I was cleaning out a cabinet of files and came upon an old Goodman Theatre playbill that featured actress Lizzy Cooper Davis. I know Lizzy as an acquaintance but she is really close to the family of my best friend. Lizzy, from what I gathered, is brilliant - extremely educated, and very gracious. And I knew she came from a talented family but not exactly to what extent. From what I've found out, I may have to revise the original premise of this thread. Lizzy's family is up there with the Jarrett-Dibble and Mossell Clans already featured, and possibly tops them.
Lizzy has a B.A. from Brown University, an A.M. from Harvard University, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University
Lizzy Cooper Davis is Assistant Professor of Applied Theater at Emerson College. She is an artist and scholar interested in how the arts can facilitate community conversation, resistance, and change. Particularly focused on black freedom movements, she has conducted research in Cuba, Brazil, and New Orleans, and her current project examines the cultural workers of the civil rights era. She has performed nationally as an actor in such theaters as Second Stage, The Public Theater, The Long Wharf, Berkeley Rep, and The American Repertory Theater and with such directors as Liesl Tommy, Anne Bogart, and Mary Zimmerman. She has also worked in television, film, and radio.
Lizzy's parents are Gordon and Peggy Cooper Davis.
Gordon Davis
Born in Chicago
Education: The Francis Parker School, Williams College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School
Founder of Gargoyle at Williams College and Harvard Law Schools's Black Law Students Association (BLSA) one of the first in the country.
Davis was a prominent leader in New York City's public, civic, and legal affairs for four decades. Davis was one of the first African Americans to become a partner in a major New York corporate law firm (Lord Day & Lord, 1983). He was Mayor
Ed Koch's first
New York City Parks Commissioner and is considered one of New York’s most successful parks commissioners. Since 2012, Davis has been a partner in the New York office of the law firm
Venable LLP
Peggy Cooper Davis
Education: Western College for Women, Barnard College, Harvard Law School
Davis became the first African American female professor at Rutgers University School of Law in 1977, where she taught criminal procedure and civil rights law. Davis worked as the deputy criminal justice coordinator for the City of New York in 1978, before serving as judge of the Family Court of the State of New York from 1980 to 1983. In September of 1983, Davis joined the New York University School of Law faculty, where she taught lawyering, evidence, and family law. In 1986, she obtained a full time professorship, and was named the John S. R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and Ethics at New York University School of Law in 1992.
Lizzy's uncle and the brother of Gordon Davis is Allison Stubbs Davis
Allison Stubbs Davis
Education: Cushing Academy, University of Chicago Laboratory School, Grinnell College, Northwestern University
After graduating from law school, Davis moved to Mali, where he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development coordinating smallpox eradication efforts and vocational training for three years. After returning to Chicago in 1967, Davis accepted a legal position at the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council. In 1969, Davis helped co-found the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a group focused on electing judges based on a merit system. In 1971, Davis co-founded Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland law firm in Chicago, focused on civil rights litigation. T
he firm hired Carol Moseley Braun, who went on to become the first African American female U.S. Senator and Barack Obama as a recent graduate of Harvard Law School.
Gordon and Allison Davis' parents are William Boyd Allison and Elizabeth Stubbs Davis
William Boyd Allison Davis
An educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar, William Boyd Allison Davis was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation. He became the first African-American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the University of Chicago in 1942, where he would spend the balance of his academic life. Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologist St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service, is best remembered for his pioneering anthropology research on southern race and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient in the 1940s and 50’s, and his support of “compensatory education” that contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal program Head Start.
- 1942 Social Anthropology Ph.D.; University of Chicago
- 1925 BA English; Harvard University
- Anthropology; London School of Economics
- 1924 BA summa cum laude English; William College
- Dissertation: The Relation between Color Caste and Economic Stratification in Two Black Plantation Counties.
- Areas of research interest: acculturation, race and social class, child development, personality and intelligence
- Awarded Julian Rosenwald Fellowships in Anthropology 1932, 1939, 1940.
