UGA Law Names Rotunda for Chester C. Davenport (9/1/21)

The announcement is here.  Some excerpts (bold-face supplied by JAT):

The University of Georgia School of Law has named its iconic rotunda after its first Black graduate, Chester C. Davenport. A portrait of Davenport is being commissioned and will eventually hang in the space located at the main entrance to the law school.

Davenport, who passed away in August 2020, was a monumental figure in the School of Law’s history. He was the law school’s first Black student and remained its only Black student during his law school career. He earned his law degree in 1966, finishing in the top 5% of his class and serving as a founding member of the editorial board of the Georgia Law Review.

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During the past year, Davenport was memorialized with the establishment of the Chester C. Davenport Memorial Endowment at the law school and was posthumously awarded the UGA Alumni Association’s oldest and highest honor, the Alumni Merit Award.

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After law school, the Athens, Georgia, native and Morehouse College graduate became an attorney in the tax division of the U.S. Department of Justice and subsequently served as a legislative assistant for California Sen. Alan Cranston. Following a position on President Jimmy Carter’s transition team and an appointment as assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Davenport co-founded a law practice based in Washington, D.C. He later started a private equity firm.

Davenport’s service to UGA includes positions on the law school’s Board of Visitors and the UGA Arch Foundation. He delivered the law school’s 97th Sibley Lecture and participated in the school’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case. In 2006, he made a transformational gift to the law school to support student scholarships. The UGA chapter of the Black Law Students Association bears his name and, in 2016, he received the law school alumni association’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Scroll Award.

My database indicates that Chester served in DOJ Appellate from 1966-1969.  I started with DOJ Tax Appellate in June or July 1969 and don’t recall that he was there when I started, so he must have left shortly before that.  I did hear his name often while with DOJ Tax.