Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 73F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 73F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.

The unsung heroes of a community are out there in the world, and one can come across them in the most unexpected ways. About seven years ago, my path crossed with a retired physics professor and historical preservation advocate who grew up in Union Springs. His name is James Clinton Davenport.

Professor Davenport and I met through a college friend in southern Virginia, where he was a longtime faculty member at Virginia State University, a historically Black institution in Petersburg. He’s 86 years old. His memories of his childhood in Union Springs and Bullock County are as vivid as if the events he recounts had occurred yesterday.

He was born in the Sardis community on March 18, 1936, to Isabelle Rouse Davenport and Leonard Davenport. Before he had started school, his parents separated. At that time, he, his mother, and his older sister moved to Union Springs to live with his maternal grandmother on Ellis Street. Later on, they moved to South Prairie Street. He had relatives living in Inverness and Bread Tray Hill, so he had exposure to town and country life. From public school teachers to music instructors to church leaders to business owners, Davenport was exposed to a vital community of enterprising Black folks during the era of segregation.

“We had a thriving middle class of Blacks when I lived there,” he said. But his memories of his home turf extend beyond the parameters of race. As a youngster walking to school, he became aware of the rich architecture in Union Springs. He would vary his route so that he could discover a variety of houses, commercial structures, and churches as he wound his way from Ellis Street in the eastern part of town to Montgomery and Holcombe Avenues on the western side, where the old Carver School stood. Although he became a distinguished professor of physics and research scientist, his love of architecture, from the most modest cottages to grand homes, has been a lifelong interest that led him to own a handsome period house in Petersburg and significant achievements in historic preservation in the state of Virginia. And he’s the only African American who owns a home on the city’s historic High Street. But how did a youth who had never taken a physics course in high school become a physicist?

With his determination and guidance from his teachers in secondary school, he made his way to Tuskegee University (then Institute), where he took his first physics course, and on to Howard University in Washington, D.C, for graduate studies. His family roots run deep here, and his religious foundation is firmly based in this community.

An honorary member of Wayman Chapel AME Church on Cooper Street, Davenport, continues to support this church which has been an important influence in his life. “It was patterned after Mother Bethel AME Church, our mother church in Philadelphia,” he said. Speak to Davenport about any aspect of life in Union Springs and Bullock County during his first 18 years, and he’ll gladly share his memories of customs, commerce, neighborhoods, and families, both White and Black. As an aficionado of local history, he often alludes to the articles and photographs in the Sesquicentennial Special Edition: Historical Union Springs, Alabama, published in 1994, a ready reference he keeps handy.

The railroad station, a beautiful building and a hub of activity, no longer stands. And the impressive homes, many of which have been razed. And the businesses that have disappeared or changed names, such as the Cowikee Cotton Mill and Mill Village, provided housing for the workers that no longer exist. And the people who were pillars in the community have passed away. He can tell you about all of them. There were Black neighborhoods scattered all over town, he said, excepting the North Prairie Street section. And he remembers the numerous Black churches and schools throughout the county.

The schools are gone now, but most of the churches remain. He never entered any white churches while growing up—that was not customary in those days--but he studied the architecture from the outside. He was particularly fond of the style of the old Trinity Episcopal Church, now the Red Door Theatre, he said. “I never saw the inside of a library until I went to Tuskegee,” he said. Blacks were not allowed in the public library in Union Springs. He added that what passed for a library at Carver High School was a couple of sets of encyclopedias and the Lincoln Library of Essential Information.

He said that the Carver building itself “was just pitiful—an old, ugly frame box,” unlike the nice brick elementary and high schools for Whites in town. Still, he is not bitter. He doesn’t have any unpleasant racial memories of times in Alabama. “We knew how to get along. We knew the system, and we outwitted the system,” he said with a laugh. “And we had outstanding teachers at Carver,” which to him is more important than the school buildings.

Some of the teachers in the Black schools were local; many came from Montgomery and would stay in the area until the weekends, he said. He can recite the names of the White and Black doctors, dentists, undertakers, mechanics, and dry cleaning proprietors. “One Black man, Melvin Mitchell, had a pressing shop at the end of Seale Street, and he delivered his clothing on a bicycle,” he said. Black house painters were always busy. Painters were in demand because the owners of the big houses—and the not-so-big—had their homes freshened up with a new coat of paint almost every year, he said.

