When the civil rights movement was at its height in the 1960s, Milton Davis gave the effort his heart, but he also did a lot of thinking.
African-Americans eventually would win their rights, he was sure, but then they would have to invest in their communities.
As a co-founder and an executive of ShoreBank on the South Side, Davis brought opportunity to the inner city for 30 years.
“He believed that for black people to have power they needed to have access to money,” said Mr. Davis’ daughter Shelley. “While a lot of banks were red-lining, my father used to say he was green-lining.”
Milton Davis, 73, died Friday, Feb. 11, of cancer in his Chicago home.
Mr. Davis, who was born in Jasper, Ala., graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, his family said. He spent some time in the Army and took master’s-level courses in economics at Washington University in St. Louis before he moved to Chicago in 1958, his family said.
Right away Mr. Davis pursued his interest in finance at the University of Chicago, where he studied at the school’s Center for Research in Security Prices. In the meantime, he was also a leading member of the Congress of Racial Equality.
In 1960, Mr. Davis married his wife, Gertrude, who soon grew accustomed to her husband’s political involvement.
Many times in the next 10 years Mr. Davis was arrested as he led sit-ins for fair housing and picketed outside Chicago school board meetings to end segregation, his family said.
“More than once he called my mother from jail after he had been arrested at a protest,” said his daughter. “It was part of their early married life.”
Such a prominent civil rights activist known for his intellect and interest in finance did not escape the notice of some leading bankers in the city.
In 1968, Ronald Grzywinski, president of Hyde Park Bank, recruited Mr. Davis to head a new division that would specialize in writing small business loans to minorities.
At that time, many local banks pulled resources out of the poorer areas to focus on clients in the Loop. Mr. Davis’ pilot program broke new ground and proved that banks were missing an opportunity when they shunned minority borrowers.
In 1973, Mr. Davis, Grzywinski and two other senior Hyde Park Bank executives left to take over South Shore Bank, now called ShoreBank, and halted its plans to leave the South Side.
“This was a time when it was common practice to discriminate against the inner cities,” Grzywinski said. “By using banks as a community development tool, Milton was doing something courageous.”
Mr. Davis was bank president from 1973 to 1982, and chairman from 1983 to 1996.
By the time he retired as the bank’s chairman emeritus in 2002, ShoreBank had invested more than $2 billion in underserved communities in Chicago and across the country.
Other survivors include his wife and granddaughter. A memorial service will be held at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the University of Chicago campus, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave., Hyde Park.
