962, be elected attorney general of Massachusetts, the first African American to win statewide office in the state. In 1966 Ed Brooke became the first African American United States senator since Reconstruction. As an adult, Ed Brook held fond memories of his old Northwest Washington neighborhood. "We lived in a Negro community that had everything within its limited society. I didn't know we were not part of the total society," he said.

Julia Davis spoke often of talking with her neighbor, the citys most illustrious literary eminence, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar acclaimed by then-former Atlantic Monthly editor and literary critic William Dean Howells as America's best "Negro poet." Dunbar completed his first novel, "The Uncalled," while working on the circulation desk at the Library of Congress.

Dunbar shared a large gabled house on Fourth Street NW with Howard University mathematics professor Kelly Miller, who later became the universitys dean. "Come to 1934 Fourth St. NW. My house is very beautiful and my parlor suite is swell," he wrote to his mother in Toledo, shortly after before his marriage to Alice. In 1900 Dunbar and Alice moved from Kelly Millers house, to their own home at 321 Spruce Street, in the same neighborhood. In Lyrics of the Hearthside he wrote poetically of evening walks with Alice in the community where most of the streets are still named after trees, "Sunnah nights and sighin' breeze/ 'Long de lovah's lane."

A year later, as Dunbars health deteriorated, he wrote to his mother, expressing his discouragement over what he believed was Washingtons failure to acknowledge his literary work, though his writing was highly acclaimed in Europe and on the Continent. "I still stagnate here among books in medicine and natural sciences, in what I have come to believe is the most Godforsaken and unliterary town in America," he wrote. "I hate Washington very cordially and evidently it returns the compliments, for my health is continually poor and I am afraid the climate of Washington does not suite me, but there is much to hold me here."

Dunbar described what he perceived to be the socially exclusive nature of the small group of black people living in his neighborhood, in a December 14, 1901 Saturday Evening Post article: "Here exists a society which is sufficient unto itself as society which is satisfied with its own condition and which is not asking for social intercourse with whites, he wrote. Their homes are finely, beautifully and tastefully furnished. Here comes together the flowers of colored citizenship from all parts of the country." If scholar and NAACP cofounder W. E. B. DuBois accurately described Washington, D.C. in the early 1900 s as the "center of Negro society," Dunbars magazine article was confirming the citys northwest quadrant as the axis on which it turned.

All black Washingtonians, of course, were not the flowers of colored citizenship and though just a few of them owned homes that were finely, beautifully and tastefully furnished, in white minds across America Washington, D.C. was "the colored man's paradise." Actually, the larger majority of black Washingtonians, mostly former southern agricultural workers, were living in sub standard housing situated in tubercular places like Groats and Blagden alleys, or in wretched stable-like quarters formerly occupied by slaves, servants and horses

The Davises and their friends referred to themselves proudly as "Negroes." The term "black" was still a nasty racial denigration for a people who had not yet begun the linguistic journey that would take them from "Negro," to "people of color," to "colored," to "black," to "Afro-American," to "African American" and, finally back to black again.

On January 19, 1905, William and Julia Davis had a third child, John Preston Davis, born in the family's house on 10^th Street NW. John Preston Davis birth was a cheerful occasion for William and Julia Davis , but the times hardly welcomed his arrival. The fortunes of African Americans were at an ebb as lynchings, 90 in 1905, were common and increasing and racial pogroms flared in cities North and South as segregation was creeping surreptitiously into places it had not previously existed.

Dr. William H. Davis kept his Treasury Department job while opening a night school - The Davis Business College - in the basement of the family's Tenth Street home. Though many students could not afford the school's modest tuition, he turned no promising young man or young woman away. His school and his teaching skills came to the attention of the citys school board and he was hired as principal of Washington's new Armstrong High School. By 1908 Dr. William H. Davis had expanded Armstrong's school from enrollment of 42 students to more than 400 and moved the school into a larger building on Vermont Avenue NW.

