Davis, Frank Marshall
1905-1987 · Contribution: 1927-1955
Newspaper editor; poet
Transformed the Atlanta Daily World into the first successful African American daily newspaper as its managing editor in the early 1930s, then spent twelve years as executive editor of the Associated Negro Press while building a parallel career as one of the era’s most acclaimed social-realist poets
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1905, Arkansas City, Kansas
- Active since
- 1927
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- Building the first successful Black daily newspaper; social-realist poet of the Black Chicago Renaissance
Impact on the world
Davis helped prove a Black daily newspaper could succeed, ran a national wire service, and gave the era one of its sharpest poetic voices on race and labor.
Sources
- Poetry Foundation
1 more sources and references are available to members.
Related visionaries
Barnett, Claude Albert
1889-1967
Founded the Associated Negro Press in 1919, the first sustained national and international wire service built specifically for Black newspapers, which at its peak supplied news, columns, and photographs to roughly 200 African American publications across the United States, the West Indies, and Africa
Scott, William Alexander II
1902-1934
Founded the Atlanta World in 1928 at age 26, which became the Atlanta Daily World in 1932 — the first successful African American daily newspaper of the 20th century — and built the nation’s first chain of Black newspapers, eventually growing to fifty publications
Bennett, Lerone Jr.
1928-2018
Spent more than fifty years at Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony magazine, rising to executive editor, and used its pages to publish groundbreaking popular history — above all Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (1962) — that made him the era’s most widely read chronicler of the African American past
Schuyler, George Samuel
1895-1977
Wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier for more than four decades as columnist and chief editorial writer, and published Black No More (1931), widely considered the first satirical novel written by an African American author