Voting rights expert was award-winning teacher
When Chandler Davidson entered his Rice University classroom one year, he did so dressed in Western garb — complete with a cowboy hat, boots and a big-bucket belt.
Little by little, as he lectured, he removed the cowboy getup to reveal business attire.
Sharon Plummer, Davidson’s wife of 34 years, said the lauded voting rights expert and award-winning teacher was trying to drill home a message.
“It was his way to encourage students to be open-minded and not make assumptions based on appearance,” she said.
In many ways, this was a core mission of the sociologist’s life work.
Davidson, a leading voting rights scholar and a co-founder of Rice’s sociology department, died April 10 of massive brain inflammation at his Houston home, his wife said. He was 84.
He spent his life advocating for racial equality, social justice and voting rights, and was often sought out by legislators and lawyers for his expertise. Davidson’s scholarly work was cited in several court opinions around the country.
In the early 1990s, Davidson teamed up with political scientist and University of California at Irvine professor Bernard Grofman on a project that assessed the effects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the South. The initiative, which engaged nearly 30 political scientists, historians, sociologists and lawyers, gave way to Davidson and Grofman’s awardwinning book “Quiet Revolution in the South.”
In Texas, Davidson was a fixture at the state Capitol, often providing testimony for voting rights, said Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis.
“I was just impressed with his photographic memory. He rarely had to look at his notes,” said Ellis. And when Ellis served as chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Mickey Leland, he said the congressman would send him and his staff to Houston to meet with Davidson to prepare for voting rights cases.
“He was the most cited academic I know of who (wrote) about voting laws. It’s a tremendous loss for the civil rights community,” Ellis said.
In a case about whether the Voting Rights Act was still valid, Davidson’s work was cited in Washington’s U.S. District Court nearly 30 times, and when decided by the court in 2012, Davidson and Grofman’s book was cited by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Richard Murray, a retired University of Houston professor who knew and worked with Davidson for about 50 years, said they were optimistic that Texas was moving in the right direction while working on cases in the 1970s. But over the past 25 years the colleagues grew dismayed to see some legislators and politicians being more aggressive toward Black and Latino interests, he said.
“Chandler took his research and science and community activism very seriously,” said Robert M. Stein, a fellow in Urban Politics at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Davidson served in the U.S. Navy for two years before being honorably discharged in 1961, the same year he completed his bachelor’s in philosophy from the University of Texas. He later earned master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Princeton University.
Described as a “stellar” teacher of an old generation, Stein said Davidson elevated Rice’s sociology department from an undergraduate teaching institution to a nationallyranked doctorate program.
“He wasn’t always striving for excellence for himself. He was always doing it for the people around him. It was almost infectious,” Stein said.
Aside from his life’s work, Davidson was known for his deep and distinct laugh, and his penchant for cooking, which inspired him to scour cookbooks for new recipes and designate their home kitchen as his domain, Plummer said.
He also reveled in interacting with children, and once took on an eightyear-old neighbor as his sous chef in Rice’s annual pie competition. The two won second place that year for a pecan pie.
And even in retirement with progressing dementia, he took on new interests, including joining a club of retired men who had discussions while dining out and educating himself about the climate crisis.
Davidson is survived by his wife, son Seth Davidson and his wife Yasuko; three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
A celebration of Davidson’s life will be held at Rice Nov. 1, 2021, the day that would have been the couple’s 35th wedding anniversary.
The family has requested that memorial contributions be made to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center or to Rice’s Chandler Davidson Undergraduate Research Fund in Sociology.