He recalled that white was the predominant color; a few were painted steel grey. Although essentially a city boy, Davenport spent time in the country in the Sardis and Bread Tray Hill area where his grandmother Callie Davenport lived. A faithful attendee at Wayman Chapel AME Church, he sometimes visited Old Sardis Baptist Church which was his father’s church. “The two churches were very different—the services and the preaching,” he said. The AME service was much more structured than the Baptist. Davenport took piano lessons in his childhood and played at several Baptist churches, including Old Sardis and Mt. Silla, Elizabeth in Aberfoil, and Elizabeth in Ft. Davis.

He also played at Wayman Chapel. “I could sit in Wayman Chapel and look out at those colored windows and listen to the good music. I knew all those people. It was an educated congregation. I owe a debt of gratitude to Wayman Chapel,” he said.

Union Springs nurtured him in many ways. And his memories are pleasant ones. What particularly impressed him was “the uniqueness and charm of Union Springs,” he said. “There was a lot of small-town Southern charm.”

He said the big impressive homes belonged to the Rainers, the Moseleys, the Frazers, the Andersons, the McLaurines, the Rosenstihls, and others. He has strong recollections of the servants who wore starched uniforms in these homes--some were members of his family--and the ladies who lived in them who dressed in hats and gloves. The eccentrics he recalls stood out to bring back many colorful memories. For instance, several old ladies drove old cars, and a judge’s wife, Alice Frazer, lived on South Prairie and wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her life after her husband’s death.

“She had a new Cadillac about every year; her chauffeur would pick up her maid in that car,” he said. He said that the last members of Trinity Episcopal Church and the only ones he saw entering that church were sisters Miss Annie Hobdy and Miss Jennie Hobdy, who died in the late 1960s. “They drove a 1934 Chevrolet about five miles an hour through the streets of Union Springs,” he recalled. Their house at the corner of Chunnenuggee and the Tuskegee Highway (U.S. 29/Martin Luther King Blvd.) is known as the Smith-Hobdy-Turnipseed-Ikenberry House, as described in the Sesquicentennial publication, he said.

“The Hobdy sisters captured my attention because of my interest in the significant architecture of Union Springs,” he said. Their vintage vehicle and other older cars caught his attention too. Mrs. John Smith, the telephone operator, had a 1931 Model A Ford as did two Black men he knew, Tommie Manley and a fellow known as Malachi, both of Sardis. Mrs. Turnipseed on Peachburg Road drove a conspicuous red convertible, he added. “I often discussed my love of old cars with Mr. James Lee—called Mr. Shoo--a Black mechanic in Union Springs,” he said. Davenport owns a restored 1934 Chevrolet in Petersburg and a ’31 Model A Ford stored in Union Springs, which he bought and took his driver’s test on. His interest in vintage vehicles continues to this day.

The Wilson-Davenport Chapter of the National Honor Society at Bullock County High is named for him and the Rev. Saul Wilson, who lived in Union Springs. He spoke to the whole student body at the school in April 1984 when a group of students was inducted that year. Now that he has savings set aside, he would like to be able to invest in projects like a scholarship fund for the National Honor Society chapter at the high school. Still, after much investigating, he’s come to the sad conclusion that the chapter appears to be defunct. “I would like to help my home community,” he said.

With all the emphasis on sports programs in public schools, he would like to see the scales balanced with more advocacy of academics. “We need to have people on the school board who are interested in academics,” he said, adding that qualifications are essential too. He points to folks like Eloise Thornton, who was the first Black on the county school board, and the daughter of Clinton Thornton, who was a school teacher.

Ms. Thornton taught in the public schools here and at Conecuh Springs Christian School. In 2007, Davenport received the Y. C. Nance Foundation’s Bullock County Achievers Award for his contributions to education; he traveled to Union Springs for the event. “On another occasion, I spoke at the Carver High School combined classes reunion, held at Eufaula in 2010,” he said.

Davenport, who noted there was no national honor society chapter at his high school when he was a student, graduated from high school in 1954 and went to Tuskegee that fall, finishing in 1958, “I had never had a course in physics when I came to Tuskegee. I majored in Secondary Education with a concentration in Natural Sciences. I took physics my junior year at Tuskegee,” he said. In 1958, he entered Howard University in Washington. “You couldn’t go to any white school for graduate work in the state of Alabama, but the state paid your tuition, travel, room, and board to go elsewhere,” he said. It was called Out of State Aid. “No black school in Alabama had a Master’s Physics Program, so if anything good came out of segregation, I got me an education.” He remained at Howard, earning his Master’s Degree in physics in 1960, having a graduate assistantship, and receiving his Ph.D. in 1965. Davenport recalls always having to play “catch up” as he continued his higher education.

