On Becoming Deuce Davis

A Pen Name and Why

A collage of memory, movement, and becoming. From Horton stretching across the top left like the household philosopher he clearly is, to the Carter Presidential Center and the quiet gravity of the Amy Sherald exhibit, these moments trace a life lived between history and reflection. In one frame, I’m being interviewed for a classmate’s documentary; in another, standing after becoming a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, carrying tradition like a torch passed hand to hand. The National Mall photo captures me before my second hip replacement and is a reminder that resilience sometimes walks with a limp before it learns to stride again. The bottom row feels like America itself: marching at a Black Lives Matter protest after George Floyd’s murder, photographing the flag over Federal Hill like a question still unfinished, and ending beneath the glow of the Domino Sugar sign. That old Baltimore neon lighthouse humming over memory, labor, industry, and home.

I recently changed my Substack name from Steward Beckham to Deuce Davis.

Steward Beckham wears so many hats that the rack keeps filling up. It felt like a good idea to develop a pen name.

Stew On This stays Stew On This because the publication is an ode to my great-grandfather, J. Steward Davis. That is also where the Davis in my middle name and in this new pseudonym comes from. Deuce is because I am the second Steward Davis Beckham. My father was the first, also named after my great-grandfather.

In 1914, J. Steward Davis became the first African American to graduate from Dickinson School of Law and the first African American class valedictorian there. He served in the First World War and then settled in Baltimore, where he built a career as a trial lawyer and worked as a campaign organizer for W. Ashbie Hawkins, Al Smith, and Herbert O’Conor, doing the grassroots party work that helped bring Black voters into the Democratic coalition.

In April of 1929, he left home one morning for the office and never arrived. He had bought a train ticket to New York and spent the night there, and after that, nothing. There were rumors, some of them unflattering, none of them confirmed. I want to learn more about him, his achievements, and the rumors both. Honest writing about history can’t make exceptions for one’s own, even when it hits close to home.

That my great-grandfather did the work of Baltimore politics in the 1920s, and that I am now writing about American politics from Baltimore a century later, is not lost on me. The world we are writing into is becoming hostile to intellectual clarity and rigor, in public life and in private. It is not a world unfamiliar to recent or distant history. Many of us have come to take for granted the liberal wins that our ancestors fought for at the grassroots level, often invisibly, often without ever being remembered by name. Writing under his name, in this moment, is a small reminder to myself of what that work looks like.

I hope the new name doesn’t cause whiplash. The work is the same, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Much love, Deuce

J. Steward Davis