More than 135 years ago, John S. Davidson, an Augusta citizen, worked hard for fairness and excellence in education. Soon after the Civil War the Georgia legislature passed an education bill mandating equal schools for both blacks and whites. Davidson, who served on the county's first board of education, as the city attorney, and as a state senator, took immediate steps to carry out the new law. Although he was unmarried, and without children, Davidson had a resounding interest in schools. Today he is known in Augusta as the Father of Education.

Davidson "stuck his neck out to organize the first black high school in Augusta," says local historian Ed Cashin. In 1886, in acknowledgment for his role in bringing public schools to Augusta, Augusta named a new elementary school on Telfair Street after Davidson.

In the decades after the Civil War, however, the political leadership in Georgia changed. A few years after Davidson's death in 1894, the Georgia legislature passed a law that said that school districts did not have to provide equal schooling to blacks and whites. The county closed Augusta's black high schools almost immediately. 

In Cumming v. Board of Education, local black citizens sued the county, claiming that if a black school was closed, then a white school also had to be closed. They lost the case, but appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1899, the Supreme Court handed down an interpretation that reinforced the end of black high schools in Georgia for nearly 40 years. It wasn't until 1937 that the county board of education finally voted to add two years of high school curriculum to one of the black elementary schools in Augusta, even though blacks made up 40 percent of the county's population.

Following the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, John S. Davidson elementary school in Augusta was among those chosen to integrate blacks into the public education system. But the old racism was not gone—at the insistence of local white businessmen, the county changed the school's name to the Telfair School rather than allow black children to attend a school with a white man's name.

In 1981 the John S. Davidson Fine Arts School opened in Augusta, chartered with the stipulation that the school reflect the racial makeup of the community.  The school moved to a ten-million-dollar campus in 1998, down the street from its former location. The student body is equally black and white, and the school is considered the premier fine-arts high school in the state, recognized for excellence in education, as well as in its approach to fair and equal opportunity for its students.
 
—David W. Wooddell