In Chicago, between 1934 and 1948, Frank Marshall Davis embodied a Renaissance figure who played multiple roles: a poet, newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, labor and Civil Rights activist, photographer, radio personality, humanist, and often unacknowledged leader of the Chicago progressive community. As a Renaissance man and an African American writer, his professional task was to use the written and spoken word to expose and break down social and political barriers, destroying the construct of a preordained subordinate place for blacks in society, and to create and cultivate a literary and social consciousness. The indictment of white America as imperialistic, paternalistic, and racist remained a common theme in his writing. Davis was a courageous figure in Chicago’s radical urban renaissance experience from 1927, when he began his job as the editor of the Chicago Evening Bulletin, until his departure for Hawaii in 1948. There, he lived, raised his family, wrote, and experimented with a few business ventures for almost 40 years until his death in Honolulu in 1987.
Frank Marshall Davis was born in Arkansas City, Kansas, in 1905. When his parents divorced the following year, he lived alternately with this grandmother and mother and stepfather, J. M. Boganey—a surname he would later use for an editorial column. Unlike many blacks, he lived in a predominately white working-class neighborhood where attitudes reflected the Jim Crow pattern of the day. To escape his loneliness and a low self-esteem due to isolation and alienation during his formative years, Davis developed a passion for books.
His stepfather (who worked the railroad and got Davis summer jobs there) introduced him to the Black Press by sharing black newspapers with Davis at an early age. After graduation from Arkansas City High School in 1923, Davis worked for a summer on the railroads in secondary service jobs, worked as a busboy in an exclusive club, and in the fall took classes in nearby Wichita at Friends University. However, he left the school when he could no longer afford to attend due to the death of his grandfather. The following year Davis moved to Kansas City and enrolled at Kansas State Industrial and Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) where he began to study journalism. He wrote and published his first poems in 1924, having received encouragement from one of his English teachers, Miss Ada Rice, who recognized his talent.1
In 1927, Davis moved to Chicago where he got a job as night city editor and columnist for the Chicago Evening Bulletin, and wrote short somewhat sensational stories for the popular market under the name of Frank Boganey. In 1928 he wrote for the Chicago Whip before he accepted a position at the Gary American in Indiana where he was a reporter, editor, editorial writer, and columnist, writing sociopolitical columns under the pseudonym “Raymond Harper.”2 He also introduced “Jazzin’ the News,” which was to reappear as a column when he was an editor at the Atlanta World.
During his first break from Kansas State Industrial and Agricultural College at the beginning of the Depression, Davis went to Gary, Indiana, for his first job in the newspaper field. Unfortunately, because of segregation (also known as Jim Crow), many blacks were denied access to most administrative and professional jobs outside of limited African American institutions and entertainment, the railroad industry, or sports.
Consequently, some of the most gifted Black intellectuals like Davis found themselves in these alternative careers. A few chose traditional careers in medicine, science, teaching, and the arts, and still others, like Davis, chose journalism. He quickly experienced another kind of alienation when he discovered the rampant corruption of big city politics, and the exploitation of employees by factory owners and “Big Bosses.” His frustrations and feelings of impotence expanded as he began to understand the enormity of the problems of race and poverty.3
The tragic circle of domination and degradation encouraged whites to strengthen segregation and relegate African Americans to declining expectations of success. By 1929, Davis returned to Kansas State on a scholarship and resigned his position at the Gary American, only to return in 1930, when he wrote a column entitled “A Diplomat in Black.”
In 1931, Davis was recruited by W. A. Scott to be managing editor of the biweekly Atlanta World, which he turned into a daily newspaper in 1932. While in Atlanta, he wrote editorials on many controversial race issues such as lynching and violence in the black community, and he had two columns: “Touring the World” and “Jazzin’ the News.”4
Davis resigned from the Atlanta World in 1934 and accepted a part time position at the Gary American, where he again used the pseudonyms “Raymond Harper” for editorials, and “Frank Boganey” or “The Globe Trotter” for his sports columns.5
Even before his career changes, Davis was writing poetry based in part on his experiences in the South. His poetry also reflected his love for and belief in the power of jazz. Davis used the rhythms and discordant tones and improvisation in jazz to express alienation and pain. For Davis, jazz spread like a wildfire across the country and around the world, affirming the active, creative, and rebellious presence of African Americans. Davis deemed the music of jazz and the blues unique and culturally and historically significant.
