William Harry Davis, Sr. (April 12, 1923 - August 11, 2006) is an American civil rights activist, amateur boxing trainer, civilian and business leader in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He overcomes poverty, childhood polio, and racial prejudice into humanity. Davis is remembered for his warm and positive personality, to train top Golden Gloves champions in the upper Midwest, and to manage the Olympic boxing team who won nine gold medals. His contribution to public education in his community lasts a long time. A leader in desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement, Davis helps Americans find their way forward toward racial equality.
Video W. Harry Davis
Biography
Initial years
Davis is the son of Elizabeth Jackson, known as Libby, and Lee Davis, Winnebago Dakota Sioux and catcher for the Kansas City Monarchs of Negro league baseball. They live in northern Minneapolis in a poor neighborhood near 6th and Lyndale Avenues North is called Hellhole , known for prostitution, drinking and gambling. Later the area was covered by the intersection of the Olson Memorial Highway and Interstate 94.
Davis was paralyzed from the waist down due to polio at the age of two or three years until about the age of five. Her mother had studied polio treatment from an ancestor who was a doctor on a plantation in Virginia. She helps free Davis from her illness through massage and warm water, applying an iron to keep her warm. Davis was the first African-American student at Michael Dowling School for Crippled Children. She was not allowed to go to Shriners Hospital, but she received much help at school from a visiting doctor from the City Hospital. Then Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who joined the City Hospital staff in 1940, will find the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in Minneapolis and provide physical treatments and treatments similar to those used by Davis's mother.
While growing up, Davis is known as Little Pops. His second home was the home of Phyllis Wheatley. Directed by Gertrude Brown gives the children of the area continue their education in a safe place to go after school. Davis must have gotten into trouble at some point due to a teenage parole officer who suggested he attend Phyllis Wheatley. There with his friends, Davis studied boxing, etiquette, and Robert's Order Rules. They meet Chick Webb and dance to Duke Ellington and Count Basie who live there on a tour to the Orpheum Theater. In 1941, he graduated from North High School where he signed up and won the city championship in boxing. Davis attended the University of Minnesota and later in his life received an honorary doctorate in law from Macalester College.
Davis is married to his wife, Charlotte, a public figure, for 61 years. They have four children, Rita Lyell, Harry Jr., Richard, and Evan.
Career
Golden boxing gloves
Phyllis Wheatley teaches amateur boxing as an exercise or pleasure, as well as to prevent fighting in the street and as a form of self-defense. Davis set up a central competitive boxing program during the 1940s, coached basketball, soccer and baseball, and served on the central board of directors for thirty years. Between 1945 and 1960, Phyllis Wheatley won most of the boxing championships for the upper Midwest region including Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Davis became the most successful coach and vice president in the Golden Gloves region. Davis teaches "do not abuse or abuse it," and the three principles of body, mind and conscience. Among his students was Clyde Bellecourt who co-founded the American Indian Movement and Jimmy Jackson who won the national Golden Gloves championship in 1957. His relationship with other winners from Minneapolis, Duane Bobick, Jack Graves, Virgil Hill, Roland Miller, Pat O'Connor , Don Sargeant, Dave Sherbrooke is? Davis was inducted into Golden Gloves Hall of Fame in ?.
Civilian leadership
In 1945 he became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) an organization he influenced throughout his life. In 1957 Davis and other lay leaders worked with pastors Chester Pennington and C. M. Sexton on the merging of Methodist Borders with Methodist Hennepin Avenue. A mostly white congregation now known as the Methodist Church of Hennepin Avenue United invites Border congregations when they lose their church for rebuilding the city. In 1966 Davis and a group of eight others set up the Twin Cities City Industrialization Center (TCOIC), a program criticized for over-spending and hailed for providing job training to local African-Americans.
In 1967, after large-scale disruptions in several major US cities, most of the African-American neighborhoods around Plymouth Avenue in northern Minneapolis witnessed urban unrest. After several buildings were burned, Davis worked with the mayor Arthur Naftalin to resolve the tension between community members and the police. During this time Davis worked locally in the Poverty War and founded the Minneapolis Urban Coalition.