For most black Washingtonians, like Dr. William H. Davis, fortunate enough to have government jobs or professional positions, federal city life was comfortable. They were isolated, though not completely insulated, from the most blatant forms of segregation and discrimination spreading across America as Jim Crow practices proliferated by custom and legal decree, but that would soon change with the election of President Woodrow Wilson.

Black Washington's distrust of Wilson was surpassed only by the disaffection many Northerners held for him. They disapproved of Wilson's frequent references to the Civil War as a war for "Southern independence." They disliked his strong Southern sympathies, his predilection for filling his cabinet and most other high-level government positions with Southerners like Postmaster General Albert Burleson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and especially William McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury.

McAdoo, from Tennessee, was Wilson's campaign manager, his friend, his confidant and would soon be his son-in-law. He quickly became one of the most powerful and influential members of the Wilson Administration. It was McAdoo, at his mother-in laws suggestion and his father-in-law's approval, who began a new and strictly enforced policy of segregation in federal government offices.

The story of how segregation came to federal government offices may be apocryphal, but it probably contains more threads of fact than fiction. The Wilson Administrations segregationist polices were influenced by the presidents wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, whose ambiguous racial posture puzzled black Washingtonians. After an April 1913 trip to the city's Pennsylvania Avenue Post Office Mrs. Wilson complained to her husband and her son-in-law McAdoo that she was startled and disturbed to discover black and white postal employees -especially white women and black men - working together in the same room.

Almost over night, In the Treasury Department office where Dr. William H. Davis worked comfortably sharing facilities with uncomplaining fellow white workers for 13 years, he now found segregated locker rooms, washrooms, separate water fountains, hastily erected partitions in his office separating black and white employees, and segregated lunch rooms. From that day forward the defiantly proud Dr. William H. Davis brought his lunch to work in a paper bag and ate it on a park bench.

In October 1917 Emmett Scott assistant to the Secretary of War appointed William H. Davis as his own special assistant and manager of his five-person War Department staff. He was impressed with William H. Davis' work as official stenographer at annual conventions of Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League and convinced him to leave his Treasury Department job for an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution toward black progress.

At the War Department Dr. William H. Davis handled complaints from black soldiers, assuring their families received government benefits to which they were entitled and seeing that newly instituted Selective Service regulations were applied equally. He soon discovered that though eligible black Americans were 10.7 percent of the population they constituted 13 percent of those called to military service, even though the Selective Service procedure was supposedly colorblind.

Dr. Davis' investigation of this irregularity revealed that black men were excluded from sitting on southern draft boards, and white men, some of whom may have wanted to shield their own sons from the dangers of military service, found it easy to draft black men in disproportionate numbers. Dr. William H. Davis findings were sent to Secretary Baker and then to the Wilson White House, but nothing changed.

In a letter of complaint to my Dr. Davis at the War Department that was later published in the "Pittsburgh Courier" Houston wrote: "The hate and scorn heaped upon us as Negro officers by our Americans, at Camp Mencou and Vannes, in France convinced me there was no sense dying in a world ruled by them...They boarded us off from our fellow white officers. They made us eat on benches in order to maintain segregation, and they destroyed our prestige in front of French officers." Houston told Dr. William H. Davis that he was so disheartened by his treatment as a military officer that he did not apply for several medals for which he was eligible.

As reports of Army racism became more frequent DuBois went to France to see first-hand the conditions of black fighting men and to gather material for his "History of the Black Man in the Great War." During three months in Europe DuBois saw black soldiers humiliated and badly treated and his initial enthusiasm for black participation in the war diminished. In the "Crisis" DuBois reported "no person in an official position dare tell the truth" about the treatment of black soldiers.

Despite Dr. Davis' frustration over his War Department office's inability to make any significant changes in the way black servicemen were treated, or to gain any assurance that life for black Americans would improve after the war, his tenure there was not without personal reward.

