Family history

Born in 1902 to John Abraham and Gabrielle Davis, William Boyd Allison Davis, who would later be known only as Allison Davis, entered into family well-acquainted with both achievement and activism. He was the oldest of three children with a younger sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, John Aubrey Davis, Sr.. Davis’s grandfather had been an abolitionist lawyer. His father led a group of seventeen white clerks as the head of a government printing office before his demotion under the policies of the Wilson administration, and chaired the anti-lynching committee of Washington D.C.'s chapter of the NAACP. Davis would describe him as a “brave man” who was “already marked in a town of 236 citizens” as a large landowner who “further angered whites by registering and voting.”

Education

Allison Davis's path to the university faculty was possible largely because of his academic achievements that preceded it, many of which were entirely unavailable to most African-Americans at the turn of the century

Allison Davis entered Washington D.C.’s segregated Dunbar High School in 1916 and, like his father before him, graduated as its valedictorian. The school had been founded almost a half-century before, making it the nation’s oldest public black high school, and had since developed a reputation that pulled black families to the nation’s capital for the chief purpose of gaining residency within the school district. Bucking national trends, the school had settled firmly in the Du Bois camp during the debates on black education a few years before and offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum that included Greek and Latin.

Though the quality of black colleges would steadily increase through the mid-century, at the time of Davis’s graduation most black “colleges” were still teaching primary and secondary curricula; the ticket to the white post-graduate program was most often through the white university. Between 1916 and 1922, Dunbar sent sixteen students to the Ivy League, Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan. Williams College had a singular arrangement with Dunbar that allotted one full merit-based scholarship per year to the valedictorian. From this agreement Williams derived its entire black cohort and in 1920 drew Davis into its ranks.