Clifford Davis, left, and Kleber Miller.
Two Fort Worth legal greats were honored Tuesday during the Tarrant County Bar Association membership luncheon at The Ashton Depot.
L. Clifford Davis and Kleber Miller were celebrated on the recent occasions of their 100th birthdays and a lasting legal legacy of long careers.
Keynote speaker at the event was Dr. Bill Criss, author of “Six Constitutions Over Texas.”
Davis is living history.
Davis worked with the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall on the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954. In 1955, he filed Jackson v. Rawdon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, which ultimately led to the desegregation of the Mansfield school district, the first Texas school district ordered by a federal court to open its all-white high school to African Americans.
A suit filed in 1962 by Davis led to the desegregation of Fort Worth schools.
Fort Worth’s L. Clifford Davis Elementary School is named in his honor.
In 1983, Texas Gov. Mark White appointed Davis to Criminal District Court No. 2, the first appointed African American judge to preside over a district court in Tarrant County. In 1984, Davis became the first elected Black judge in Tarrant County. After his term ended in 1988, Davis continued to serve as a visiting judge until 2004, when he retired.
He also presided over Tarrant County’s first drug diversion court from 1996-2002. His many accolades include receiving the Tarrant County Bar Association’s Blackstone Award, the highest award bestowed by the Tarrant County Bar Association; being awarded an honorary degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 2017; and having the African American Bar Association of Tarrant County named the L. Clifford Davis Legal Association.
He later joined the firm of Johnson, Vaughn & Heiskell.
Another Blackstone Award winner was Kleber Miller, born near Austin.
While in college at UT, after having served in the South Pacific from 1943-46, he was said to have recalled the advice of high school debate coach who suggested he would make a good lawyer.
“As it turned out, it was the best decision I could have made,” he has often said over the years.
So, lawyering it was.
Miller graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1951 and began practicing as an assistant district attorney in Travis County. He moved to Fort Worth after a friend told him of an opportunity for an attorney to take over the account of the Santa Fe Railroad — now BNSF.
His professional career spanned more than 70 years, ending on his 98th birthday. In addition to the Blackstone Award, Miller was awarded the Tarrant County Bar Association’s Professionalism Award; the State Bar of Texas Presidential Citation; the Outstanding Fifty Year Lawyer Award; the Dallas Bar Association’s Living Trial Legend Award; the Texas Association of Defense Counsel’s Founders Award; the Fort Worth Business Press Lifetime Achievement Award, Attorney of Excellence Award in Business Litigation, and Mentor Award; and the Boy Scouts of America Law “Good Scout” Award.
In 2009, he was recognized by his peers in the State Bar of Texas as a “Texas Legal Legend.”
Davis was born in Wilton, Arkansas. He went to Little Rock Dunbar and Philander Smith College. He was denied entrance to the University of Arkansas law school because of segregation and later rebuffed the school when it conditioned acceptance with paying in advance, something not required of all the others.
Instead, he graduated from Howard University School of Law in Washington. In school he was befriended by Scipio Africanus Jones, the lawyer who defended 12 Black men sentenced to death following the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas in 1919.
He returned to Arkansas to practice and eventually moved to Waco, where he taught at Paul Quinn College.
In 1953, he moved to Fort Worth, becoming one of two Black lawyers in the city.