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John Aubrey Davis, Sr., 90, a scholar and civil rights activist who in the 1930s organized one fo the earliest civil rights protests in Washington and helped establish the legality of economic boycotts to fight employment discrimination, died of pneumonia December 16 at an assisted living facility in Scottsdale, AZ.
Dr. Davis was a former chairman of the political science department at the City College of New York. From 1943 to 1946, he was one of four directors of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices.
As a scholar, he directed the nonlegal research for the NAACP brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case that led to a 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional.
Dr. Davis was born in Washington and graduated from Dunbar High School. He was Phi Beta Kappa and a summa cum laude graduate of Williams College and a former trustee...