Davis was born in
Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1930. He converted to
Catholicism in his teenage years and became interested in joining the priesthood as well as becoming a monk. Though many
monastic communities (and most Catholic
religious institutes) did not accept
African Americans at the time, after high school Davis joined the seminary of
St. Meinrad Archabbey (1949–1956). He became a
novice on July 31, 1950, took the monastic name
Cyprian on August 1, 1951, and was ordained a priest on May 3, 1956. He was the first African American to join that monastic community. Davis received a
Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the
Catholic University of America (1957), before going to the
Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium to study
Church history, obtaining his
Doctoral en Sciences Historiques (D.Hist.Sci.) from Louvain, in 1963. While there, Davis focused his work on the Church during the
Middle Ages to avoid American Church history and concerns of race and slavery. Upon his first return from Belgium in 1963, he taught church history at
Saint Meinrad Seminary, and eventually became the school's first professor emeritus in 2012. Having returned to the US in the midst of the
civil rights movement, Davis attended the August 1963
March on Washington and heard
Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "
I Have a Dream" speech. Davis died on May 18, 2015, in Memorial Hospital in
Jasper, Indiana, at age 84. == Works ==