Davis, Frank Marshall

Impact on the world

As managing editor in Atlanta from 1931 to 1934, Davis oversaw the World’s conversion from a struggling weekly into the nation’s first successful Black daily, filling roles from straight news reporter to sportswriter to editorial writer; he then returned to Chicago, where from 1935 to 1947 he served as executive editor of the Associated Negro Press, writing influential music and theater columns that helped document the West African roots of Black American culture, and in 1946 co-founded the Chicago labor weekly the Star. His poetry collections, especially Black Man’s Verse (1935) and I Am the American Negro (1937), established him as a leading voice of the Black Chicago Renaissance alongside friends Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. His labor and civil-rights advocacy drew FBI and House Un-American Activities Committee scrutiny for suspected Communist Party ties; he relocated to Honolulu in 1948, where he continued writing a column for the labor paper the Honolulu Record and, in the 1970s, became an informal mentor discussing race, art, and identity with a teenage Barack Obama, an episode Obama would later describe in his memoir Dreams from My Father.

Life & background

Born December 31, 1905, in Arkansas City, Kansas, Davis studied journalism intermittently at Kansas State Agricultural College without completing a degree, moved to Chicago in 1927 to write for Black newspapers there, and became managing editor of the Atlanta Daily World in 1931 before returning to Chicago in 1934. He led the Associated Negro Press as executive editor from 1935 to 1947, published three major poetry collections during the 1930s and 1940s, and relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1948, where he ran a small wholesale paper business and continued writing until his death from a heart attack on July 26, 1987, at age 81.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Poetry Foundation; Academy of American Poets