James C. Davenport
Bullock County native James Clinton Davenport (1936- ) is a pioneering Black physicist who chaired the physics department at Virginia State University (VSU) for more than 30 years. He was a charter member of the National Society of Black Physicists. He won multiple awards for his contributions to education, including the White House Initiative Faculty Award (1988), the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award (1994), and the Y. C. Nance Foundation’s Bullock County Achievers Award (2007).
Davenport was born on March 18, 1936, in the Sardis community of Bullock County, to Isabelle Rouse Davenport and Leonard Davenport. He had a sister from this marriage and two half-siblings from his parents’ subsequent relationships. He was educated in the segregated public schools in Union Springs, just northeast of Sardis. Although his teachers were good, the facilities and instructional materials were poor. Before attending college, he had never been inside a library. Blacks were not allowed in the Union Springs Public Library, and what passed for a library at Carver High School was a couple of sets of encyclopedias and the Lincoln Library of Essential Information.
After graduating in 1954, Davenport enrolled at Tuskegee Institute (present-day Tuskegee University). In his junior year, he took his first physics course, introducing him to a field in which he would become a distinguished practitioner. Upon graduating in 1958, a professor encouraged him to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he pursued graduate studies in physics, earning a master’s degree in 1960 and a Ph.D. in 1965.
Although Davenport had taken just one physics course at Tuskegee Institute, he had a strong background in mathematics and had acquired quantitative and analytical skills which helped prepare him to study physics at Howard University where he was required to take advanced undergraduate physics courses to satisfy the physics pre-requisites while at the same time taking graduate courses. The physics department at Howard University was grooming him for enrollment in its newly established Ph.D. program.
Attending graduate school in his field required that Davenport enroll in an institution outside Alabama. No Black schools in Alabama offered master’s programs in physics, and Black students were not allowed to attend segregated White educational institutions for graduate work. Through what was known as the Out of State Aid program, Alabama paid for Davenport’s tuition, travel, and room and board and enabled him to attend Howard University.
Davenport’s doctoral research at Howard focused on determining the thermal expansion of selected rare earth elements and their oxides below room temperature using X-ray crystallography. These rare earth elements have many practical applications for television, computers, lasers, medical technology, and military defense. He also assisted his research advisor in setting up a state-of-the-art X-ray crystallography laboratory in the physics department.
In 1958, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, but he was deferred from active duty so that he could attend graduate school; he subsequently attended the U.S. Army Artillery and Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, graduating in 1966. He was assigned to the Communication and Electronic Division at the U.S. Army Foreign Science and Technology Center in Washington, D.C., as an electronic engineer analyst and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for “exceptionally meritorious service.”
While at Howard, on a professor’s recommendation, he took a position teaching physics at the National Science Foundation’s summer institute for elementary and high school teachers at HBCU Virginia State College (now Virginia State University, VSU) in Petersburg in 1960. He returned to the institute the next four summers.
In 1967, Davenport joined the physics faculty at VSU and remained there until his retirement in 2003. He chaired the physics department all but two years during that tenure, teaching as well as guiding the department in research. From 1973 to 1994, Davenport served as the on-site coordinator for the Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory’s (now Fermilab) Summer Internships in Science and Technology Program, initially intended for minority students. (The facility in Batavia, Illinois, is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.) From 1995 to 2014, he served as a consultant and on-call scientist for the program. In 1987, he led the VSU faculty in developing an award-winning proposal to establish a laser research laboratory at the school and was a principal investigator there on a NASA-funded project titled “Computer Simulated Radiation Damage in Solar Cell Materials.”
In the 1980s, Davenport was a member of the Educational Testing Service’s Development Committee for the Physics Achievement Test used by the College Board. He served on that board in developing the National Teachers Examination tests in biology, chemistry, and physics. In 1994, he received an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, becoming the first person from VSU to be so honored.
Under his leadership at VSU, the physics department produced the greatest number of Black physicists in the state of Virginia—more than all other colleges and universities combined. In 1988, he received the White House Initiative Faculty Award for Excellence in Science and Technology for his work with students at an HBCU. He was an active member of the American Physical Society, serving on several committees. When Davenport began his work in the field, there were fewer than 200 Black Americans with a Ph.D. in physics. Indeed, he was a charter member of the National Society of Black Physicists, which he helped found in 1977.
In 2007, he received the Y. C. Nance Foundation’s Bullock County Achievers Award for his contributions to education. (The foundation also recognizes achievements in community service and development, sports advocacy, and political affairs.) He returned to Union Springs to attend the ceremony. He has maintained his educational and religious ties to Union Springs and continues to support Wayman Chapel AME Church, where he is an honorary member.
Davenport's purchase of an old home in Petersburg’s historic area led to his participation in the burgeoning historic preservation movement there. He served on the City of Petersburg’s Architectural Review Board and in 1986 served as president of the Historic Petersburg Foundation, which presented him the Sustaining Preservation Award for Exemplary Dedication and Commitment to the Field of Historic Preservation in the City of Petersburg in 1988. He has also served on Petersburg’s Historic Blandford Cemetery Foundation; Blandford Cemetery is one of Virginia’s oldest. Davenport has credited his interest in vintage architecture to the years he walked to school in Union Springs, admiring details of old houses, churches, and other structures.