Davis served for twenty years on the Minneapolis school board, as chairman who started in 1974. A judge ordered Minneapolis to discuss the concentration of races in some parts of the city and their schools. To achieve the enrollment goal was calculated by race, school closures, school buses, redistricting and other plans were attempted starting in 1972. Davis continued to be active in school issues until the end of 2006, when he supported Thandiwe Peebles, who resigned as an inspector.
Mayoral run
The city of Minneapolis is relatively progressive but racial segregation is the norm in the United States. The state sees racial violence and clashes with police sometimes called militants following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Part of his efforts to build peace, Davis agreed to run for mayor in 1971 against incumbent and independent Charles Stenvig, former head of the Minneapolis police federation, who was later called his best friend by Davis. Immediately endorsed by the Labor-Democratic Labor Party, Davis ran as a candidate for the first African-American mayor of a city backed by major political parties.
When integration or desegregation began in the 1960s, black families sometimes experienced terrifying persecution in Minneapolis by individuals and groups who behaved like the Ku Klux Klan in the southern cities. These troops remained in the city in 1971. The Davis family received daily threats to their safety during the campaign. The FBI brings them guard dogs and the police department should put guards in their homes. White politicians, Donald M. Fraser, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale sometimes accompany Davis. As expected, Stenvig won re-election. Davis won the admiration of many people.
Among the major cities in the United States that have African-American mayors around this time, Cleveland chose Carl Stokes in 1967, and Newark, New Jersey, chose Kenneth Gibson in 1970. In 1973, Thomas Bradley and Maynard H. Jackson won in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Minneapolis has not chosen a black mayor for over twenty years. Sharon Sayles Belton, who saw Davis's concession speech in 1971, took over the post in 1994 and served until 2001.
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Throughout his career, Davis was well known in the Minneapolis papers that covered Gold Gloves regularly and in the news-publishing industry that he became the city's leading black business executive whose large whites were recognized. Davis previously was a production foreman and then an employee service manager for Onan Corporation and the founding executive leader of the Urban Coalition. He started from what is now the Star Tribune newspaper in 1973. Davis became assistant vice president in public affairs and assistant vice president in employee services. When he retired in 1987 he was vice president of parent paper, Cowles Media. The Star Tribune became part of McClatchy who sold it to Avista in 2006.
Olympic Boxing
Davis served on the United States Olympic boxing committee during the 1970s and 1980s for Golden Gloves whose champions qualified for the Olympic competition. He was the manager, responsible for the welfare of the team, including lodging and logistics and medical care, for a second-place experimental team at the Summer Olympics in Montreal in 1976. In 1980 the United States led a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, where Cuba was dominated men's fist.
In 1984 in Los Angeles, Cuba was among the groups of countries that boycotted the Soviet Union. Under Pat Nappi's coach, Davis is back to team manager for the United States. Individual victory is disputed and Evander Holyfield is disqualified. Paul Gonzales, Steve McCrory, Meldrick Taylor, Pernell Whitaker, Jerry Page, Mark Breland, Frank Tate, Henry Tillman and Tyrell Biggs won the gold medal and Virgil Hill won silver. Except when the United States competes on their own at St. Louis in 1904 and winning every medal, nine gold and one team silver in 1984 was the best record in Olympic boxing. Cuba returned in 1992 in a Barcelona match to win seven gold and one silver without a boycott.
Next year
Davis received at least seventy-nine civilian leadership awards. In 2002, West Central Academy, a high school in Minneapolis, was renamed W. Harry Davis Academy. A foundation, award, and scholarship also carries his name. Davis published his autobiography in 2002. In 2003, he published Changemaker, the history of the Minnesota civil rights movement for young readers aged 10 and over, based on his memoirs.. Lori Sturdevant of the Star Tribune edits both books, published by Afton, Minnesota's historical community.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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