Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Davis, Asa

On September 28, 1999, historian and teacher Asa J. Davis died and left this community. Asa was one of the founders of the Black Studies department at Amherst College. He taught here from 1970 until his retirement in 1992. In the fullest sense of the word, Professor Davis was a unique presence on this campus and in the Five Colleges generally.

Asa was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1922, and one could still detect just a tinge of a Tennessee accent in his voice if listening carefully. He was raised primarily in New York City and educated in its public schools. He was particularly proud that he had attended Frederick Douglass junior high school in Harlem. From those experiences, in the 1930s he remembered visits to his school by the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and the poet Langston Hughes. As a student in the thirties Asa first encountered Douglass's Narrative of his slave experience, a book only taught in black schools in those years because it was out of print.

Asa was the product of both America's historically black schools and colleges and of Harvard. As an undergraduate, he attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, the oldest black college in America. While he was at Wilberforce, the flagship school of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of that denomination's bishops was Asa's uncle, Monroe Davis. During part of the time Asa was enrolled at Wilberforce, its president was Charles H. Wesley, a Harvard-trained historian and a major contributor to the growing field of African American history. Asa was a well-connected participant in the religious and intellectual life of Wilberforce, but he learned much in these years about the old adage, "there's no fight like a church fight." Asa's undergraduate years were interrupted in 1943 when he entered the United States Army in World War II. By the time he completed his service and resumed his studies in 1947, both Wesley and his uncle Monroe had come out on the losing side of church battles and had lost their jobs. After graduating from Wilberforce in 1948 Asa went to Harvard Divinity School where he first pursued a three-year course of studies that provided both a broad background in religious history and an S.T.B. degree, the educational credential required for ordination in many Protestant denominations. Receiving this degree in 1951, Asa stayed on at Harvard to complete a one year Master's program and then worked on a Ph. D., which he received in 1960. Much influenced by the emphasis on classical church history and meticulous philological scholarship then very strong in the study of religion at Harvard, Asa prepared as his dissertation a critical edition of an Ethiopian Monophysite text. As part of this work, Asa also examined the spread of Islam in Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. The preparation necessary to pursue that project included not only the usual European scholarly languages of French and German, but also a working knowledge of Ethiopic, Amharic, and Arabic.

Moreover, Asa also mastered Portuguese, which became increasingly central to his post-dissertation work. Ford and Rockefeller grants took him to archives in Portugal, Italy, and Egypt, where he pursued the complex early modem history of the Portuguese in Africa, in Ethiopia, and especially in the kingdom of Kongo. Eventually, this interest broadened out to include the whole history of blacks in Lusophone Africa and Brazil. Though he remained primarily an Africanist, his historical interests were very widespread, crossing many borders and ethnicities. He especially sought to understand the broad impact of European colonialism and of human migration on the history of the modem world. His writings ranged from numerous articles on medieval Ethiopia to essays and translations concerning sixteenth-century Kongo to studies in nineteenth-century West African Islam and African-Brazilian abolitionism. At Amherst, Asa taught courses on African history, African nationalism, African cultural survivals in Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean, and African American history.

Asa taught from 1962-1969 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he first met a young art historian, Professor Rowland Abiodun. Asa loved Africa, her people, and the promise he saw in her intellectuals. During his seven-year sojourn at the University of Ibadan, Africa's premier institution of higher learning, Asa developed intimate and life-long professional relationships with the foremost African scholars of history, religion and African Studies. They include E. A. Ayandele, the leading authority on church missionary history in Nigeria; the late Kenneth Dike, Professor of History at Harvard (one of Asa's mentors), who became the first African Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan; and Adeagbo Akinjogbin, one of the preeminent historians of Dahomey, its neighbors, and the slave trade, as well as the founding editor of ODU, The Journal of West African Studies, based at the University of Ife. Asa also contributed to the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, serving as its assistant editor for three years. Until the time of his death, Asa spoke passionately of his experiences in Africa in the 1960s, the period of transition from colonialism to independence. Being present at the birth of the independence of many African states forever shaped Professor Davis's interests in the story of African nationalism. Asa collaborated with many African colleagues on research projects of mutual interest to Africans and African descendants in the United States and Brazil. Upon his return to America in 1969, Asa taught briefly at San Francisco State University before coming to Amherst.

