As an eight-year-old son of a sharecropper in 1949 who spent his days picking and chopping cotton in the sweltering fields of Parkdale, Arkansas, Danny K. Davis could never have foreseen he would become a noted African-American member of the U.S. House of Representatives with a tenure spanning decades.
Davis, a Democrat who currently represents Illinois’ 7th Congressional District that includes parts of Cook County, this summer announced his retirement from public office. He will trade Capitol Hill for quiet mornings and peaceful evenings chatting with wife Vera G. Davis.
At the end of next year, Davis will have been in public office for 46 years including the 11 years he served on the Chicago City Council as an alderman prior to serving in Congress.
He said he always has seen his primary responsibility to be to help lift the lives of those that have been stuck at the bottom.
“That’s been my focus but not to the neglect of any other segment of society,” he said. “I just feel good when I see the desolate person uplifted. When I see a kid go to college who wouldn’t have been able to go unless they got some help which is what we did with my scholarship fund.”
Reflecting on where it all started, Davis, born in 1941, credits his parents, his teachers and his church, for bestowing upon him the foundation necessary to reach the highest plateaus this country offers.
“We lived on a farm and my parents were sharecroppers,” Davis said in his distinguished baritone, echoing the cadence of Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery, later a free man, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman who played a crucial role in the fight against slavery.
He added: “I had two wonderful parents. My dad finished the fourth grade when he was 19 years old. My mother finished the eighth grade. Where we lived, they didn’t always have a school and they certainly did not have a high school.”
Young Blacks who were of high school age had to go to another town to continue their education, Davis explained.
“Parkdale was real rural but the people were wonderful,” he said. “The average family size was five or six. In my family there were nine of us children. In our church we had about 10 families. When you added all the children in, there would be about 100 people at church on a Sunday.”
Despite working hard on the farm, chopping and picking cotton and all the other labor that was necessary, along with the hardships Black families faced during those times, Davis describes his childhood as “pretty cool.”
“There were always chores, including milking a cow,” he said. “You learned to do it all and generally started when you were eight or nine years old. You talk about child labor…We’d actually do what you would call a full day’s work and you only went to school about five months out of the year.”
From the middle of July until the middle of August was referred to as the “lay by season,” meaning there was no work to be done because the crops had all been planted and cultivated. Davis explained.
The congressman moved to Chicago in 1961, after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arkansas A.M. & N. College at 19. He subsequently earned both Master’s and Doctorate degrees respectively from Chicago State University and the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“I was part of what you would call that last big migration wave that came from the rural South,” Davis explained. “Chicago was ‘poppin’” in the neighborhood I came to live in which was the North Lawndale community. There were just eons of people. I mean Black people were leaving the South, trying to get away from racism and there were plenty of jobs so people came.”
Things were also changing in terms of technology so work on the farms was decreasing. The previous manpower or womanpower needed to work a farm was no longer as necessary due to farm machinery becoming more proficient.
Davis has never lived in any other area in Chicago except the West Side.
“When I got here, I had two sisters who lived here so of course my first stop was living with them,” he said. “Quite honestly, I fell in love with the West Side and decided as I sized things up, that this was where I was going to live and where I was going to try and be helpful.”
Davis had not set his sights on Congress at that point but knew he wanted to be publicly engaged.
After working a short while for the postal service, Davis began a teaching career in the Chicago Public School system in North Lawndale at age 20, something he said he always knew he would do.
“This was during the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “I went to meetings and listened to (Rev.) Dr. (Martin Luther) King and all of those things,” Davis said. “That was my motivation to do public work. I was teaching G.E.D. classes at one of the Urban Progress Centers when I met Ms. Rosemarie Love who was chairman of the personnel committee for the Greater Lawndale Conservation Commission.”
Love convinced Davis to leave his “good” teaching job to work for the Conservation Commission, his entry into public involvement. From there, it was a continuation of working for one agency or another.
As an alderman during the Harold Washington era, Davis was known as an independent who was not part of the “political machine” that was still the dominant force in Chicago politics, he said.
Davis was elected to the Cook County Board where he remained for six years and was elected to Congress in 1996 and started his service in 1997.
“At the end of next year, I will have spent 30 years as a member of the House of Representatives,” he said.
“You’re asking people to put their faith and trust in you to represent them and their positions on things.” Davis said of his role in public life. “So, if they’re going to give you that kind of responsibility, then you got to try and live up to it.”
Davis responded to the Trump administration’s efforts in turning back civil rights and other gains made over the years,
“The road has been rugged,” he said. “We made progress during the reconstruction period where we elected African Americans to public office, even two Black Senators from Mississippi. Then all of those individuals were put out. There were efforts to make them look bad and redistricting. These are the things that the Trump administration is doing now.”
He added: “The only thing I can figure out about the Trump administration is that they must be checked! They must be fought and we have to say ‘we’re not going back.’ The courts in some instances have been complicit. It seems to me that some of them are following the Trump law more than they are following the constitution of the United States.”
In order to get back on track, Davis said it is time to change leadership.
“If we don’t change leadership, we don’t change our direction, so there’s no other way,” the congressman stressed. “I’m amazed at the number of people who did not vote in the last election so, everywhere I go, I’m saying vote.
Josie Ware, Davis’s scheduler and office manager, has worked with him for years.
“I am proud to have known Rep. Danny K. Davis for at least 40 years, if not more,” Ware said. “He has served in several elected government positions and has proven to be a trailblazer throughout his public service career, who always put the interest of the people he represents first.”
Davis has two sons, Jonathan and Stacey (deceased), and is a member and Deacon of the New Galilee M.B. Church.
