Earl Wayne Davis (22 November 1911–4 May 2000), labor leader, was born in Ashland, Kentucky, and was the son of Elizabeth (or Eliza) Brown Davis and her first husband James Price Davis, a railway porter. His father died when he was four years old and his mother married James Boyd and they moved to Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Davis graduated from Woodward High School, in Cincinnati, spent one year at West Virginia State College (later University), and attended the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin. On 15 September 1934 Davis married Kathryn Louise Garrett. They lived in Covington and had two sons.

In 1937 Davis helped form a union of African American railway porters, known as red caps, at the Cincinnati railroad station where he worked. The following year, the organization joined the International Brotherhood of Red Caps, which elected him as a vice president for the years 1940–1944. The IBRC changed its name to the United Transport Service Employees of America and in 1942 joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1944 Davis became the vice president of the Ohio State Industrial Union Council. An advocate in civil rights and other reform organizations as well, he served on the executive board of the Cincinnati branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as president of the Citizens Progressive League in Covington.

In 1946 Davis joined Operation Dixie, the CIO campaign to unionize southern industries. He moved to Richmond in 1952, and from his home base there he traveled throughout the South attempting to organize workers in various industries. Two years later Davis became the associate director of education for the International Woodworkers of America, and in that capacity in 1956 he sat on a racially integrated ten-member committee that negotiated the merger of the Virginia State Industrial Council, the state branch of the CIO, with the Virginia State Federation of Labor, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. Since the 1930s, the relationship between the two national unions had been contentious and competitive. In spite of decades of bitterness and suspicion, the negotiations went smoothly, and Davis successfully insisted that African American labor leaders play some part in determining the policies of the new Virginia AFL-CIO. Years later he recalled that it was "a quiet meeting. I don't remember anybody walking out or getting mad."

After the merger, Davis became the field director for the AFL-CIO's Committee for Political Education and served throughout the South for eleven years. His work in Montgomery, Alabama, brought him in contact with Martin Luther King Jr. in planning to involve black ministers in registering black voters living in the city's housing projects. In 1967 Davis became director for minority affairs of the Committee for Political Education. He remained active in the civil rights movement, especially in registering voters. During the 1970s Davis served on the boards of the Richmond Urban League and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which honored him for his voter registration work in Mississippi and Tennessee. Davis was also a member of the Richmond Crusade for Voters and a life member of the Richmond branch of the NAACP.

Davis retired from the AFL-CIO in 1978, but he remained active in Richmond politics. In 1981 he campaigned for the Democratic candidate for governor, Charles Spittal Robb, who the following year appointed Davis as the first black member of the State Board of Elections and who in 1983 named him chair of the board. Lawrence Douglas Wilder, the first African American member of the Senate of Virginia in the twentieth century and the first African American elected governor in the United States, later credited Davis's work for making possible his own success in politics.

Davis's wife died in Richmond on 12 September 1982. His term on the State Board of Elections expired at the end of January 1991, and six years later he moved to San Diego, California, where one of his sons lived. Earl Wayne Davis died in San Diego on 4 May 2000. After a memorial service at the Third Street Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Richmond, he was buried in the city's Riverview Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Birth date in Kentucky Birth Index (1911–1999), Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, Ky., and in Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; Who's Who in Labor (1946), 31 (with self-reported birthplace and marriage date); Who's Who among Black Americans, 7th ed. (1992/1993), 352; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 Jan. 1956; Washington Post, 1 Feb. 1983; Richmond News Leader, 15 Jan. 1986; L. Douglas Wilder WRVA radio broadcast, 15 May 2000, audiotape WA589, Wilder Audio Tape Collection, Virginia Union University, Richmond, Va.; obituaries in Richmond Free Press, 11–13 May 2000 (portrait), and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 11 May 2000 (quotation).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Richard Love.

How to cite this page:
Richard Love,"Earl Wayne Davis (1911–2000)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Davis_Earl_Wayne, accessed [today's date]).

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