One of Fort Worth’s most notable citizens died February 15: Clifford Davis. He was 100.
Born Oct. 12, 1924, Davis grew up the son of a sharecropper in Wilton, Arkansas. Wilton was deeply segregated, and the local Black school system stopped at the eighth grade. Clifford’s parents rented a house in Little Rock, the state capital, where he and five of his six siblings lived while attending high school and college.
He graduated from Philander Smith College, a historically Black institution, in 1945. Davis wanted to go to law school, but there were none in Arkansas that would accept Black applicants, so he moved to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University, where he received his law degree in 1949.
He worked with Justice Thurgood Marshall on the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, that eventually led to school desegregation.
After moving to Fort Worth, Davis represented five Black students who were barred from attending Mansfield High School in 1955. Davis sued Mansfield ISD and won in 1956. When his clients attempted to enter the school, however, they were met by a mob. In 1959, he brought a class-action suit against Fort Worth ISD, which remained segregated. He won, and this time the system agreed to a plan to integrate its schools. Eventually Mansfield ISD and Fort Worth ISD integrated, largely because of lawsuits and pressure from Davis.
Davis opened one of the first Black law firms in Tarrant County and was one of the county’s first Black judges.
An elementary school in FWISD bears his name.
And here is where the story takes a turn.
Last year at Clifford Davis Elementary, 6% of students met grade level standards in reading on state assessments. 7% met grade level in math. That means, in a typical classroom, only 1 or 2 students are meeting grade level.
These results hold true across all the different groups of kids at the school, Black students, who make up 45% of the student population, show similar outcomes to the overall numbers.
And this is not about one school; across all subjects and all schools in Fort Worth, 77% of Black students are not meeting grade level.
As we honor the memory of Clifford Davis in Fort Worth, we are also forced to acknowledge that we as a community have defaulted on the promise of desegregation—that all children deserve equal access to a quality education. The school that bears Mr. Davis’s name stands as a stark reminder and symbol of that broken promise.
That’s why I believe literacy (and numeracy) is a civil rights issue. Clifford Davis was not just fighting for all children to have access to a school building. He was fighting for the idea that all our children have a fundamental right to a minimum standard of education—one that provides access to literacy.
Clifford Davis was right.
The most meaningful way we can honor Mr. Davis’s legacy today is to continue his fight, because what he was fighting for has not yet been realized.
Most of us who were born after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s want to believe that if we had been alive then, we would have been on the right side, the side of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Clifford Davis. The heroes we have read about. We want to believe that we would not have stood by and been OK with segregated schools, water fountains, and lunch counters.
What side would we have been on? What would we have done?
Here’s our chance to answer that question. In this very moment, 2025, in our city, all children still do not have access to the education they deserve. Whose side are we on now? What will we do now? What we tell our grandchildren about where we stood?
This isn’t about blame and certainly not about blaming one particular school. When Rosa Parks had to sit at the back of the bus, we didn’t just blame the bus or the bus driver. There are all kinds of big, complicated reasons for the situation we are in. Nevertheless, it is true: the promise of equal access to education has not been fulfilled in our time.
What if we as a city rallied to the cause? What if we collectively said, “Not on our watch?”
Let us, as a whole community, take up again Clifford Davis’s fight to give all the children of Fort Worth the opportunity to receive a good education. And let’s start with Clifford Davis Elementary School.
In her poem, Turning to One Another, Margaret Wheatley writes:
There is no greater power than a community discovering
what it cares about.
Ask “What is possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking.
Notice what you care about.
Assume that many others share your dreams.
Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.
Ask. Discover. Notice. Dream. Be brave. Start conversations.
There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
