Benjamin Davis was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. His father, a graduate of St. Augustine's College, a traditional black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, was briefly a high school history teacher, but found it more lucrative to own and operate a service station in the black section of Birmingham. His mother, with an MA from New York University, was an elementary school teacher. The family owned a large home in a middle class mixed neighborhood called "Dynamite Hill" after so-called "night rider" terrorists began bomb attacks on civil rights leaders clustered there.