Davis, Ed 1911–1999

Ed Davis 1911–1999

Automobile dealer

Moved to Detroit as a Teen

Snubbed by Colleagues

Won a Studebaker Franchise

Active in Democratic Politics

Eight Years of Success

Selected writings

Sources

Ed Davis was the first African American to win a franchise to sell new cars. Davis had been a successful used-car seller in Detroit in the 1930s before he signed on with the Studebaker Automobile Company to sell their cars. In the early 1960s, he achieved another historic first by becoming the country’s first African American to own and operate a new-car franchise from one of the “Big Three” automakers. Davis faced tremendous obstacles as an African American businessper-son in an era before workplace integration, fairness in commercial lending practices, and minority dealer-development programs. Still, he prospered through perseverance and a scrupulous attitude toward his customers, and indeed became one of Detroit’s leading citizens. Just a few months before his death, Davis was honored with a special dinner held in conjunction with the North American International Auto Show, and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame—again, becoming the first African American to achieve this honor.

Davis was born in 1911 in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was one of ten children. His father was a food jobber for oil-pipeline construction workers with the Standard Oil Co., which was a large-scale daily catering job. His father purchased the produce and meat from local farmers, and did much of the cooking himself. “The fact that he was his own boss was the greatest influence, I believe, in motivating me eventually to get into business for myself,” Davis wrote in his 1979 autobiography, One Man’s Way. “…I realized that real power and true economic freedom came from developing self-reliance and independence.”

Moved to Detroit as a Teen

Though Davis’s family prospered, his early life in Louisiana was marked by other hardships. His mother died when he was ten, and discrimination and random violence against African Americans was common in the South of the era. Davis’s father owned a 500-acre farm and a Ford Model T, which fascinated him as a youngster. “It got me interested in mechanics,” Davis told Detroit Free Press reporter Lisa Jackson. “How a car worked was more fascinating to me than the actual car itself.” As a teenager, he convinced his father to allow him to move north to Detroit, where an aunt lived, in order to attend better, unsegregated public schools. Davis was able to gain entrance to the city’s most prestigious public high school, the academically rigorous Cass Technical High School. He hoped to become an accountant, but was discouraged when he learned that there were almost no African Americans in the field at the time.

A tinkerer by nature, Davis convinced the owners of a car-repair garage to hire him, which they initially did in exchange for his bus fare. The owners of the garage instructed Davis to look busy doing janitorial work when

At a Glance…

Born February 27, 1911 in Shreveport, LA; died on May 3, 1999, in Detroit, Ml; son of Thomas H. (a food jobber) and Hester (Bryant) Davis; married Mary Agnes Miller, late 1930s. Education: attended Wayne State University.

Career: Worked as a mechanic in a garage and as operator of a car wash business, both in Detroit, early 1930s; worked in the foundry and then the machine shop in a Dodge Motor Company factory; salesperson at Merton L. Lampkins Chrysler-Plymouth, Highland Park, Ml, 1936–38; opened Davis Motor Sales in Detroit, 1938; became a Studebaker new-car dealer, 1940–56; Victory Loan and Investment, co-founder, 1940, and president; opened Davis Chrysler-Plymouth in Detroit, 1963; City of Detroit Department of Street Railway Systems (DSR), manager, 1971–74; business consultant, 1974–94.

Awards: Named Michigan’s Small Businessman of the Year, 1966; inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, 1999.

customers were in the garage, and not to appear to be working on any cars. Eventually they hired him for wages that rose to $12 a week—a good salary for a 16-year-old—during the worst years of the Depression, but he eventually lost the job when the owners could no longer afford to keep any employee. Next, Davis approached the owner of a gas station and convinced him to let him wash cars there for money. The owner agreed with some reluctance, but after a month realized that Davis was making more money than his gasoline business. He then tried to renegotiate the rates they had agreed upon, but Davis refused.