In 1933, he met with an editor in Chicago about publishing a book of poems. When Davis returned to Chicago from Atlanta, he was happy to return to this haven for musicians and national center of jazz and the blues. One could listen to Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and W. C. Handy, “the father of the blues,” all in one night by visiting the many clubs, theaters, and cabarets on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side.
Davis described jazz as “musical militancy” in an age when African Americans found it hard to speak out openly about whites. In his poem “Jazz Band,” he writes:
Play that thing, you jazz mad fools!
Boil a skyscraper with a jungle
Dish it to ’em sweet and hot-
Ahhhhhhhh
Rip it open then sew it up, jazz band!6
Davis revealed his command of language, imagery, world culture, and history, as well as his perception that music transcends individual and national differences. The ironic tones, the cultural references, and the use of sounds to imitate jazz were common to African American writers of the period, especially Langston Hughes. Such juxtaposed themes were evident in the jazz and blues music as well as in poetry: the bittersweet tones, the staccato anger, and the raging riffs. Indeed, much of Davis’s life and writing reflect the notable influence of jazz.
Davis also wrote book reviews and made innumerable speeches about town. Slowly, he gained more legitimacy and respect in the white community, expanding his voice and empowering himself through his writings and lectures. He included an African American historical context in his editorials, which were informed and occasionally erudite, and he discussed the contributions of women in his columns whenever possible. Meanwhile, in 1935, he wrote several columns like the editorial, “Behind the Headlines,” and a theater column under the pseudonym “Franklyn Frank” which allowed him to “chronicle the show world and bathe in hot jazz.”7
Through his creative writing, Davis joined the South Side Writers Group and the Allied Arts Guild, which included a variety of creative people from various fields including writers, dancers, singers, pianists, photographers, and painters. Between the years 1933–1948, he met or became reacquainted with other black intellectuals, activists, and outstanding individuals like Jack Johnson, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Davis, like Hughes, belonged to a small group of intellectuals and artists who had a deep appreciation for the common people, their colorful and original art, lifestyles, resilient spirit, dynamic energy, and oral history.8
As a poet, Davis’s first book, Black Man’s Verse (1935), appeared a few months before he joined the staff of the Associated Negro Press. By 1948, Davis had added three more books of poetry: I Am the American Negro (1937), and Through Sepia Eyes (1938), that was later incorporated into 47th Street (1948). Davis received excellent reviews nationally by such writers and critics as William Rose Benet, William Allen White, Alain Locke, and George Schuyler. Sterling Brown also wrote in Opportunity (July 1936) of Davis’s “strong and vivid revelations of the American scene.” Davis enjoyed the positive reviews, but remained broke.
His writing exemplified the new Black Aesthetic, which valorized indigenous African American creative expressions. He urged writers to continue the quest to create, define, expand, refine, and articulate a black aesthetic. There is also a political aspect of the African American Aesthetic which has usually been characterized by an ideological and moral quality that Davis embodied. Davis recognized the need to create a language devoid of negativity directed toward African Americans. For example, he sifted through old words such as “savage,” “black,” “heathen,” “power,” “love,” “friendship,” “community,” and “sexual” to understand their contextual usage in relation to African Americans. It was necessary to explore the worlds of white supremacy and black inferiority to better understand the reasons for their continuing oppression. This act of critique guided the central acts of perception and informed the subject matter of African American writers.
In his 1937 poem “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” Davis attacked institutional racism, the politics of domination, injustice, and patriarchal assumptions found in Christianity as an illustration of this process:
You tell me Christ was born nearly twenty centuries ago … your artists paint a man as fair as another New White Hope. Well, you got it all wrong … facts twisted as hell … see?9
Davis rebels against traditional religious subservience. He sets forth a new discourse reflecting and re-creating the social organization in the minority voice. To Davis, African American literature, then, is often a literature of survival and necessity, a literature produced to perform a political function as much as to embody an aesthetic one. This political function has been to critique white racism and simultaneously, to demonstrate the intellectual capacity of all African American people through the agency of the artistic products of the writer, who becomes a voice of the group, presuming a collective “I” or “we.”