It is no accident that Asa's early teaching career was in Africa and not the United States. At the time Asa received his Ph. D. from Harvard, there was no special sense of urgency among American colleges and universities to add blacks to their faculties or student bodies. Asa's coming to Amherst was made possible only by the transforming influence on American higher education of the civil rights and black power movements, and this circumstance put a permanent mark on his career here. Arriving at the College in the fall of 1970 as a professor of history and the new chair of a fledgling Black Studies department, Asa's position at Amherst was from the outset challenging and problematical. What one learned from coming up in black schools, from being well-connected in the AME Church, or from having taught in Africa for seven years, was neither quickly recognized nor easily apprehended by most of Amherst. And, if it was Asa the Harvard-trained scholar who seemed more suited to win the respect of his colleagues, it was a match that was never fully made.

Appointed in somewhat irregular fashion, in the midst of an intense political climate, and with significant Five-College participation, Asa was not everywhere received by much of Amherst College with the usual enthusiasm typically accorded a new senior colleague. Nor, it must be said, did Asa's sometimes oblique manner help in overcoming the initial suspicion with which he had to contend. It was difficult for Asa to establish a sustained scholarly conversation with many of his Amherst colleagues. His love for his subjects was an obvious one, as was his zeal as a dogged researcher. Professor Blight also remembers occasions in archives around the country where he looked up to find Asa across the table from him (at the Schomburg Library in New York and the Houghton Library at Harvard), plowing through collections of documents. To most of his Amherst colleagues, however, Asa remained a scholarly enigma.

If at Amherst Asa remained an elusive personality, he quickly built a world of his own in the Black Studies department —and in the larger Five College black community. Here, in ways often not fully seen or appreciated by his colleagues, he was a critically important voice. At the end of his first year at Amherst, in June 1971, Asa wrote a letter of protest in the Hampshire Gazette, chastizing the Northampton Police Chief's effort to ban as an "obscene" book the 1960s classic, Manchild in the Promised Land, a work about racism and poverty by Claude Brown. In the letter, Asa wrote with a sure voice: "The obscenity which is alleged to characterize the book," he said, "strikes us as inhering, instead, in the fact that too many people must live the life there depicted, and that ever since the 18th century, the testimony offered by black people concerning their experience in America has been systematically suppressed."

Asa is remembered as an enthusiastic and gracious conversationalist among his former students and colleagues; his kindness won him the devotion of many people. At Asa's funeral in October 1999, he was remembered lovingly and profoundly by his family, his children, and grandchildren, by a friend from his Wilberforce years who traveled across the country to pay tribute, and especially by former students. For many black students who attended Amherst in the 1970s and 80s, they came of age as black history entered the curriculum and became what C. Vann Woodward once called the "moral storm center of American history." Asa Davis was their pilot in that storm. Such personal testimonials were repeated at a special memorial service in his honor last Sunday, April 2, during Black Alumni weekend here at Amherst College. Clearly, to many black graduates of Amherst, Asa Davis was a special - both real and symbolic - presence in their lives and their learning. After his retirement; Asa often held court among University of Massachusetts students at that campus's Student Center, talking about current affairs, race relations, or any historical problem with all comers. Some former U-Mass students testified at Asa's funeral that were it not for his guidance and listening, they would never have finished college. Asa's influence on young blacks trying to make their way in this world of higher education in the Pioneer Valley went well beyond the corner of Routes 9 and 116. Upon his retirement, friends and former students endowed the Asa Davis Prize, which goes to the student each year who writes the best senior thesis in history on Africa or the African diaspora.

Asa is survived by a closely-knit family: his wife Jane, a son, Asa, who lives in Northampton, three daughters, Beryl of Boston, Stephanie of Washington, DC, and Bridget of Amherst, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Asa Davis's life was a personal odyssey of discovery and teaching, from Tennessee to Harlem, from Wilberforce to Harvard and Ibadan, in African, Portuguese, and American archives, and from the AME Church to Amherst College.

This memorial minute is submitted by Rowland Abiodun, David Blight, Rhonda CobhamSander, and David Wills.