For 55 years, Tom Davies had to keep his opinions to himself. It was a matter of legal and judicial ethics as he practiced law in Fargo, then spent nearly 45 years on the bench in the city’s municipal court – a tenure that made him its longest-serving elected official.
Health problems forced him to retire from the bench several years ago. Now fully recovered, all those pent-up opinions are flowing at last … in his column, “The Verdict,” which appears each week here in The Extra, and is republished on the Web blog unheralded.fish.
In the past month, that combination has “gone viral,” as Internet citizens call it. The Extra delivers thousands of newspapers to sites around Moorhead, Fargo and nearby towns every Thursday morning, and posts it the same day at thefmextra.com/e-editions. But that’s just the beginning.
We post his column on the Extra’s Facebook page. Fans have shared his Extra columns from there nearly 1,000 times in the past month, reposting them on their own pages. Meanwhile, Unheralded.fish, which is published online via a service that more closely tracks numbers of readers and “shares, has documented steadily rising numbers over the past month … culminating last week with almost 25,000 online readers and well over 10,000 “shares” for his column titled “Ambush at Standing Rock.”
“I’m shocked that anybody pays any attention to what I do and say,” the 77-year-old retired barrister says with a grin. “For all those years, I could have opinions – and I did – but I couldn’t voice them publicly. Now I can’t stop!”
He professes to be amazed at the attention “The Verdict” has been attracting – not only here in Moorhead and Fargo, but across the state, the nation and even internationally. The reason? Tom was one of the first respected voices far from the reservation to draw attention to the Standing Rock Nation’s protest of pipeline construction over historically sacred ground just north of their reservation. They also fear that the Dakota Access Pipeline, planned to cross the Missouri River deep under its bed, will rupture or leak and foul their water supply.
He addressed confrontation between the Native “water protectors” and private contractors in “Ambush at Standing Rock.” A crew scoured the disputed area with heavy equipment just hours after the tribe filed suit to delay construction and provided a detailed account of the burial sites and other antiquities suspected to be on the land. When earthmoving equipment obliterated the area on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, Native protests swarmed onto the site. A private security force repelled them with Mace and attack dogs, touching off international news stories and outrage.
That’s the “ambush” that Tom wrote about. His first comments came Aug. 18, when he wrote, “Pipeline protestors at Standing Rock deserve our support.” His Aug. 25 column decried the North Dakota governor’s “overzealous response” to the growing encampment north of Fort Yates. On Sept. 1, he again insisted that the leadership of Standing Rock, as a sovereign nation under U.S. law, deserved far greater respect.
Tom is as passionate in defending the Native protestors’ right to defend their water and sacred sites in person as he is in the paper and online. “This stinks — watching how North Dakota is treating the tribes like poor backwoods neighbors who ought to shut up and be subservient.
“I only wish my dad, Ronald N. Davies, were still alive to see what’s going on there,” he muses. “I know exactly how he’d feel. I can just hear what he’d have to say. Seeing people being demeaned and not treated with the respect every American citizen deserves made him absolutely furious.”
The elder Davies is best known as the federal judge whose historic ruling in the fall of 1957 is a landmark in the history of the American civil rights movement. It was he who ordered the immediate desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to the school under the pretense of maintaining civil order. The nine black students attempted to enter Central High on September 4, 1957, but were turned away by the guardsmen. The deployment of the guardsmen brought international attention to Little Rock … much like, Tom notes, the response to the Standing Rock protest is shining a light on North Dakota.
Tom compares that iconic moment to the National Guard members in riot gear who stood guard on the North Dakota Capitol grounds as Indians from the encampment danced and prayed on the lawn.
“Dad could not stand bigots, racists … prejudice of any kind,” he says of the namesake of Fargo’s new Davies High School. “Some people are just built that way. He had empathy for everyone. He loved the Constitution and he loved people.”
Tom has probably become one of the community’s most active and avid Facebook members. He began, oddly enough, as part of his occupational therapy after the year-long battle with acute pancreatitis and its aftermath that led to his resignation from the court. He was hooked.
“I truly enjoy it,” he says now, still shaking his head over his newfound fame — which includes a cameo appearance in a music video setting images from Standing Rock to Miley Cyrus’ song “We Can’t Stop.”
“I like to stir things up.”
