Malcolm Davis, pastor turned potter, dies

As early as 1960, Malcolm Davis began organizing civil rights bus caravans and sit-ins in the South. He helped lead voter registration drives and was confronted by the Ku Klux Klan, all while he was still a seminary student.

He later became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and he moved to Washington in 1967 as the ecumenical campus chaplain at George Washington University. He became a leader in the peace movement and helped organize antiwar marches along with such '60s activists as Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman.

He was still a popular campus minister in 1974 when a neighbor invited him to attend a class on ceramics.

"In a matter of weeks," Davis recalled in a 2003 oral history interview, "I was transformed. It was as if there was that potter in me all my life just waiting to get out and just never had the opportunity." Over time, he gave up his ministry to devote himself to making ceramics. He became renowned for his porcelain and for a colorful ceramic glaze that he developed. He taught other potters all over the country, and museums and private collectors paid top prices for his teapots, cups, bowls and plates.

Davis, who lived in Washington and had a studio in Upshur County, W.Va., died Dec. 12 at Sibley Memorial Hospital's rehabilitation facility in the District. He was 74 and, according to his wife, had a pulmonary embolism three days after hip-replacement surgery.

For Davis, pottery was much more than a craft. There was something deep and enduring about molding vessels by hand, something that connected him to traditions and people reaching across time.

He called it his destiny.

SEE PHOTOSRecent notable deaths

"What we do with the clay," he said in 2010, "what we create with our hands, what we offer from our spirits may not end racism or stop injustice, but it may just help keep our culture human."