With the committee passage last week of House Resolution 390, by U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, Memphis’ Downtown federal building, known since 2007 as the Clifford Davis-Odell Horton Federal Building, is destined to be known henceforth simply as the Odell Horton Federal Building. The change, approved unanimously by Tennessee’s entire congressional delegation, reflects a seismic shift in racial sensibilities.
Clifford Davis, as Cohen noted, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he entered politics in the 1920s, and, to a large extent, owed his election as a Memphis city judge in 1923 to Klan support. In 1927, he was elected to the old five-member City Commission and served as Commissioner of Public Safety until 1940 when, having meanwhile become a favorite of Memphis political boss E.H. Crump, he won the Democratic nomination and the general election as congressman from what was then Tennessee’s 10th congressional district. Like most national legislators of his time from the South, he was a signatory to the Southern Manifesto of 1956, which defended the then-prevalent “separate-but-equal” system and opposed desegregation.
The most significant event of Davis’ tenure in Congress occurred in 1954, when he and four other House members were fired upon from the chamber’s visitors’ gallery by members of a Puerto Rican independence group. Davis suffered only a leg wound and quickly recovered. Davis consistently won re-election until 1964, when he was upended in the Democratic primary by Memphis lawyer George Grider, a liberal who would serve a single term before being defeated in 1966 by Republican Dan Kuykendall.
Kuykendall was ousted in 1974 by Harold Ford Sr., the legendary African-American power broker who established a family dynasty in local politics. Ford was succeeded in 1996 by son Harold Ford Jr., who vacated the seat to make an unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate in 2006. The younger Ford was succeeded that year in what was now the 9th Congressional District by Cohen, who has been re-elected seven times.
In the meantime, the Memphis-based district itself has, through redrawn boundaries and demographic shifts, undergone significant change, metamorphosing from the white-dominated enclave of 1940 to the majority-Black jurisdiction of today.
Odell Horton also figured large in the events of the Memphis community and the congressional district encompassing it. A native of Bolivar and a Marine during the Korean War, Horton acquired a B.A. degree from Morehouse College and a Bachelor of Laws from Howard University School of Law. After engaging in private law practice in Memphis from 1957 to 1962, Horton served in a succession of publicly important posts, in most of them as the first African American ever to hold them — from assistant U.S. attorney to director of the division of Hospital and Health Services for the City of Memphis to Criminal Court Judge to president of LeMoyne-Owen College to director of Community Health Services of the Mid-South Medical Center Council to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge.
In 1980, Horton was appointed a U.S. District Judge by President Jimmy Carter and actively served until 1995, when he took senior status, continuing in that capacity until his death in 2006.
Judge Horton’s personal history directly intersected with that of the 9th congressional district when, as Chief Judge of Tennessee’s Western District from 1987 to 1994, he presided over the first trial of then Congressman Ford Sr. for bank fraud. The first trial of the congressman resulted in a standoff between eight Black jurors voting for acquittal and four white jurors voting to convict. Horton declared a mistrial and ordered that the jury for a second trial be imported from rural West Tennessee. When the second trial was held in 1993, Representative Ford was acquitted by a jury of 11 whites and one African American.
