Content area
Full Text
In August 1951, Governor James F. Byrnes of South Carolina retained John W. Davis (W&L A.B. 1892, LL.B. 1895), then senior partner at Davis Polk Wardwell Sunderland & Kiendl (Davis Polk) in New York City, to represent the State of South Carolina in Briggs v. Elliott,(1) one of five companion public school segregation cases (the School Segregation Cases) that, according to the lawyer who wrote the U.S. Attorney General's amicus curiae brief, "changed the whole course of race relations in the United States."(2) During that summer, I rejoined Davis Polk as an associate after a year's leave of absence to study law at Manchester University and the London School of Economics and Political Science under the auspices of the Fulbright Program. By virtue of that coincidence of events, I was provided an opportunity to work with one whom a commentator called "probably the nation's most distinguished appellate lawyer"(3) on a case that other commentators have characterized as "the most important Supreme Court decision of the century,"(4) and very close to if not actually "the most important decision in the history of the Court."(5)
I. The First Eighty Years
John William Davis was born on April 13, 1873 in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the son of United States Congressman John J. Davis. John J. Davis was a typically conservative southerner of his day, serving the cause of white supremacy and states' rights while in Congress and contending on the floor of the United States House of Representatives that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution had been fraudulently adopted under circumstances in which the southern states had been illegally deprived of their rightful representation in the governmental bodies that adopted those amendments.(6) Despite the elder Davis's conservative stance on social issues, he aligned himself in his law practice against the large corporate interests of his day. In representing the underprivileged members of his community, he demonstrated his belief that the law is a profession rather than a business.(7)
John W. Davis studied the classics at an early age under his mother's tutelage. He attended private schools in Clarksburg and in Albemarle County, Virginia, and in 1889 he enrolled as a sophomore at Washington and Lee College in Lexington, Virginia, at a time when General...