L. Clifford Davis was born into segregation, so he never attended an integrated school. But he fought to ensure future generations could.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Born October 12, 1924, L. Clifford Davis is just weeks from a milestone birthday.
After nearly 100 years of living, his feet move a little slow. But his mind doesn’t.
WFAA met Davis at a law firm in Fort Worth where he still keeps a small office. There’s a computer he said he seldom uses, some file boxes, and a rolodex.
It’s more of a storage room for history now, and some of that history hurts.
Davis was a young attorney from Arkansas who moved to Texas in the early 1950s. Before his move, he’d worked with a lawyer who filed some of the first lawsuits seeking to integrate Arkansas schools.
The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision made public school segregation unconstitutional. But the Texas Davis had moved to didn’t seem to care.
“There was no integration anywhere I was aware of going on in Texas,” Davis said. “We were segregated throughout the state of Texas in those days.”
Many schools across North Texas ignored the 1954 Supreme Court order and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In 1970, a Black father named Sam Tasby in Dallas got so fed up that his kids could not attend their neighborhood school, he sued Dallas ISD.
Because of that lawsuit, a judge ordered DISD to bus students to campuses across town. It was an effort to force schools to integrate. There were protests, and Black DISD students told WFAA reporters they were treated with disrespect.
“White teachers sitting us in the back. You ask them, why have they got to sit us in the back? And they say, don’t ask questions, just sit in the back,” one DISD student said In a 1971 interview. “Those days are over.”
Davis was doing his work in Tarrant County. He represented five Black students who were barred from attending Mansfield High School.
He sued and won in 1956.
But civility was lost.
“On the day school opened, a mob gathered and of course it was physically unsafe for us to go,” Davis recalled. “After the mog gathered, they pulled the flags of the U.S. and Texas off the flagpole and hung an effigy on that flagpole.”
Davis remembers receiving threatening letters and calls. He eventually stopped answering his home phone at night. But he didn’t give up the fight.
Into the 1970’s, Davis was still doing interviews with WFAA about districts ignoring court orders to integrate.
In Dallas ISD, the journey to desegregation took 33 years.
The Black father who had sued was Sam Tasby. His case wound through the system for decades and finally, a federal judge freed DISD from court-ordered desegregation in 2003.
In 2006, Dallas ISD opened Sam Tasby Middle School. The district now has a majority-minority student body.
So does Mansfield.
Many of the people who fought for integration have died: Tasby in 2015, his lawyer, Ed Cloutman, passed away in early 2024. But Davis is still alive, with clear – albeit painful – memories.
“I don’t claim to be solely responsible for all this,” Davis said. “I helped bring these changes with others.”
To this day he believes all Americans should still be working for equality and equity.
“It’s in the constitution,” he said. “We have a civil responsibility to treat all people with decency, courtesy, dignity, and respect without regard to that person’s race, his color, his culture, his education, his age, his sexual orientation, religion or non-religious experience, political affiliation, economic status, or any other socio-economic factor.
“To provide a more perfect union – that’s what this is all about.”