Obituary: L. Clifford Davis, Civil Rights Lawyer & Judge, 100

 

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.

Charles Person, Youngest of the Original Freedom Riders, 82

Charles Person was the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South - and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so. He was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, although he had been accepted at MIT, when he first became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the thousands of students across the South who were marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters.

His first arrest, during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant, was in 1961. When he returned to campus, he saw an ad from the Congress of Racial Equality looking for volunteers for a trip by commercial bus from Washington to New Orleans. Along the way, the ad said, they would test the December 5, 1960 US Supreme Court decision (Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454) banning segregation in bus terminals serving interstate travelers. 

After training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others - including the future congressman John Lewis - left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Person could try to use the white restroom while Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters. Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, just drew ugly stares from white people in the depot. In Charlotte, N.C., Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.

The next stop was Anniston, a small town in eastern Alabama. The station was closed, but the driver stopped anyway. Another bus had been firebombed outside town, he said and if they wanted to proceed, the Black Riders would have to move to the back. When they refused, the driver left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the Riders; knocking Person and Peck unconscious before being dragged to the rear. “They threw us to the back of the bus,” Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”

In Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14, a crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the Riders. After the bus driver refused to carry them further, the Riders left the bus. In the station when Peck said the two of them were friends, several men pulled him into a hallway and began beating him with a pipe. Somebody grabbed Person, too, but after awhile he was able to escape. By then the Klansmen were beating up the Riders with abandon. Person managed to catch a city bus, and finally reached the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader in the city’s civil rights community. More Freedom Riders, including Peck, eventually made it to the home. Though most doctors did not want to treat them for fear of retribution, they eventually found medical care.

Around 400 people joined the bus campaign in total, many facing beatings and prison. But it worked: In November, 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals. "It really was the template for citizen politics in the 1960s,” said Ray Arsenault, the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pages. Paperback $18.99). “A lot of what came after - the antiwar protests, the women’s movement - all drew on these ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

After settling in Atlanta in the 1980s, Person became locally involved in civil rights activism. In 2022, he wrote Buses Are a Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider with Richard Rooker (304 pages. St. Martin's Press, 2021. Paperback $19.00).

Read the US Supreme Court summary of Boynton v. Virginia.

Book Review: "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" by Michelle Adams

 

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. 528 pages. $35.00 hardcover.

"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground." - Jeffrey Toobin, New York Times Book Review.

This book relates Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs and the associated struggle for desegregation in the North. In The Containment, Michelle Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, tells the history of the attempts to integrate Detroit schools, and the problems that followed when this effort collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. The book includes brief bios of the activists who tried to help Detroit's students during this period of riots, Black power, and white flight. In 1974, Federal District Judge Stephen Roth ruled that integration was not possible within the city's boundaries and ordered a new plan to include 53 of the 85 surrounding, mostly white, school districts. 

This metropolitan desegregation remedy could have remade the future direction of racial justice. Instead, the US Supreme Court on July 25, 1974 overruled the lower courts in ruling that the federal courts "could not impose a multidistrict, area-wide remedy upon local districts in the absence of any evidence those districts committed acts causing racial discrimination." The decision seriously impeded the struggle for forced desegregation both in Michigan and throughout the North, and limited the scope of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

Read the State Bar of Michigan's Michigan Legal Milestones historical article.

Read the full text of the Milliken v. Bradley decision.

Thelma Jean Mothershed Wair, One of the Little Rock Nine, 83.

Thelma Jean Mothershed Wair was a member of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American students involved in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school. Mothershed was a junior when she entered Central. Despite the fact that she had a cardiac condition since birth, she had a near perfect record for attendance.

Mothershed attended Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School before transferring to Central High. Despite daily tormenting from some white students at Central High, she completed her junior year at the formerly all-white high school during the 1957-58 year. The students who integrated Central High School were known as the Little Rock Nine.

For three weeks in September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block the Black students from enrolling in Central High. This was three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms were unconstitutional. In response to Faubus' actions, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school on September 25, 1957.

Because the city’s high schools were closed the following year, Mothershed earned the necessary credits for graduation through correspondence courses and by attending summer school in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her diploma from Central High by mail. Mothershed graduated from Southern Illinois University at Cabondale in 1964 with a BA in home economics and earned her MS in Guidance and Counseling Education in 1970; in 1985, she received an administrative certificate in education from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She taught home economics in the East St. Louis school system for twenty-eight years.

Mothershed Wair also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in St. Clair County, Illinois, and as an instructor of survival skills for women at the American Red Cross Shelter for the homeless. During the 1989-90 school year, the East St. Louis chapter of the Top Ladies of Distinction and the early childhood/pre-kindergarten staff of District 189 honored her as an Outstanding Role Model.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded her and the other Little Rock Nine, along with Daisy Bates, the prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1958. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine.

Image Credit: Office of U.S. Rep Vic Snyder (D-Arkansas), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read the October 28, 2024 Encyclopedia of Arkansas article.

Read the October 21, 2024 Associated Press (AP) article.