As had other African American writers before him, Davis experimented with images, borrowing from the visual arts, music (especially jazz and jazz rhythms) and musical instruments, science, and philosophy. Like Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, Davis often used the city as a metaphor of urban life, a locus that he captured, personified, and bestowed with character, moods, and authority—a giant dwarfing human beings. In the 1948 poem “Chicago Skyscrapers,” he writes:
Here in this fat city
Men 72 inches short
Have frozen their dreams
Into steel and concrete
Six hundred feet tall.
Davis, soon became known as a social realist, writing of the pathos of frozen dreams of black immigrants from the South, and the insignificance of people dwarfed by a steel and concrete city that depersonalizes individuals. He created poetry, sometimes using rhetoric, in order to disown and sometimes destroy the lying figures of speech, the disguise of “civilized, artistic” forms, and the insidious masks of poetic diction that denigrated and segregated African Americans from the rest of society. To counter the blatant and subtle verbal attacks by white writers, Davis sometimes used critical and emotionally charged language as a counterforce to the dominant discourse, a challenge to white abusive authority and the tradition of patriarchal power.
After the publication of his first book, during the mid to late 1930s in Chicago, Davis was in contact with other African American intellectuals such as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, A. Philip Randolph, and Margaret Walker.10 Like Davis, most of these black artists were concerned with the material and emotional lives of the ordinary people that influenced the content of the African American aesthetic. Those creative writers he most respected held to a radical approach to culture and art as he did and were not afraid to speak out in a writing style that became known as social realism.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the voice of the African American writer, including Davis, often had similar tones of frustration and outrage. Common themes ranged from racism, the politics of color, miscegenation, corruption, crime, exploitation of power, big business to slave insurrections, folk tales, “passing,” gender issues of African American men and women, Northern upper-class urban life, the influence of the West Indian presence in African American life, racial violence and discrimination, urban life, and the plight of the much darker-skinned person in the color-conscious community. The voice and themes also reflected the social origins, education, styles, preoccupations, daily employments, and attitudes toward the problems of living and writing in a white patriarchal society.
Bearing in mind this racial aesthetic spectrum, Davis used his writing to revision and reinterpret the world from a new and positive perspective of black courage and strength in order to formulate an ideology of collective hope and survival. Putting aside the “victim” mentality, Davis saw that the writer can explain and interpret the African American reality against a modern background of oppression. Davis focused on exploring themes dealing with survival, environmental racism, poverty, the disorder and decay of cities, the threat of war and effect of war on the African American community, environmental destruction and decay, political repression, economic stagnation, the declining role of religion and the church, and of values such as unity, courage, perseverance, patience and philosophical inquiry. Through deconstruction of traditional metaphors, paradigms, and ideologies—such as the word “black” and its derivatives, which function as a metonym for evil and negativity—Davis saw that the African American writer can reconstruct reality with African Americans as active positive forces.
When he published I Am the American Negro in 1937, he included a “Forewarning” to the reader:
Fairy words … a Pollyanna mind
Do not roam these pages.
Inside
There are coarse victuals …
Companions who seldom smile …
For being black
In my America
Is no rendez-vous
With Venus … 11
This cosmology suggests alienation and loss but also stresses a variety of values including the various interrelationships between humans and the universe. His poem included an appreciation for the body and physical pleasures (eros), the roles of the individual and group in society, the role of the extended family, the valuation of the ancestors, and the exalting of fertility, intuition, music, rhythms, and dance.
