J. Earl Downs

James Earl Downs, known as J. Earl Downs (June 18, 1905 - September 20, 1998),
Biography
Downs was descended from a political family based in Rapides Parish in Central Louisiana. His father, U. T. Downs was the mayor of Pineville from 1914 to 1924 and the Rapides Parish sheriff from 1924 to 1940. U. T. Downs was also during the 1920s a member of the Ku Klux Klan.Downs's younger brother, , was a member of both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature in the 1940s and 1950s and was an advisor to Governors Earl Kemp Long and John McKeithen.He graduated in 1928 from Southern Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville. He then obtained a master's degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. C. H. "Sammy" Downs followed this same educational path but in 1946 obtained a law degree as well. Earl Downs taught and coached during the 1930s in Jena, where his father graduated from Jena High School, and in Logansport in DeSoto Parish and Winnfield in Winn Parish. He left the education profession to become a traveling salesman. Beginning in 1944, he entered into an oil and gas business. He ran unsuccessfully in 1948 for the Louisiana Public Service Commission for the seat held from 1942 to 1944 by Governor Jimmie Davis. In 1954, Downs was elected Shreveport public safety commissioner, a position held from 1938 to 1942 by Jimmie Davis. He served two terms, first with Mayor James C. Gardnerand then with Mayor Clyde Fant.
In the fall of 1961, Commissioner Downs, along with Mayor Fant, Caddo Parish Sheriff J. Howell Flournoy, chief deputy and subsequent Sheriff James M. Goslin, and Hugh B. Walmsley, manager of the Continental Southern Lines bus terminal in Shreveport, were defendants in a desegregation suit filed by the United States Department of Justice at the request of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The government sought to halt the bus terminal by ending designated racially separate facilities for restaurant, waiting room, restroom, and ticket sale services. The United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, based in Shreveport, in its 1962 ruling sided with the Justice Department, as did the United States Supreme Court on appeal. The court decreed that the segregated facilities "imposes an undue burden upon interstate commerce in violation of the commerce clause of the United States Constitution. The city of Shreveport was ordered to pay the costs of the litigation. The city was represented in the case by later U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, Jr. The presiding judge was Benjamin C. Dawkins, Jr.

After his tenure ended as the public safety commissioner, Downs was a social worker involved in job training and vocational rehabilitation services.
Downs was married to the former Helen Whitener (1908-2007), originally from Natchitoches, the daughter of Samuel S. Whitener, Sr., and the former Harriet Rebecca "Bitsy" Brewton.The Downses had one son, retired North Carolina senior resident Superior Court Judge James Uriah Downs (born in Shreveport in 1941) and a graduate of Virginia Military Institute and the Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. Originally appointed to the court by Governor James B. Hunt, James U. Downs was elected to the bench four times without opposition. His jurisdiction was in Buncombe and other counties in western North Carolina. He returned in 2014 to the private practice of law, with an office in Franklin in Macon County in southwestern North Carolina.
In their later years J. Earl and Helen Downs relocated from Shreveport to Franklin, North Carolina, to be near their son and his family. They were already living in Franklin by 1985 at the time of the death of Sammy Downs. Earl Downs died in 1998 of congestive heart failure

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