Davis Knight (8 January 1925 – 8 August 1959) was a Mississippi man of distant black descent who, in 1948, was charged with miscegenation for marrying a "white" woman, Junie Lee Spradley.
Biography
Davis Knight was born in Stringer, Jasper County, Mississippi in 1925, the great-grandson of Newton and Rachel Knight. Knight served in the US Navy during World War II. Despite outwardly appearing white, he was considered a "negro" because his great-grandmother was black, and his marriage to Junie Lee Spradley in 1946 led to him being charged with miscegenation by Mississippi's racist court system. On 17 December 1948, he was convicted of miscegenation, but he did not serve his five-year prison sentence, as the state supreme court overturned the lower court's decision due to its inability to prove that Knight was more than one-eighth negro. In 1951, Spradley abandoned the home, and Knight divorced her in 1954. He moved to Channelview, Texas after the divorce, and he remarried to an older woman. Knight died in Harris County in 1959 at the age of 34, drowning during a fishing trip.