(born Clarence John Davis; September 9, 1930 – May 18, 2015) was an African-American Catholic monk, priest, and historian at St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana.
Though many monastic communities (and most Catholic religious institutes) did not accept African Americans at the time, after high school Davis joined the seminary of St. Meinrad Archabbey (1949–1956).
Upon his first return from Belgium in 1963, he taught church history at Saint Meinrad Seminary, and eventually became the school's first professor emeritus in 2012.
[2] Having returned to the US in the midst of the civil rights movement, Davis attended the August 1963 March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech.
[2] He was involved in writing two pastoral letters on race, "Brothers and Sisters to Us" (1979) and "What We Have Seen and Heard" (1984), and later received a grant from the Lilly Endowment to the study the black Catholic church, resulting in the publication of his award-winning The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990)[3] Davis died on May 18, 2015, in Memorial Hospital in Jasper, Indiana, at age 84.