 "The Washington Star" was highly critical of an African-American lawyer legally challenging the District's Dual school system when the principal of Noyes School refused to admit Mike Davis at five years of age, stating that the District citizens had long accepted separate schools for blacks and whites and that the suit brought by John P. Davis would cause even deeper divisions in the nation's capital.The U.S. Congress, in response to John P. Davis's suit, appropriated federal funds to construct the Lucy D. Slowe elementary school directly across the street from his Brookland home in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Davis attended the Fieldston school in New York, New York.As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was a leader of the student sit-in movement.