Snubbed by Colleagues

One of Davis’s car-wash customers was a man named Lampkins, who was a supervisor at a local factory operated by the Dodge automobile company. When he heard of Davis’s plight, Lampkins offered him a job in the foundry—a dangerous, arduous position, and one of the few open to African Americans in the auto industry at the time—which he accepted. He shoveled pig iron into huge blast furnaces for a few weeks when Lampkins and another manager, who both seemed to appreciate Davis’s dedication to any task he undertook, gave him a job in the plant’s machine shop. When Lampkins’s son opened a car dealership, Davis was invited to become a salesperson there, for it was thought that the business might attract more African American customers if they had an African American salesperson on staff. Davis began working part-time at Merton L. Lampkins Chrysler-Plymouth in Highland Park, a small city inside north-central Detroit, in 1936, but kept his Dodge plant job for a year until he thought it safe to quit.

As he wrote in his autobiography, One Man’s Way, Davis became one of only three African Americans selling cars in Detroit in 1936. His sales-floor colleagues at Lampkins snubbed him from the start, and he was not allowed to conduct his business with customers in the showroom when they were present. “So you know what I did? I got an office upstairs, and I bought really nice furniture,” Davis said in the Detroit Free Press interview with Jackson. It was actually the parts showroom, but African American customers soon began flocking to Davis. “Every day, more people came to buy cars from me,” he recalled. “Every day, that mean secretary had to lead people up to my office. Drove her crazy.”

In time, the other salesmen and even Mert Lampkins himself began to resent the amount of money Davis was making, and they often made derogatory remarks. With the money he saved Davis opened his own business, Davis Motor Sales, in 1939. It was a used-car lot on East Vernor Avenue, on Detroit’s lower east side and in the heart of its African American business district. Davis would arrive at the lot each morning at 5:30 to clean it. His business was a success nearly from the start. “I had the opportunity of operating in a neighborhood that not only held opportunities, but was congenial to me,” Davis wrote in One Man’s Way. In “those days,” he noted, “most blacks spent their money where they lived.”

Won a Studebaker Franchise

Davis’s business was soon thriving to such a degree that it attracted the attention of one of the Detroit representatives for the Studebaker automobile company. In July of 1940, Davis’s lot became a Studebaker new-car dealership. Although his business experience and financial success had been met with approval by the company, becoming a new-car dealer involved a great deal of personal investment. Davis was unable to obtain financing from any bank, and had to risk his entire savings to pay for his first delivery of cars to the showroom. He managed to stay in business during the difficult years of World War II—no new cars were manufactured for a time—but prospered in the years after the war, when Studebakers enjoyed a surge in sales.

The Studebaker Company went out of business in 1956, so Davis returned to selling used cars on his lot. Despite this setback, he fully expected to obtain another new-car franchise from a more successful automaker. He contacted the Big Three automakers, and was offered a Plymouth-DeSoto dealership. Within a few months, however, his phone calls were not returned and he learned that other dealers in the area had threatened to quit if he was awarded a franchise. By this time Davis had become a prominent local business leader, and was appointed by Detroit’s mayor to head the Community Relations Commission in 1953, a civil-rights watchdog group that tried to end segregation in the city’s public-housing projects.

Active in Democratic Politics

Davis had also founded, along with four other African American businessmen, the Victory Loan and Investment Company, which made loans to the African American community. For a time in the late 1950s, Davis worked with a local white Ford dealer as a vice-president, but his success in this job was rewarded with both official and covert discrimination. Because of his opposition to what was euphemistically called “urban renewal”—the wholesale government condemnation of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Davis became increasingly active in politics during the late 1950s. New low-income housing communities were created, but the homes were often poorly constructed and the areas became riddled with crime. In Detroit, many of the condemned homes were owned by African Americans who had worked in the auto factories for years and managed to purchase their own home; they were the working poor, and the small home was all that they possessed. “I think we are paying the social price today,” Davis wrote in the late 1970s about this policy. “Urban renewal has turned men and women bitter at the loss of their homes, destroyed their sense of security, and confused and frustrated them,” he wrote in One Man’s Way. “How can anyone expect peace in the inner city under such circumstances? No wonder these people became wary of buying another home and working to keep it looking nice, when they knew that a lifetime of hard work and saving could be swept away by government edict.”\

