Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 – April 25, 1968) was an American poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
Early life
Davidson was born on August 8, 1893, in Campbellsville, Tennessee. His father, William Bluford Davidson, was "a teacher and school administrator," and his mother, Elma Wells, was "a music and elocution teacher."
Career
Davidson was an English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965.
In 1931, Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English. He bought a house in Vermont where he did much of his later writing. He taught at the Breadloaf School every summer until his death. In 1939 his textbook, American Composition and Rhetoric, was published and widely adopted for English courses in American universities.
Perhaps most widely read of his writings today is Davidson's two-volume history The Tennessee (1946 and 1948), in the Rivers of America series. The second volume is notable for its critique of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the impact of its dam-building and eminent domain land seizure on local society. Although originally a supporter of the New Deal, he was suspicious that the TVA was a plot of northern business interests to exploit and dominate the South. He denounced the TVA as an instrument of political collectivism, run by outsiders, designed to destroy the South's traditions.
In 1952 his ballad opera, Singin' Billy, with music by Charles F. Bryan, was performed at the Vanderbilt Theater. His work as book page editor for the Nashville Tennessean was commemorated in 1963 with the publication of The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924–1930. A comprehensive collection of his poetry, Poems: 1922–61, was published in 1966.
Segregationist political activism
Davidson was a proponent of racial segregation and racial inequality. In an essay defending segregation in The Sewanee Review, described by historian Paul V. Murphy as his major work on the topic, he wrote: "The white South denies the Negro equal participation in society, not only because it does not consider him entitled to equality, but because it is certain that social mingling would lead to biological mingling, which it is determined to prevent, both for any given contemporary generation and for its posterity." He joined the Tennessee States' Rights Committee in 1950, and became the chairman of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government (TFCG), the local analogue of the White Citizens Councils, at its founding in 1955.
Personal life and death
Davidson married Theresa Sherrer, a legal scholar and artist, in June 1918. They had a daughter, who married Eric Bell, Jr.