To honor the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Allen Davis started a tradition over lunch on the third Monday of January.
The tradition of reading King’s “I Have A Dream” speech is one that only encompasses the last three years, but is something Davis plans on keeping for many years to come.
In fact all, of Davis’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day was a tribute to the Civil Rights leader. It started by viewing the video put together by the Hancock Community Conversations on Race for the town’s third annual celebration of MLK.
He then took turns reading the famous speech that King gave on Aug. 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. with his partner in their Dublin home.
In the evening, Davis took part in a book discussion group centered around “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.”
There are a few moments that helped shape Davis’s view of the systemic racism still happening in the United States. The first was when he read a piece by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times on Nov. 9, 2016, just after the presidential election.
Porter’s article, Davis said, opened his eyes to the difference in the social welfare system in the U.S. for Black and Brown people.
“I realized I needed to do some learning before I could put my political activism to work,” Davis said. So that’s exactly what he did.
As Davis dug deeper, he became passionate about the social movement surrounding racial injustice and it has become his life’s work to share what he’s learned over the last four years.
Viewing “I Am Not Your Negro,” a 2016 documentary film directed by Raoul Peck, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript “Remember This House,” was a formative moment for Davis. The book examined Baldwin’s personal relationships with King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X and their fight for racial equality.
That film resonated with Davis and it led to a collaboration with the history department at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, Davis’s alma mater, titled The James Baldwin Lecture, to address issues connected to social, economic, and political justice and underpinnings in institutional racism.
The first lecture in 2018 featured Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign. The second bi-annual lecture, Young People Fighting for Climate Justice with Vanessa Nakate, Varshini Prakash is scheduled for Feb. 1 online.
But that wasn’t the only action Davis took in 2018. Along with locals Grace Aldrich and Jim Guy, the group decided to put together a program, “Talking about Race: Staying Curious, Moving Forward, and Being Part of the Solution” at the Peterborough Town Library that June. It was created to give those interested a personal look at what it’s like to be Black in the Monadnock region.
“We were hoping for 10 or 15 people and 80 showed up,” Davis said. And that was all he needed to see. Over the last two and a half years, the program has been held at libraries around the area with more to come.
Davis said he’s participated in some of the vigils held since the death of George Floyd and for a very specific reason.
“What’s brought me out there is to be a witness and let people know that Black lives matter and be a physical reminder to all who drive by that it’s not a moment, but a movement,” Davis said.
Growing up on Long Island, Davis lived in a completely white community. Half the students were like him, Jewish, and the other half were Protestant or Catholic. It was just how he grew up and didn’t know any different. Then he went to UMass.
“That was sort of my first exposure to a more diverse world,” Davis said, but that diversity only included a handful of students of color.
“There were very few Black students at the University of Massachusetts in the late 1960s,” he said.
Davis went there with a goal of becoming a lawyer. He majored in American history because as he put it, it was his best subject in high school and he was always somewhat interested in political matters.
There he had a great professor by the name of Milton Cantor, who “opened up the world to me regarding the United States’s role in the world,” Davis said.
Cantor, Davis said, would begin classes reading articles from the New York Times about the Vietnam War.
“Prior to that I was a very conservative person. I was a regular middle class white guy,” he said. “Nobody talked to me about racial justice, nobody talked to me about the Vietnam War.”
Davis credits Cantor for getting him to start thinking critically about government policy and policy makers. And it forced Davis to look into subjects he wasn’t familiar with and look at them in a way he never had before. It was just the start of his life as an activist.
The year after he graduated, Davis joined thousands of others at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on Nov. 15, 1969 in Washington, D.C.
“It was a little scary because of the hundreds of thousands of people. It was also exhilarating and empowering,” Davis said. “It was the first time I put my body where my beliefs were because I felt the Vietnam War was morally wrong and unwinnable despite what our nation’s leaders were saying.”
Not only did Cantor help fuel Davis’s passion for activism, but he also put him on a path toward education.
“I began to see a connection between the importance of critical thinking and democracy,” he said.
That ultimately led Davis to a doctorate program in higher education and organizational change at UMass.
“I saw education as a way to strengthen our democracy by educating people to be critical thinkers,” Davis said.
He had two dreams in graduate school: to help start an experimental college and become a college president. A few years later Davis achieved one of those dreams, when he took a job as assistant dean and assistant professor at Western College of Miami University in Ohio. He was part of a team of 10 that helped put together a curriculum in two months for the inaugural class of 150 students. Davis described the experimental college as a place where the focus was on high interaction between faculty and students, where the engagement would help shape decisions at the school.
“It was a leap of faith but I was thrilled at that opportunity,” Davis said. But he had a plan. “I had this intuitive feeling I wanted to go out there for four years, work as hard as I could and graduate with the first class so to speak.”
Then Davis decided it was time to take what he calls his gap year.
“I had no keys, no car and no particular plan,” Davis said. “That also in retrospect was a leap of faith, but my heart told me it was the right thing to do.”
So he spent the next three years traveling around the U.S. and Europe. He went to San Francisco, the Los Angeles area, Boston, Poland, Scotland and England. He spent nearly two years of it stationed in Aspen, Colorado after going to see a friend to ski for a couple of days.
“I was just bumming around, enjoying life and seeing what may arise for my next phase in life,” Davis said.
But then he started to run out of the money he had saved and decided he needed a more permanent place to be and didn’t want to stay in Aspen. So he went back to San Francisco and began looking for a job, outside of the field of education. But he didn’t have much luck.
After nine months and having to borrow some money, he decided education was what would get him back into the workforce and he took a job at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. That led to a job at Northfield Mount Hermon, as dean of the Northfield campus.
But after five years he got that pull to do something different, while still wanting to stay in the western Massachusetts area. He spent the next four years as the executive director of the United Way of Franklin County and then a few years with an environmental organization out of Amherst.
The final 16 years of his professional life, Davis served as executive director of the Greenfield Community College Foundation.
In 2013, Davis moved to Dublin to live in the home his partner grew up in, but still kept his connections to the western Massachusetts area he spent so many years in.
Davis calls his passion for racial justice as his third career and he doesn’t plan on retiring from it anytime soon. He believes everything played a part into leading him to this work.
So to say that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is important to Davis doesn’t give it the proper amount of merit. And with Black History Month only a few days away, it’s another opportunity to share his knowledge with others.
At the end of every email, Davis has a quote from James Baldwin that reads “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And that’s why he’s facing this challenge of creating change, because he knows that every voice and every action can lead to something bigger.