Usually, he preferred the raw, vibrant, and sometimes explosive energy and folk tradition of the masses. He wrote poems about women (“Horizontal Cameos”), musicians (“Lady Day & Cabaret”), the policy man, and the exploited workers (“Mojo Mike’s Beer Garden”). Davis wrote of the familiar warmth of common folk and places like the bars, poolrooms, barbershops, and other informal institutions. He respected the colorful dialect of the people, the new black music of jazz and the blues with its staccato rhythms and angry tones, which he incorporated into his writing style. In “47th Street,” he uses dialect and standard English to show familiarity and offer commentary on a slice of life in the neighborhood with few hopes of escaping from poverty:
“Five cents’ll git you five dollars
A dime brings ten iron men
So gimme your gigs
An’ hope t’ God you hits.”12
Davis explored the dynamics and philosophy of black culture in order to contextualize the black experience. This will to balance, to re-create images, and to deconstruct a paradigm of white superiority was his way to help heal the bruises and wounds of racism, an almost invisible destructive force in the fabric of society, incorporated and institutionalized into American literature. He felt the need to rescue “native” culture from prejudged imaginary myths and texts that exploit and trivialize the lives of those people with darker skins and little education. He felt it was the responsibility of the writer to destroy the colonialist discourse and negative stereotypes sometimes embodied in the plantation tradition of black inferiority and misrepresented identity. Indeed, Davis observed the values of democracy subverted almost daily by callous competition, the dominant upper class, and the profit motives of capitalism in various institutions in American society.
In addition to his love of poetry, Davis also understood the value of having an African American press to construct a positive group identity and to balance the colonial themes and white perspectives of wealth, power, and status. Like other African American editors and activists, he chose to construct an alternative paradigm to white supremacy. Through the African American press, Davis presented a variety of views, including news of the African Diaspora, and analysis about and for African Americans and their communities. His columns were based on the principles of a democratic society that he fought for with each column he wrote. Not surprisingly, while Davis worked for the Associated Negro Press (ANP) in 1934, he was interested in the survival of the Black Press during hard economic times. But, he couldn’t accomplish his aims if the newspaper folded.
Indeed times were hard and he came to rely on the Republican Party for extra money. Despite his reformist attitude, Davis stuck with the GOP a bit longer than most blacks and liberals who were aware of continuing discrimination and wage discrepancies between African Americans and whites in many of the New Deal programs. Davis was realistic about the pressures of survival, but he was seduced by the GOP perks and paid advertisements that he could rely on, not to mention the cash payoffs given for newspaper publicity promoting the GOP within the African American community.
Although an African American intellectual and journalist known for his militancy, Davis continued to believe in and support the principles of democracy and publish news to promote it. When an African American student, Lloyd Gaines, with the help of the NAACP, sued for admission to the law school of the University of Missouri in 1938, Davis characteristically covered the story:
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1937 rendered its historic Gaines case decision, establishing the precedent that a state must provide equal educational opportunities for all citizens within its borders—a break in the dike of discrimination paving the way for the high court decision seventeen years later outlawing segregated schools … And again I want to stress that this drastic change came about only through militancy on the part of Afro-Americans.13
Davis then recounts how he was approached by segregationists to help establish and possibly head a professional regional school “for Nigras,” even though it was in direct violation of the recent decision: “State officials had the choice of admitting Gaines to the law school or establishing a completely equal separate law school within Missouri borders. They chose the latter and shelled out taxpayers’ funds to start a law school at Lincoln University, the state’s Jim Crow institute of higher learning.”14 Davis publicly deplored the role of the legal system as a whore to social tradition in the perpetuation of inequality. Intellectuals like Davis met at workshops, rallies, conferences, jazz clubs, and the Allied Arts Guild where they discussed issues and strategies on combating segregation in the armed forces, the fight against fascism, the struggle against poverty, and the various federal work programs. By joining their voices and efforts, African American strength and political clout grew. They participated in the National Negro Council, the National Negro Congress (a coalition of about 40 African American organizations, which was infiltrated by the Communist Party in 1936), and the National Negro Exposition in Chicago, which included many distinguished African Americans.
The Communist Party, which appealed to many black intellectuals, encouraged a proletarian art that changed American cultural history by publishing and promoting working class and African American artists. The Communist Party’s influence rendered the thirties and forties a very exciting and creative period in the development of diversity in American culture and the arts. There was a sense of excitement and solidarity between artists and political activists.
