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Matthew Simpson Davage, former president of Clark College in Georgia, dies.
1976 (Sep 20)
Matthew Simpson Davage, former president of Clark College in Georgia, died in New Orleans, Louisiana, at age ninety-seven. Davage was born in 1879 in Shreveport, Louisiana. He earned a B.A. degree from New Orleans University (now Dillard University) in 1900 and immediately joined the faculty there as an instructor in mathematics. He remained on the faculty until 1905 and, at the same time, pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago. Between 1905 and 1915, Davage was business manager of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a Methodist publication. In 1915, he returned to education as president of the George R. Smith College at Sedalia, Missouri. After only one year at Sedalia, he assumed the presidency of the Haven Institute at Meridian, Mississippi, which he quickly left to assume the presidency of Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College) in Austin, Texas. In the spring of 1920, Davage was elected president of Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he became the first Black to head the fifty-four-year-old historically Black institution. In 1924, he became the sixteenth president of Clark University, as it was then called. Davage was the second Black person to head the institution, the first having been his predecessor, William Henry Crogman. During his seventeen-year tenure at Clark, Davage presided over the removal of the institution from southeast Atlanta to its present location near the city's other Black institutions of higher education, and he helped to provide new financial strength and vitality for the school, even during the Depression years. In 1939, Davage became one of the first Blacks to speak before the all-white Atlanta Rotary Club. Because of the Jim Crow laws and customs of the time, he could not eat lunch with the Rotarians and had to wait in an adjoining room until the meal was finished. Then he gave a speech entitled “The Negro's Place in Atlanta's Life." In it, he said, “Some day we may hope, the thinking people of both races will translate that mutual respect and trust into some concrete work. ... They may meet and work on the same critics trying to say they are seeking to tear down a social order."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.