Courtesy photo
By Stephen Oduntan
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES — Rain pattered against the windows, blending with the low hum of the day. Over the phone, Leatha Clay Davis spoke with the unmistakable rasp of age, her voice softened but firm.
At 80, her words carried the weight of decades, shaped by a life of resistance. When she laughed — a deep, knowing chuckle — her white teeth gleamed against her dark skin, unchanged by time. Even over the phone, her voice carried the same steady warmth.
“They say we’ve come a long way,” she said. “But I ain’t sure we’ve come far enough.”
Sixty years ago, state troopers brutalized peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The late John Lewis was among those beaten that day. Davis was there too — running, dodging, the crack of billy clubs splitting the air, the sting of tear gas burning her eyes.
“I remember that sound,” she said, her voice heavy. “That bone-cracking sound. You don’t forget that.”
Davis grew up in Pleasant Hill, Alabama — an isolated countryside of red dirt roads and wooden shacks, where families like hers labored under the weight of sharecropping. They called her hometown The Silly Place, though for Black families trapped in poverty, there was nothing silly about it.
“We didn’t know nothing about hours,” she said, looking back. “From sunup to sundown, that’s what we knew. When the sun started going down, you better be out the way, ’cause the snakes came out.”
By the age of 5, she worked the cotton fields under the sweltering sun, her small fingers tugging at bolls. At the end of the season, her father would stand before a white landowner, waiting for his share.
“All that work, and the white man with the pen would tell my daddy he only broke even — leaving us with just a dollar and a bucket of syrup,” she said.
Her childhood wasn’t just backbreaking — it was dangerous. The Ku Klux Klan loomed over their world, a faceless menace that could strike at any time.
“We lived miles from anybody,” she said. “And we heard stories — how they’d take them dogs and run Black folks through the woods. I never saw one myself, but I knew. And I was afraid.”
By 16, Leatha had made up her mind — she was joining the fight.
“I loved to read,” she said. “I’d sneak newspapers and magazines into the outhouse just to see the pictures. I knew there was a world bigger than that cotton field.”
Her parents were terrified.
“My daddy just knew I wasn’t coming back,” she said.
When she asked to take her younger brother with her to Montgomery, her father refused.
“One is enough,” he told her. “He had a feeling.”
The day they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Davis was in the crowd, voices raised in freedom songs as they stepped forward in defiance of injustice. But the police were ready.
“They ran us back across that bridge like cattle,” she said. “I didn’t know what tear gas was. I just knew I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t see.”
At the front of the march were civil rights leaders John Lewis, Andrew Young and Hosea Williams.
“We saw them beating John Lewis. Heard it. The sharp crack of the billy club. Bone on bone. He thought he would die.”
That night, she and others took refuge in a church while mounted police patrolled outside, the sound of horseshoes clicking against the pavement a reminder that they were still not free.
Decades have passed, but the struggle continues.
“We’ve come far, but we are not there yet,” Davis said. “We still fight for jobs, for education, for dignity.”
She still teaches young people about the movement, making sure they know their worth.
“I tell them, you can be anything you want to be. But you got to be ready to fight.”
When asked what she hoped people would remember about her, those who knew her could easily picture her signature smile — warm and unwavering, a presence felt even through the steady rhythm of her voice.
“Tenacity,” she said. “That’s what I want them to remember. The confidence that it can be made better.”
Outside, the rain hadn’t let up. But through the static of the phone line, Leatha Clay Davis — who had defied the Klan, withstood the police, and shattered the limits of her time — remained unshaken, as fierce as ever.
Stephen Oduntan is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers.