Black women had never served in the United States Navy and in 1917 Dr. William H. Davis convinced Secretary Baker to establish the first Navy office staffed by black women. The 16 black Yeomanettes, who were enlisted personnel and wore official U.S. Navy uniforms, worked in the Muster Roll division at Washington's Navy Yard under the command of John T. Risher, a member of the city's black middle class. They were responsible for tracking the movement of war ships and the Navy men who sailed them and assuring that their benefits and paychecks were paid on time.

The 16 members of the black Yeomanettes included several women from Washington's middle class black families, Catalina Boyd, Josie Washington and Ruth Osbourne, who would become the grandmother of President William Jefferson Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, Ronald Harmon Brown. William Davis was especially proud of his nineteen-year-old daughter, Yeomanette Sara Louise Davis.

This was the Washington the Davises and their friends knew as they raised their families in the 1920s.

William and Julia Davis, John P. Davis' parents and his paternal grandmother, Susan La Baetz Davis. The two children are Sara Davis Taylor and William Davis, Jr (1896)

Conference Group African American Editors n Washington during the war. Reading left to right, Front Row---Former Gov. P. B. S. Pinchback , Charles W. Anderson , Maj. L. P. DeMontal, Dr. Emmett J. Scott, Chairman, Col. Edouard Requin, Dr. Robert R. Moton , Judge R. H. Terrell, Dr. W. E. 13. DuBois, Major J. E. Spingarn, Chris J. Perry, Rev. Ernest Lyon. Second Row---W. H. Steward, Dr. A. M. Curtis, W. T. Andrews, Dr. W. H. Davis, Benj. J. Davis, Henry A. Boyd, R. S. Abbott, John Mitchell, Jr., J. H. Murphy, G. L. Knox, A. E. Manning. Third Row---Dr. Maurice Curtis, Dr. H. M. Minton, J. C. Dancy, H. C. Smith, E. A. Warren, C. K. Robinson, J. E. Mitchell. Ralph W. Tyler, R. W. Thompson, N. C. Crews. Fourth Row---Dr. S. A. Furniss, R. C. Bruce, P. B. Young, Geo. W. Harris, Dr. W. H. Brooks, Jas. A. Cobb , Dr. J. R. Hawkins, C. N. Love, W. J. Singleton, W. L. Houston. Wrn. E. King. Fifth Row---Dr. R. E. Jones, Maj. A. W. Washington, Robt. L. Vann. A. H. Grimke. Prof. Geo. W. Cook, Capt. Arthur S. Spingarn. F. R. Moore. (Early 1920s)

The War Department Staff. Dr. William H. Davis standing on the left. (Early 1920s)

Jonh and Marguerite Davis with their children, Michael and Miriam. (1940s)

John P. Davis and Sara Davis Taylor at President Truman's inaugural ball. (1940s)

John P. Davis' wife, Marguerite Davis and children, Michael and Miriam. (1940s)

John P. Davis' wife and children at the New York Museum. (1940s)

John P. Davis. (1930s)

John P. Davis (1905)

John P. Davis on tour at

Cambridge, Oxford and Heidelburg

Universities ( 1923)

Davis at Bates College (1923) John Preston Davis 3rd row, third person to the left

Davis rented from this Boston row house in the (1933)

Among the African-American students who lived and studied in these row houses were future UN secretary and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Ralph Bunche, and William Hastie, who later became a US Supreme Court Justice. Other young students who lived in the row houses included Lewis Reading, who later served as an attorney in the landmark case, Brown vs. the Board of Education, Robert Weaver, an economics major who went on to become the first African-American member of a presidential Cabinet and Harvard Law School graduate John P. Davis, known for his role in the National Negro Congress. They were all roommates, who lived in one of the row houses. They would play poker games together and have these grand discussions; afterward, they would retire to their respective rooms to study.

John P. Davis with grandmother, Susan La Baetz

Davis and Son, MIchael Davis (1941)

John P. Davis' wife, Marguerite Davis and son

MIchael Davis (1939)