Jackson B Davis

Early life

Davis was born on March 27, 1918 near Lecompte in south Rapides Parish, one of three children of Jesse Octo Davis (1893–1986) and the former Litha Pittman (1893–1961). Not long before Thanksgiving Day in 1961, his mother, who was then living in Baton Rouge, and her sister, Essie Pittman Linzay, and a third woman, were killed in a two-car crash at Pine Grove. Davis studied at Southern Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville from 1932 to 1933, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, from 1933 to 1934, and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1934 to 1936. He obtained a master's degree from LSU in 1937 and his Bachelor of Laws in 1940 from Louisiana State University Law Center.

Davis volunteered for military service and received an officer's commission in the United States Navy. Assigned to naval intelligence, he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for the duration of World War II. Davis arrived in Hawaii on September 7, 1941, on the USS Neosho. Though personally spared injury, he was awakened in his hotel room to the first wave of bombing by the Japanese that was unleashed on the morning of December 7, 1941. He worked in traffic analysis, codebreaking, and communications in the basement of the Fourteenth Naval District headquarters building there. He was discharged as a lieutenant commander in January 1946.

Political career

In 1956, Jackson Davis launched his political career with election to the first of six consecutive four-year terms in the Louisiana state Senate. Though a Democrat, Davis was uncomfortable with the national party nominees. In 1964, he refused to endorse the election of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and joined a number of Louisiana Democratic officeholders who, along with Caddo Parish Sheriff J. Howell Flournoy and Mayor W. L. "Jack" Howard of Monroe, endorsed the Republican presidential nominee, U.S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. Davis and Flournoy timed their announcement with Goldwater’s campaign stop in Shreveport.

A supporter of right-to-work laws and business expansion, Jackson was considered a fiscal conservative in his long legislative career. He also worked to expand higher education in the northwest Louisiana corridor, including the establishment in 1967 of Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

In his first three Senate terms, Davis served at-large with his fellow conservative senator, B. H. "Johnny" Rogers of Grand Cane in De Soto Parish. In his fourth term, his colleagues were future U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, Jr., and Joe LeSage, both attorneys in Shreveport. In his fifth term, Davis's Caddo Parish colleagues were Don W. Williamson, then of Vivian, and Cecil K. Carter, Jr., of Shreveport. In his last term, he served alongside Williamson and Virginia Shehee of Shreveport, a prominent businesswoman and the first woman elected to the Louisiana State Senate. When Davis did not seek a seventh term in the 1979 nonpartisan blanket primary, he was succeeded in a single-member Caddo and Bossier Parish district by attorney Sydney B. Nelson of Shreveport.

Personal life

Davis is the author of a biography of Confederate Army General Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor. He is Southern Baptist. He and his wife, the former Rosemary Slattery, whom he wed in 1944, have four children, Jackson Davis, Jr., Robert Slattery Davis, Rosemary Davis, and Susan Patricia Davis. He died on August 22, 2016.