Davis was a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s who helped integrate Texas public schools that had resisted the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the principle of “separate but equal.” He recalled assisting Thurgood Marshall, then the chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, with the legal work supporting Brown v. Board of Education, which ended with a unanimous 1954 US Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
After graduating from Howard University School of Law in 1949, Davis practiced civil rights law in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, one of nine Black lawyers in the entire state. Seeing a greater need for his services in Texas, where racial segregation was more prevalent, he moved to Texas. He became licensed in Texas in 1953, and in 1954, moved to Fort Worth, where he was one of only two Black lawyers in the city.
In 1955, Davis was the lead attorney in a lawsuit, Jackson v. Rawdon, seeking the admission of several Black students to public schools in Mansfield, a Fort Worth suburb that was then a farming community. A federal appeals court judge ordered that the schools integrate. Despite that ruling, and despite the US Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Brown, segregationists in the district fiercely opposed the mandate.
As the new school year began in 1956, mobs tried to prevent Black students from entering the local high school. A Black student was hung in effigy from a noose downtown. Other effigies were hung at the school entrance and from a flagpole. Gov. Allan Shivers, a Democrat who had denounced the Brown decision, dispatched the Texas Rangers. At one point, according to an account in the New York Times, an Episcopal minister attempted to quell the mob, remarking that it was difficult to “put the Bible’s ‘love thy neighbor’ together with this crowd.” “This ain’t a ‘love thy neighbor’ crowd!” one of the White resisters yelled back. Davis conceded it was simply too dangerous to send Black students into Mansfield High School. “All we were asking them to do was to just follow the law,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2003. “That’s all. The appeals court ordered the [trial] judge to follow the law, that’s all. He entered the integration order, but we couldn’t go into the schools. It would have been totally unsafe for us to go.”
In 1959, Davis filed Flax, et al. v. Potts, another federal civil rights suit, which led to the desegregation of the Fort Worth Independent School District. He was lead attorney on many noteworthy cases over his career, including the race discrimination class action suit against General Dynamics, In the 1960s he became one of the first Black lawyers to join the Tarrant County Bar Association and in 1983, he was first appointed and then elected to the Texas Criminal District Court No. 2 district court bench, becoming one of the first Black state district judges in Tarrant County, where he served on the bench until 1988.
Davis received numerous awards from other social organizations. He was recognized by his peers in 1997 when he received the Tarrant County Bar Association's highest award and was inducted into the National Bar Association Hall of Fame. He was also recognized by the NAACP and awarded the “William Robert Ming Award” for his efforts with their legal affairs.
Read the February 21, 2025 Washington Post article.
Read the obituary by the L. Clifford Davis Legal Association.
