The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Minister was an advocate for death row inmates, homeless
Her life’sworkwas a continualfight for social justice.
ATLANTA — Murphy Davis, a determined advocate for death row inmates and homeless people in Georgia, died Thursday of complications related to cancer. She was 72.
Davis had been in hospice care in Baltimore, where she and her husband, Eduard Loring, lived after leaving Atlanta a few years earlier. Her death was confirmed by their daughter, Hannah Murphy Buc.
Davis, a Presbyterian minister, left an indelible imprint on Georgia, where for decades sheworked with homeless people and was a regular visitor to death row inmates.
“It is not always an easy task to affirm that even a murderer is a child of God, butwe knowthat it is true,” she toldTheAssociatedPress in 1986. “There is no act, no matter howvicious, that entirely blots out that identity.”
Amonghernumeroushonors, she received a 1991 fellowship fromthePetraFoundation, which recognizes the work of “unsung heroes”
for social justice, and she is listed among Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell The Truth.
Davis became a full- time activist as a theological student in the mid- 1970s, after a key Supreme Court decision upheld the death penalty. Along with her husband and fellowPresbyterian minister, shemade it her life’swork to fight against the death penalty, advocate for homeless people and press for racial and economic justice and the abolition of war.
In 1979, carrying a 10- dayold baby, they opened an Atlanta night shelter for the homeless, their daughter said. Then in 1981, the couple and others founded OpenDoorCommunitynear
downtown Atlanta. Based in a large, old home, they housed and fed many of the homeless people living on nearby streets while working for larger social justice goals.
They organized protests that won concessions from the city of Atlanta and prompted the city’s public hospital to reverse its plans to impose a co- pay on its poorest patients. They also demonstrated at the state Capitol to oppose executions, and Davismade innumerable visits to prisoners on Georgia’s death row.
Anti- death penalty attorney Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, called Davis “a person with deep conviction and resolve, constantly looking forways tobring light into dark places,” andwrote that she “has actually spent more time in jails and prisons than most people who have never been convicted of a crime.”
He said Open Door gave him and other activists a place to be nurtured in spirit as well as to think, talk and strategize.
“People fromevery different sort of life experience sat together at table and learned about one another and figured out howto share life,” said her daughter, now a nursing professor at theUniversity of Maryland. “The opportunity to growupwith such a wide and loving perspective on the world and see how to work constantly for justice through that love and those relationships has informedeverything that I’ve ever done. And shewas the center of that.”
The Open Door Community closed in 2017 as the founders grewolder and the neighborhood gentrified.
Hermemoir“SurelyGoodness and Mercy” was published twoweeks before her death.
Davis’ survivors include her husband and their daughter, s o n - i n - l aw Jason and granddaughter Michaela, and a sister and two brothers.