Civil-rights leaders, even those renowned in their lifetimes, are destined; it seems, to be forgotten by fickle publics. So it has proved with John P. Davis a Harvard-trained lawyer and activist intellectual. John P. Davis along with A. Philip Randolph was quite clearly the most important black leader and civil-rights leader in the thirties and the forties.  Despite the upsurge in Black Studies in the sixties, seventies and into eighties, there seems to be a tremendous gap between the era of Booker T. Washington, W.E. Dubois and the Harlem Renaissance and the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education decision and Martin Luther King.  Well what happened during that gap was - John P. Davis and the National Negro Congress.