As the son of a sharecropper living near the tiny Arkansas town of Parkdale, young Danny Davis spent long hours in the cotton fields. But unlike most of the poor kids hacking weeds with a hoe in the hot sun, “I’d read everything I could get my hands on in my spare time,” Davis recalled. “I’d have a piece of newspaper in my back pocket. When we’d get to the end of the row there might be a shade tree, and we’d take a minute to get a drink of water. I’d pull my little piece of paper out and read.”
After three terms as an alderman from the city’s far west side Austin neighborhood, Davis, elected a Cook County commissioner last November, is now running for mayor. If the odds seem long against a well-financed, entrenched incumbent, they don’t seem to bother Davis. For this philosopher from the cotton fields, whose ideas have been refined through years of teaching, organizing, politicking, administering, and studying (history and psychology, before he got a PhD in public administration), the object of politics is not simply winning an election. It is the persistent “struggle,” to use a favorite concept of one of Davis’s most-quoted inspirations, abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
“Reading kept me from being bored,” he said, the words carefully enunciated in his characteristic deep rumble of a voice. “After you get a little whiff of another world, out there where there isn’t any of that, you can have experiences by reading. It kept me from being lonely, from experiencing anxiety. There were times when my biggest problem was finding something to read. One summer I just couldn’t find anything. I just read the Bible. Every day when we came home from the field we’d take a little rest at lunchtime and I’d see how many chapters I could read before time to go back.
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As a boy, though it’s hard to believe now, Davis was a “tie-tonguer,” or stutterer. Children were expected to recite speeches at school and Sunday school programs, and Davis was determined not to be left out. “My mother helped me by admonishing me to slow down,” he said. “People wonder why I speak as slowly as I do. She would tell me, ‘Slow down. I ain’t going nowhere.’ I discovered if I slowed down I could get my words out and people could understand and I could understand myself.” As he got better, he joined his brothers and sisters at “playing preacher,” delivering sermons from a stump pulpit.
Whenever his mother, Mazzie Davis, bought chewing gum or a bottle of pop, everybody got one small share. When the family slaughtered an animal, she made sure all the neighbors got something. When neighbor kids came around, they could eat and stay the night. After her funeral, as the family gathered around, it turned out that each member of the family was convinced that he or she had been the favorite. “My mother was one of the best social workers without going to social work school,” Davis said. “She understood the principle of group involvement.”
From an early age, Davis was troubled by the varied manifestations of inequality between blacks and whites. He saw how the neighboring white sharecropper’s son, David, would play with him and stay at his house, but “when you went into town, [the whites] went into their part of town, we went into ours. They went in the front of the drugstore, we went in the back.”
