Matthew Simpson Davage
Rev. Matthew Simpson Davage also known as M. S. Davage, was an American educator, college and university president, businessperson, and minister. He served as president of George R. Smith College ; Haven Institute ; Samuel Huston College ; Rust College ; and Clark College.
Biography
Matthew Simpson Davage on June 16, 1879, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, to parents Harriet and Rev. Samuel Davage. The family moved to New Orleans when he went to college, where his father served as the pastor for the Methodist Episcopal Church.Davage studied in the classical department at New Orleans University. While attending college, he played baseball on the University Nine baseball team and he started teaching in the evenings. He graduated in 1900 with a B.A. degree, and in 1907 with a M. A. degree; after in which he began teaching mathematics and Latin. Davage did a period of postgraduate study at the University of Chicago, and at Columbia University. He married Alice Vera Armstead in 1904.
Davage was business manager for the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper from 1905 to 1915. He served as president of George R. Smith College ; Haven Institute ; the first president of Samuel Huston College ; the president of Rust College ; and Clark College. He was the first Black president of Rust College, a private historically black college in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
He was active within the Methodist church both nationally and internationally, and served as a Methodist Episcopal Church elder statesman and educator. He was friends with George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Within his lifetime, Davage observed the political changes from Black enslavement and being interposed, to a transformation towards the American civil rights movement.
Death and legacy
He died on September 20, 1976, in a hospital in New Orleans. The Davage Auditorium at Clark University was dedicated to him.The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University has a collection of his papers. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library has a photograph of Davage published in 1922. In 1939, he corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois who sent him an autographed copy of Du Bois' speech "The Revelation of St. Orgne the Damned", which is now part of the archives at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was photographed at the charter signing of Huston-Tillotson College on October 24, 1952, which is now part of the Huston-Tillotson University Downs-Jones Library Archives and Special Collections in Austin, Texas.