By all accounts, he moved with social ease through black-tie galas, the well-connected lunch crowd at Michael’s in Midtown, and the exclusive Century Association, where he was a member. But Mr. Davis said he never lost sight of the fact that, as a Black man, he was an exception and worked to correct the inequity he experienced firsthand in worlds entrenched in white privilege.
By having exceptionally light skin, he said, he was often mistaken for white. He recalled countless times when peers in college and all-white law firms made racially insensitive or bigoted remarks in front of him. “You know that I am African American?” he made it a point to tell them.
“Maybe I’m self-contained, but it has nothing to do with race,” he said in a 1998 Times interview. “I grew up in a family that was very self-aware, and very confident in issues of race. My parents taught us that we were equal to, or sometimes better than, people who were white. We were never confused about what we were. Other people were confused, all the time.”
He served on the boards of not only Lincoln Center, where he was briefly president, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he was the founding chairman, but also the New York Public Library, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the American Museum of Natural History, the Public Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Davis to a six-year term as a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
He tried to recruit people of color to the boards on which he sat and often spoke out about the lack of diversity among the trustees of New York’s cultural institutions. “He was willing to speak up and stand up for racial justice in places where others were just happy to be in the room,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation. “He was one of the few voices to call out the lack of diversity in for-profit and nonprofit organizations.”
Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said Mr. Davis “was consistent in his belief that cultural institutions and boards have to change to reflect the world around him.”
