Davis, Griffith Jerome
1923-1993 · Contribution: 1947-1985
Became Ebony magazine’s first roving editor at Langston Hughes’s recommendation, then, as the only African American freelance photojournalist for the Black Star picture agency, chronicled the dawn of African independence in Liberia, Ethiopia, and Ghana before pioneering the racial integration of the U.S. Foreign Service
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
A Morehouse classmate and lifelong friend of Martin Luther King Jr., Davis was recommended by his mentor Langston Hughes to Ebony founder John H. Johnson and became the magazine’s inaugural roving editor before enrolling as the only Black student in Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism class of 1949. Freelancing for Black Star from 1949 to 1952, he made three reporting trips to Liberia and interviewed Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie for Ebony’s fifth-anniversary cover story, and in 1957 photographed Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King meeting Vice President Richard Nixon at Ghana’s independence ceremonies. In 1952 Davis became one of the first Black officers in the U.S. Foreign Service under President Truman’s Point Four foreign-aid program, spending more than three decades documenting and assisting the development of newly independent African nations; he left behind an archive of some 55,000 photographs that his daughter, Dorothy M. Davis, has spent decades preserving and exhibiting, including a 2025 installation in the U.S. Supreme Court Archives.
Life & background
Born April 18, 1923, on the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, Davis served as an army photographer with the 92nd Infantry Division in Italy during World War II before returning to Morehouse, where a creative-writing class with visiting professor Langston Hughes changed the course of his career. He worked as an Ebony roving editor and Black Star freelance photojournalist from 1947 to 1952, then joined the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Liberia, Tunisia, Nigeria, and elsewhere across more than 25 African countries until his 1985 retirement; he died in 1993, and his photography archive has since been exhibited at the Schomburg Center, the National Gallery, and the Museum of Broadway.
Sources
- U.S. Department of State (Art in Embassies); Bonhams; American Foreign Service Association; Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives
More in Press & Photography
Abbott, Robert Sengstacke
1870-1940
Founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 with a 25-cent investment, building it into the most influential Black newspaper in the country and a primary catalyst of the Great Migration of roughly 1.5 million Black Southerners northward
Alcindor, Yamiche Léone
1986-present
Served as PBS NewsHour’s White House correspondent from 2018 to 2022, becoming a leading chronicler of the Trump and early Biden presidencies before succeeding her mentor Gwen Ifill, also profiled in this collection, as moderator of PBS’s Washington Week
Ball, James Presley
1825-1904
Built one of the first successful African American-owned photography studios in the country, operating “Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West” in Cincinnati from 1849 and photographing subjects from Frederick Douglass to Queen Victoria over a 50-year, coast-to-coast career
Barboza, Anthony
1944-present
Built a five-decade commercial and fine-art photography career after joining the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963 as its youngest member, later serving as the collective’s president from 2005 to 2016 and co-editing its landmark 2015 history, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge