Mary-Agnes Miller Davis

She makes giving back to the community her life’s work

    She could’ve idled away her days as a society lady.

    But if you know Mary-Agnes Miller Davis, you’d know she would have had to answer to those nuns down in Montgomery, Ala., where she grew up.

    The Catholic Church was a consuming influence in Davis’ childhood home. Indeed, the little girl with the broad smile was convinced for years she’d become a nun.

    Instead, she moved to Detroit, married Ed Davis — the country’s first black car dealer for one of the Big Three, and who died in 1999 — and became what Davis likes to call “a professional volunteer.”

    Musing in her handsome, 11th-floor apartment in The Jeffersonian, east of downtown, Davis speculates those good sisters “planted a dedication to public service. That much must have stuck.”

    The Wayne State and U-M Social Work School graduate is probably best known for creating the Co-Ette Club, which trained generations of promising high-school girls in the old-fashioned virtues of social grace, leadership and charity — but that’s only part of the story.

    Starting at the tender age of 25, Davis found herself recruited to the boards of some of the most powerful institutions in Detroit — the American Red Cross, the Meadow Brook Music Festival, even becoming president of Keep Detroit Beautiful Inc. from 1973-77, where Davis learned the art of coalition-building.

    In the early years, Davis was almost always the very first black on any of these committees. She didn’t realize at the time, she says, “that there was a patronizing element to it.” But in her naivete, she turned the experiences to considerable advantage.

    “I learned a great deal,” she says. “I learned from the masters.”

    Still, it’s the Co-Ette Club that Davis readily admits has been her “life’s work.”

    The club was “wonderful,” recalls Judge Trudy DunCombe Archer, the mayor’s wife and one of more than 2,000 Co-Ette alumnae nationwide — teaching its young charges “how to be gracious and how to give back to the community.”

    For her part, Davis maintains the club promotes a sense of “responsibility, which I think inspires the Co-Ettes to achieve beyond merely the self-serving.”

    Since its founding in 1941, the same year she married, Co-Ettes in cities across the nation have competed every year to raise needed funds for groups from African Famine Relief to the United Negro College Fund. In the latter’s case, they’ve contributed more than $50,000 since 1954.

    Every December, the Metro Detroit Co-Ettes throw a Charity Ball — last year’s was at the Renaissance Center — where the highest fund-raiser is crowned queen.

    “Mary-Agnes is a citizen of the first rank in Detroit,” says Arthur Johnson, the longtime president of the Detroit branch NAACP, who’s known her for some 50 years.

    “And in all her work,” he adds, “she’s expected people to bring quality and class to what they’re doing.”

    Davis herself just laughs, noting the Sisters of Charity insisted she be named both for the Virgin Mary and St. Agnes, patron saint of her Jan. 21 birthday. “They placed a heavy burden on me,” she says. “I don’t know that I ever lived up to it.”

   

— Michael H. Hodges