During the forties, Davis’s slow, intense voice made him a much sought-after public speaker in Chicago at events both political and cultural. His network of African American and white radical friends was as extensive as an African American “Who’s Who,” ranging from those in the most influential communities to the regulars at Mojo’s Cafe. Davis credits Richard Wright for acquainting him with a number of white writers, almost all militantly leftist, who encouraged Davis in his forthright writing and oratorical style. Davis was known and respected as an outspoken editor and critic of Jim Crow, white supremacy, and the inequalities of capitalism. He managed to live fairly well during this period in spite of many obstacles, not the least of which was his low salary, standard for the African American newspaper business.
Davis became another significant pioneer in the long history of African American journalism following a tradition which began in the early 1800s when abolitionists used the printed word and the power of circulation to communicate freedom and equality among the public.15 Confronted with hostility and rejection, lacking access to most power organizations, the African American press and its writers had a critical role. They had to analyze their situation, indicate possible solutions, mediate between various factions, and transform a negative self-image by educating the public to African American successes and failures.
White-superiority theories advanced by leading white anthropologists and sociologists fed African American intellectuals’ discomfort. The many legal tentacles of justice attacked self-esteem and served to detract from a positive sense of identity. Even in the havens of home, library, and job, there was no easy escape from such theories.
To counter these spurious theories, Davis used journalism to document the movements of individuals and the community, reporting on oppression, liberation, failure, and success during the Chicago Renaissance. There were major breakthroughs in race relations in sports, which he recorded and commented on in his forums, poetry, prose, and editorials in the Associated Negro Press. For example, Davis attacked the color bar in sports. Since African Americans could traditionally aspire to earning a decent living and a measure of success in only a limited number of fields, Davis wrote of the difficult obstacles even in those fields for promising talent. He wrote about trials and tribulations of the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, who, like Jack Johnson before him, was an early symbol of success and power to African Americans, especially youths.16
Davis even documented the segregation in most sports, especially football, basketball, and boxing. In 1939 he covered the first annual National Professional Basketball Tournament played by the two best African American teams in the nation: New York Rens out of Harlem, and the Harlem Globetrotters out of Chicago. He also wrote about how outstanding players on these African American teams met their demise once the teams were integrated, or how they were lured away to formally all-white teams with promises of higher salaries, better publicity, and more power.17 Furthermore, journalism provided Davis with a forum for his ironic commentaries, analyses, and critiques of society. Although his salary was often minimal, the press card gave him access to almost any event, as well as free drinks, invitations to parties and dinners, and even occasional bribes, which ranged from booze and cash to women and clothes, all “customary” in Chicago, a city known for its graft and corruption.
Between 1933 and 1945, Davis was a reporter for, and later executive editor of, the Associated Negro Press. Along with his columns, he often handled publicity for other organizations, such as the National Negro Congress and the Republican Party. As a columnist, he had access to famous musical and sports personalities: Ray Nance, Cab Calloway, Oze Simmons, and Joe Louis.18 He also penned stories on dancers and even a few impersonators. Davis was also a Pan-Africanist who often reflected upon the ideologies of Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois. Davis prided himself on extensively reading national and international newspapers on a daily basis to inform his editorials and essays concerning blacks globally. Clearly, Davis’s particular responsibilities at the ANP were enormous, but by all accounts, he was an excellent editor.19
One of his more significant contributions as an editor during the Chicago Renaissance was his input to the 1941 National Conference of Negro editors in Washington, D.C., ironically scheduled the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although Davis was unable to attend, his associate and colleague, Claude Barnett, presented his suggestion for volunteer integrated fighting units during World War II to General George Marshall, chief of staff, in the presence of representative editors and members of the NAACP gathered from all over the country. Even though the proposal was initially vetoed, “the question of an integrated army was officially on the record before many witnesses. Immediately after the close of the conference, the NAACP launched a nationwide petition campaign, creating strong sentiment for the proposal and obtaining thousands of signatures demanding mixed army units.”20
