Early Life
Davis was born in 1899 to a sharecropping couple, the former Sarah Elizabeth Works and Samuel Jones Davis, in the now-ghost town of Beech Springs southeast of Quitman in Jackson Parish in north Louisiana. The family was so poor that young Jimmie did not have a bed in which to sleep until he was nine years old.
He graduated from Beech Springs High School and the New Orleans campus of Soule Business College. U.S. Representative Otto Passman also graduated from Soule but from the Bogalusa campus. Davis received his bachelor's degree in history from the Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville in Rapides Parish. He received a master's degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His 1927 master's thesis, which examines the intelligence levels of different races, is titled Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes.
During the late 1920s, Davis taught history (and, unofficially, yodeling) for a year at the former Dodd College for Girls in Shreveport. The college president, Monroe E. Dodd, who was also the pastor of the large First Baptist Church of Shreveport and a pioneer radio preacher, invited Davis to join the faculty.
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