“I needed to catch up when I went to Tuskegee,” he said because he didn’t feel fully prepared for the curriculum. “I had to do a lot of remedial work at Howard to get into the Master’s Physics Program too.” But he made steady progress and was recommended by one of his professors at Howard to teach physics in the National Science Foundation’s summer institute for elementary and high school teachers at Virginia State University (then College) as part of their in-service training. A grant from the NSF funded this. And after four summers in that post, he was offered a full position at Virginia State.

That was in 1967; he remained at Virginia State until his retirement in 2003, having chaired the physics department all but two years during that time.

From 1965 to 1967, he served in the army as an electronic engineer analyst at the Foreign Science and Technology Center in Washington—a 9 to 5 job that allowed him to hold an adjunct professorship in Physical Science at Howard. “My army position is tied into my Ph.D. background. I specialized in infrared technology. Most of my work was top secret, so I can’t say much about it,” he said. “My specialization area of study in graduate school was X-ray crystallography,” he said. While at Howard, he helped set up the university’s X-ray diffraction laboratory. X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, according to Wikipedia. “During my career at Virginia State, I primarily emphasized teaching and mentoring. However, the research component of the physics department flourished,” he said. In 1987, he led the faculty in developing an award-winning proposal to establish a laser research laboratory at Virginia State.

The National Science Foundation awarded the university $300,000 to establish this facility. In 1994, he became one of 11 professors in Virginia to be selected by the State Council of Higher Education to receive its Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Public Service. “I was the first person from Virginia State to be so honored,” he said. And he added proudly, as part of the awards, under his leadership, the physics department at Virginia State produced the greatest number of African American physicists for Virginia—more than all the other 36 colleges and universities combined. His students described him as “an inspiration to those pursuing science degrees,” he recalled, quoting from the award booklet. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the Educational Testing Service’s Development Committee for the Physics Achievement Test used by the College Board. He also served on that board for two years in developing the National Teachers Examination in biology, chemistry, and physics. He was a charter member of the National Society of Black Physicists; there were fewer than 200 Blacks with a Ph.D. in physics when he started to work in the field.

From 1973 to 1994, he was on-site coordinator of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Summer Internship in Science and Technology Program in Batavia, Illinois, outside Chicago; the program was initially intended for minority students. From 1995 to 2014, he served as a consultant for the program and on-call scientist. The facility is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Being in the Chicago area each summer allowed him to indulge his fondness for classical music by attending the touted Ravinia Festival. With all those professional responsibilities, one wonders when he found time to pursue his passion for historic preservation and architecture nurtured in Union Springs during his early school days. After buying a small but stately Greek Revival house of granite construction in Petersburg’s historic High Street in the late 1960s, Davenport soon found himself involved in preservation more broadly. “I was influenced by the charm of old houses. I don’t like houses with low ceilings. Structural integrity is what I like,” he said. He lived in faculty housing when he first started teaching at Virginia State. Still, as student enrollment increased and the university needed housing for students, he was encouraged to move to a nearby subdivision where most of his peers were relocating. “My friends at the university thought I was crazy. I’ve been in this house ever since, and I’ve never regretted it,” he said. “I was a Black Ph.D. in preservation in Petersburg—the only one in that movement,” he said. He served on the Architectural Review Board for the city of Petersburg.

In 1986, he became the first and only Black person to serve as president of the Historic Petersburg Foundation, which presented him the Sustaining Preservation Award for Exemplary Dedication and Commitment to the Field of Historic Preservation in the City of Petersburg in 1988. “The preservation movement was a big thing in the late ‘60s and the 1970s,” he recalled. Additionally, he noted that he has served on Petersburg’s Historic Blandford Cemetery Foundation for a long time and is the only Black on that board. He’s even selected a grave site for himself in this colonial-era cemetery, one of Virginia’s oldest, but his tombstone will say he was born in Union Springs, Alabama. Although he has chosen Virginia to be his final resting place, the pride he feels for his heritage draws him irrepressibly to his home community.

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