Not surprisingly, Davis’s talent and commitment to the African American community were most evident when he was working as editor of the ANP. It was here that he showcased his “versatility as a newspaperman.”21
The Second World War and its aftermath produced peculiar tensions with American race relations to which Davis was acutely sensitive. Davis continued to observe and comment on racism on a regular basis through the news stories he covered, editorials, and poetry. In poems like “Nothing Can Stop the People,” he observed how the rise of fascism in Europe brought early concern to African Americans, especially after Italy invaded Ethiopia. The irony of the color bar for African American troops serving in a war to combat (among other things) fascist racism struck Davis as particularly absurd. He exposed the ill treatment of African Americans, such as lack of promotions, inadequate training, and quick assignment to active combat duty. Consequently, during the Battle of the Bulge when the American army integrated its first group of voluntary soldiers, both white and black who were willing to downgrade their rank to private, Davis liked to take some of the credit for the breakthrough.22 Like most African American men, Davis smoldered daily at his exclusion from the social order, the lack of economic opportunities and political power available to African Americans. He raged at the hypocrisy of a democratic “system” that bred corruption at all levels regardless of color. He observed that greed and the desire for power, bribes, and perks were as abundant as restaurants in the city but recognized that it always seemed to be the whites who became wealthy. To soothe the barbs of racism and injustice, he turned to musical entertainment in the evenings where he found solace and others like himself, seeking to forget the pain and humiliation of daily living. The blues and jazz vibrated between the rhythms of exhilaration and despair.
To help relieve the tensions and disparities of race and class, Davis wrote, began to drink more, and unconsciously laid the foundation for what later evolved into an Epicurean philosophy of life. In a poem called “Creed for Hedonists,” Davis wrote:
Yesterday is a bucket of bones …
Tomorrow stirs in the womb of Now …
Only today is real! …
For who can surely say …
He will be around …
To dine tomorrow?23
He embraced or slipped into a “seize the day” philosophy and a hedonistic lifestyle when he was not working, perhaps in part to erase the humiliation of exclusion and to compensate on the individual level for the inequalities of a society where African Americans anchored the socioeconomic scale.
In the North, in large cities like Chicago, some African Americans who became too disillusioned with the system often turned to various forms of hedonism. Others found hope in black nationalism and various brands of separatism, espoused by early emigrationists like Martin Delany, and later Marcus Garvey and the Black Muslims. Even the Communist Party for a while advocated self-determination and a separate region for African Americans in answer to the strong nationalistic sentiment that was sweeping the masses in the community. Davis, however, disagreed because “at that time the prevailing goal was complete integration, not separation into a black nation.”
Many Black nationalists sought to relocate African Americans somewhere away from whites, either in a separate state or country; some, like Garvey, preferred to think of returning to Africa. The significance of Garveyism on the Chicago Black Renaissance and the African American intellectual cannot be ignored. Garvey’s message to the urban masses was one of black awareness and self-esteem, and the “race men” who followed in the 1930s and 1940s, including Davis, saw the necessity of the race to be aware of its history, heritage, and culture. Garvey’s injunction, “Black man, know thyself,” was a theme that was to appear in various ways in Davis’s life and writings. However, Garvey’s message of racial purity did not find a place in Davis’s ideology.
Nevertheless, Davis resented being deprived of full participation in the democratic system, which had been so liberating for most Euro-Americans and so hypocritically oppressive and confining to most African Americans. Indeed, he was forever seeking more effective ways to fight racism and injustice in a system where the laws, angels, and God from which they came, seemed to be all white. The African American cosmology reflected in the discourse of the intellectuals became more and more accusatory and mistrustful of white America.