- Professor of Anthropology, Head of the Division of Social Studies, Dillard University 1935-1940.
- Professor in the Department of Education, University of Chicago 1942 (first Black professor); Full Professor in 1948; John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Education, 1970.
- First educator to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- Selected Publications: Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940, co-authored with John Dollard), Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941, co-authored with Burleigh and Mary Gardner), Intelligence and Cultural Differences: A Study of Cultural Learning and Problem-solving (1951, co-authored with Kenneth Eells, Robert Havighurst, Virgil Herrick, and Ralph Tyler)
Alice Elizabeth Stubbs Davis
Not much is documented on Elizabeth Stubbs Davis except some things in relation to her husband. However, it is known that she was very exceptional, and along with her husband was one of the first black anthropologist in the nation. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and possibly both Harvard and the University of London and after marrying Allison Davis, assisted him on much of his research.
I will revisit Elizabeth as she connects the Davises to another black dynasty.
William Boyd Allison Davis’ brother was John Aubrey Davis whom was married to Mavis Wormley Davis.
John Aubrey Davis
Educator and civil rights advocate John A. Davis Sr. began his career in activism in the 1930s as leader of the New Negro Alliance, which pressured businesses to hire black employees. Two decades later he assisted with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. He also was chairman of the department of political science at City College of New York.
He graduated from Williams College in 1933 and received an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin the following year. In 1936 he received a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to complete his doctoral work at Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. in 1949.
He taught political science at Howard University, and in 1935 became a full professor at Lincoln University. In 1953 he joined the political science department at City College of New York as associate professor, becoming one of only about two dozen black faculty at predominately white institutions in the United States. He eventually became chair of the department. He retired in 1980.
Mavis Elizabeth Wormley Davis
Like her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, not much is written up on Mavis. However, it is also known that she was exceptional as well. She was a library scientist as well as a published scholar and assisted her husband on many of his published works.
Like Elizabeth, I will revisit Mavis as she also connects the Davises to another powerful black dynasty.
______________
W.B. Allison and John Aubrey’s father was John Abraham Davis.
John Abraham Davis
J. Abraham Davis and Family. John is seated in the middle.
John seated at far left with the white men that he supervised.
Here is a NYT article that Gordon Davis, Lizzy’s father, wrote about his grandfather John Abraham and is a great case for reparations due to their family.
Opinion | What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather
OVER the last week, a growing number of students at Princeton
have demanded that the university confront the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as its president before becoming New Jersey’s governor and the 28th president of the United States. Among other things, the students are demanding that Wilson’s name be removed from university facilities.
Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, is mostly remembered as a progressive, internationalist statesman, a benign and wise leader, a father of modern American political science and one of our nation’s great presidents.
But he was also an avowed racist. And unlike many of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he put that racism into action through public policy. Most notably, his administration oversaw the segregation of the federal government, destroying the careers of thousands of talented and accomplished black civil servants — including John Abraham Davis, my paternal grandfather.
An African-American born in 1862 to a prominent white Washington lawyer and his black “housekeeper,” my grandfather was a smart, ambitious and handsome young black man. He emulated his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, in style and dress. He walked away from whatever assistance his father might have offered to his unacknowledged black offspring and graduated at the top of his class from Washington’s M Street High School (later the renowned all-black Dunbar High School.
Even as the strictures of Jim Crow segregation began to harden in the South, Washington, and the federal Civil Service, offered African-Americans real opportunity for employment and advancement. Thousands passed the civil-service exam to gain coveted spots in government agencies and departments. In 1882, soon after graduating from high school, the young John Davis secured a job at the Government Printing Office.
Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary — for an African-American — of $1,400 per year.
But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.......
See above link for full article.
Gonna stop here with the direct Davis line and explore Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Mavis Wormley Davis, both of whom come from equally substantial families with top notch pedigrees that jettison out in every direction.
%20%20Museum%20of%20the%20City%20of%20New%20York.%2093.1.1.10838_orig.jpg)