A freeway was also slated to be built on Vernor, which meant that Davis would soon be forced to shut his doors and relocate. But in 1963, a chance occurrence at a business dinner changed his fortunes. A friend of Davis’s asked the president of the Chrysler Corporation why his company did not have any African American new car dealers. The executive replied that Chrysler was looking for qualified businessmen of any race. The friend then introduced him to Davis and, four months later, Davis Chrysler-Plymouth opened for business. Those four months, however, were fraught with long, difficult negotiations with company sales executives, who requested that Davis obtain an extraordinary amount of bank financing, and then quizzed him on how he and his sales and service force would deal with white buyers.

Eight Years of Success

Davis received a good deal of local press when Davis Chrysler-Plymouth opened its doors on Dexter and Elmhurst on Detroit’s west side in late 1963. He was the first African American to be awarded a new-car franchise from one of the “Big Three,” as the top three automakers of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were once known. “It was one of the proudest moments of my career,” the Detroit News quoted Davis as saying. “The auto companies (had) kept turning me down, but then they realized they were missing out on sales in that neighborhood.” The dealership, like all of Davis’s other businesses, enjoyed excellent sales from the start. As in the past, however, other dealers snubbed him at sales gatherings and company events. He also realized that some of these dealers were even conspiring to undersell him.

But Davis persevered, and won a loyal clientele for his honest practices. He also became active in the neighborhood, and bought a sound truck painted with the slogan, “Good Citizenship is Our Business Too.” With three dozen other merchants, Davis founded the Dexter Boulevard Redevelopment, Inc., which was dedicated to improving the neighborhood and encouraging business growth in the area. Davis’s wife, whom he married in the late 1930s, was also extremely active in community work. A pianist by training, Mary Agnes Davis had returned to college to earn a social work degree. In 1966, Davis was named Michigan’s “Small Businessman of the Year.”

The riots that devastated large tracts of Detroit commercial property in the summer of 1967 did not damage Davis’s dealership, but they did forever alter the business climate in Detroit. Suddenly, job opportunities for African Americans at white-owned businesses became more available, and Davis had a hard time retaining his staff. Vandalism, rising insurance costs, and problems with the unionized sales force forced Davis to close his business in 1971. Still active in community improvement efforts, Davis began a training program for entrepreneurs and managers, and became the manager for Detroit’s Department of Street Railway Systems (DSR), the city’s mass-transit authority, in October of 1971. Davis found the department riddled with inefficiency and waste. The DSR’s own employees wouldn’t even ride the system because service was so bad. Davis took over a public agency, with 2,300 employees and over a thousand buses, that had been losing money for five years. During his three years on the job, he improved the financial situation for the DSR, tried to boost employee morale and performance, and even hired the city’s first female bus drivers.

After Davis retired, he spent the next 20 years serving as a consultant to minority auto dealers and other African American business owners. He also tried unsuccessfully to gain a Cadillac dealership from General Motors. Davis wrote extensively about affirmative action and minority hiring practices in the last chapter of his book, One Man’s Way. “Too often, minorities are hired to meet minority quotas within individual companies, and these companies have no intention of letting them succeed,” Davis asserted in One Man’s Way. “Minorities who are capable of being promoted and doing a good job should be given consideration for promotion in positions throughout their organization, not just promotion into an isolated spot or department especially designated for special groups. This is racism as its worst.”

During the late 1970s, when Davis published his memoirs, there were only 30 African American-owned car dealerships in the United States. Twenty years later, there were over 600. Davis formally retired in 1994, a year after the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers created a Pioneer award and established a scholarship fund, both in his name. In early 1999, he became the first African American to be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. “It turned out that I opened many doors,” Davis told the Detroit Free Press at the induction ceremony. “I didn’t plan for it, but I guess it did happen. I’m proud of it.”

Selected writings

One Man’s Way (autobiography), Ed Davis Associates, 1979.

Sources

Periodicals

Detroit Free Press, January 7, 1999, p. 11A; January 31, 1999; May 4, 1999.

Detroit News, May 4, 1999; November 12, 1999.

—Carol Brennan