Eventually, despite his independent efforts as a journalist, Davis came to believe that an individual, even through poetry and editorials, was not strong enough to effect change in American society’s racial politics. Then he decided to join hands with others fighting racism like the labor movement. When Davis joined the powerful Chicago labor movement, he took a large risk by calling attention to himself in a period rife with suspicion and censorship by the federal government. Although involvement with the labor movement was Davis’s opportunity to promote better wages and conditions for both African Americans and whites, most significantly this movement allowed Davis and other African American intellectuals to mix freely in interracial situations, thereby opening doors for those who came after. It was a chance to heal some of racism’s wounds.24
During the Chicago Black Renaissance, there was yet another arena besides music, labor, and government where African Americans and whites could meet and share on intellectual and social levels. This was in liberal political circles and coalitions, which often included Socialists, Communists, university types, and representatives from labor unions. Like many creative and intellectual African Americans of the thirties and forties, Davis regularly circulated in these so-called “radical political groups,” which sponsored rallies, forums, poetry readings, and petitions, and generally declaimed the existing inequalities of class and race. These activities served in the long run to effect a change in the national political consciousness of the public, heighten the awareness of the values and issues of democracy, and lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement which was yet to come. Davis inevitably associated with people connected with the Communist Party, since they were most likely to be involved in civil rights, labor, art, and the fight for equality.25
Around 1943, Davis became interested in photography thanks to his friend and neighbor, Leo, who provided him with inexpensive equipment and a camera. He quickly and proficiently learned how to develop and print, and soon turned his attention to the human body, especially nude women. Considering that the African American female tended to be less constrained by African American men and her community in the personal realm of sex, Davis was not surprised to have an ample supply of African American women models when he began to develop his passion for photography. Although promiscuity was frowned upon, and the family structure was respected, circumstances (historically and contemporarily) often created a more independent attitude in poor black communities toward sexual expression.26
Davis enjoyed the power of controlling people’s images and observing their vanity and desire possibly to be immortalized in film. His preference for African American women at this point in his life seems obvious, or perhaps it is no more than his appreciation of the beauty of the human form. He was later to distinguish himself in this field and win several national awards.
In 1944, Davis began teaching in a university setting as a guest lecturer. He participated in an annual series of outstanding lectures on race relations at Northwestern University and spoke to the sociology classes of Dr. Melville
J. Herskovits, author of The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and renowned anthropologist. Davis was fascinated by the complexities and issues of American identity and acknowledged that African Americans were “culturally and biologically … a goulash of Europeans, Africans, and American Indians, with African dominant.” Imprisoned by the politics of color, he was understandably most fascinated by the carryovers of surviving Africanisms, represented in rhythms and atonalities.27
Not surprisingly, Davis taught the first classes on the history of jazz offered at the Abraham Lincoln School in 1945, commonly known as the Little Red Schoolhouse, because so many controversial events occurred there. In his lectures, he enjoyed explaining how the African musical traditions blended with European melodic concepts. The connectedness of traditions and experience are evident when Davis explains how the European instruments and the African American rhythms and tone combined to create a syncretistic expression evident in jazz.28
The Chicago Renaissance afforded artists the access to information so that they could present correspondences, explore cross-cultural connections, and study world history and cultures. He was aware that composers like Stravinsky and Bartok were influenced by jazz. Davis attributed the uniqueness of African American expression called “soul” to the emotional content that was created by a people who had suffered, both economically and racially: “This music vividly illustrated how these Baptist hymns originating in England had been completely transformed by African musical patterns retained.” He also taught about the functional aspects of African and African American music, the role of the work song, the blues, and the political role of spirituals in the Underground Railroad. He unveiled the creativity and genius of the often poor, self-taught, African American musicians.29
Although Davis distinguished between New Orleans Jazz as African American and Dixieland as white jazz, he felt strongly that this period of history was one of the first stages of integration and true democracy in America. Davis credited John Hammond, a white liberal who fought against discrimination in the music industry, for helping to integrate the jazz bands. Not only did Davis write poetry, give lectures, teach classes, and write columns about jazz, but in 1945 he also developed and hosted a popular jazz radio program that he called “Bronzeville Brevities” on WJJD in Chicago.30
Ironically, due to the location of Northwestern University, his students were almost all white. Since the course was offered at night, most African Americans were afraid of getting harassed for being found in a white community after dark. Not only was the African American community denied access to his courses due to the politics of race and place, but Davis observed that jazz also soon fell victim to exploitation as white musicians copied and softened the rebellious rhythms and tones of the African American musicians, rendering it more palatable and less offensive to the white public. Soon, with a modified product, white jazz artists were making much better money than most of the African American composers, musicians and performers.31
As Davis moved within liberal and radical circles in 1945, he soon discovered that many white women and men wanted integration, but perhaps for dubious reasons. Both secretly and openly harbored desires to have sexual contact with educated African American males. This was perhaps due to sexualized and primitive stereotypes about African Americans that were carryovers from slavery time when blacks were used as breeders and sexual objects. Davis himself was curious about sexual contact with whites, and this inquisitiveness led him on a path that was eventually to end in marriage and exile in Hawaii.32
Davis saw the need for unity between the working class and wealthy of both races as well. Being an optimist and a social realist, he tried to bridge this economic gap between both groups. In 1944, he wrote “Peace Quiz for America”:
Say, Mister, you with the white face, you toiler
Come over here and let’s talk.
