The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

DAVIS, NANCY OLA RANDOLPH (1926–2015).

Nancy Ola Randolph Davis, the youngest of the Randolph children, was born on April 14,1926, in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, to Earnestine Hilliard Randolph and Ed Napoleon Randolph. Their insistence on Black empowerment and education prompted their daughter to complete her elementary and secondary education at Booker T. Washington High School in Sapulpa in 1944. She earned a bachelor of science degree in home economics from Langston University in 1948. After completing her undergraduate degree, she accepted a teaching position at Dunjee High School in Choctaw, Oklahoma.

In summer 1949 she decided to enroll in the home economics master’s degree program at Oklahoma A&M University (now Oklahoma State University, OSU) in Stillwater. Although in 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregation in higher education to be illegal, in a case won by Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher of Oklahoma, Nancy Randolph still had to follow a similar path to be accepted into OSU. Intervention by Roscoe Dunjee, the noted editor of the Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City), along with Tulsa attorney Amos T. Hall, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) civil rights lawyer, resulted in a meeting with OSU administrators. They decided to admit her for the autumn semester of 1949. Nancy Ola Randolph thus became the first African American student to enter graduate school at OSU. She received a master of science degree in 1952.

Despite admission to the university, she was relegated to an anteroom outside of the classroom where it was difficult for her to hear the lectures. This restriction was based on a Jim Crow law that barred instructors in educational institutions from teaching enrolled African American and white students in the same room. Instructors faced a fine of ten dollars to fifty dollars per offense. Nevertheless, she was one of the top students in her class. Her positive impression on classmates caused them to insist on her being inside the room with them. They stood watch, and when an administrator approached, they warned the instructor to send her back into isolation so that there would not be a fine.

Undaunted by the educational challenges, she continued her teaching career at Dunjee school. She worked closely with groups that were experiencing a variety of economic conditions. She accepted her position in the local area as if it were a ministry, and that is the way she worked with students and their families. In addition to her home economics classes, she incorporated personal hygiene lessons for her students, home improvement guidance for community members, moral encouragement, and family togetherness. Her classroom was designed as a laboratory, incorporating a “model home” with a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a dining area, and she often visited students’ homes to evaluate the way students were implementing the lessons she taught in her model.

Among the huge tasks of teaching and learning, Davis found time in 1953 to marry Fred C. Davis, also a teacher at Dunjee. They raised two children, a daughter and a son, and she also was deeply attached to her husband’s daughter from a previous marriage. Instead of traveling outside of the school district to live, the family made their home in the heart of the community and took part in its religious, social and political activities.

Nancy Randolph Davis became the main person at Dunjee to support her co-worker Clara M. Shepard Luper, who is known as “the mother of Oklahoma’s civil rights movement.” Davis assisted Luper with recruiting Dunjee students along with Oklahoma City students into the NAACP Youth Council, the pool used to select youth participants for the Oklahoma City sit-in movement. These women enlisted their own children to participate in the youth activities that included traveling to national conferences. For example, in 1957 they went to New York City where they enacted Luper’s play, Brother President, the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dunjee school was ordered to be closed in 1972, and Davis was sent to Star Spencer High School during the tense period when the Dunjee and Star Spencer student bodies were merged. Her steadfast professionalism and strict, caring discipline allowed her to help the students maintain some sense of calm during the unfortunate disruption to the communities. She began as a home economics teacher (and even enrolled a few boys) and became a vocational child care instructor, human relations advisor, and vocational parent advisory sponsor.

Davis always lived according to philosophies that enriched other people’s lives. Two of them included: “Once a task you’ve first begun, never give up until it’s done,” and “Be the labor great or small, do it well, or not at all.”  She later enhanced her education with additional studies at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, and Central State College (now the University of Central Oklahoma). She retired from the Oklahoma City school system in 1991, having taught at Dunjee for twenty years and at Star Spencer for twenty-three.

From 1949 to 2015 Nancy Randolph Davis was recognized as an iconic Oklahoma figure. Her awards, honors, and citations are numerous. At the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City a special area is reserved for her. At OSU Davis Hall is named for her, a sculpture of her stands in its courtyard, and several scholarships are offered in her honor. Special days are set aside at OSU and Langston University in respect for her influence on those two institutions. She received the OSU Distinguished Alumni Award in 1999 and the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and was inducted into the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame in 2015. Nancy Ola Randolph Davis died on March 23, 2015, in Oklahoma City.

Gloria J. Pollard