Maybe we both got the same disease
But different symptoms;
Mine pops out in humiliating race discrimination
Yours is a rash of class distinction and poverty
Coming from the same infection;
Fascism and profit grabbing 33
The original poem titled “War Quiz for America” offended the white power structure and Communists alike, although most African Americans, even the more conservative ones like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP could relate to Davis’s attack on white supremacy, patriarchy, discrimination, and the hypocrisy of democracy, fascism, poverty, sharecropping, perpetual debt, exploitation, violence, colonialism, and imperialism. Unfortunately, for too many African Americans, the trauma and psychological damage of this cultural isolation and economic alienation manifested in a neurosis of inferiority and socioeconomic impotence, sometimes juxtaposed with a fierce determination to succeed and assimilate into the dominant white society, despite catastrophic rejection.
However, with the growing consciousness of the New Negro and the international movement of negritude, the significance of color in the African American community declined in proportion to education. Nonetheless, Davis seemed to exclude himself from the social gatherings of the African American bourgeoisie, perhaps because of his democratic idealism and global vision, his unwillingness to become involved in trivia, competition, gossip, vanity, false pride, and hypocrisy.34 Being a “race man,” Davis saw the compelling need to lift up the masses, and for the group to work together as a whole. When Davis decided to align himself with political groups, he knew that his life was going to change from the comfortable immunity of being a reporter. Although he did not belong to the John Reed Club as did Richard Wright, Davis joined the League of American Writers, a national united front organization which was mobilized by the alarming rise of power of Hitler and Mussolini. It published a controversial booklet, Writers Take Sides, which soon drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to those involved, including Davis. Davis said all the writers in the League were listed in Washington as “un-American” for opposing the Rome-Berlin Axis. Since he considered himself a free thinker and was obviously not afraid to speak out against what he thought was wrong, Davis did not want to forget the struggle against racism at home for the sake of national unity.35
However, having lived in the Deep South, Davis could not see the relevance of the Communist plan for self-determination and nationalism in the Black Belt. He knew that the majority of southern African Americans had never heard of Communism or Stalin. Indeed, the prevalent view at that time expressed by most Civil Rights groups was that the way to equality was through integration and assimilation, not the Communist brand of nationalism and a separate black nation. Eventually, the African American newspapers became as anti-Communist as the rest of the white press, but Davis was not so quick to dismiss the Communist Party and their call for equality and brotherhood.
Davis’s public activities were numerous, and he was often associated with groups considered to be radical. He spoke on anti-Semitism for the Democratic and Republican Platform Committees in 1944, was on the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism, the National Civil Rights Congress, and the Board of Chicago Civil Liberties Union which fought bigotry in the public schools. Bigotry was particularly bad in Chicago because many European immigrants in the area adapted and maintained the national pattern of prejudice. Being the lowest on the social totem pole due to their recent arrival, European immigrants looked for a scapegoat to elevate themselves, gain status and favor with the dominant whites, and justify their usurpation of African American jobs.
Davis also frequently spoke to young members of American Youth for Democracy, organized and chaired conferences on black-white unity, helped to organize white collar workers, addressed mixed audiences on African American history, worked with the Boy Scout movement, and spoke before various CIO unions. Davis even shared panels with Adam Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, Marshall Field, and Mike Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union.
In 1944, FBI agents were asking others about Davis, as they had previously questioned him about other African American leaders who were perceived as a threat to national security. He made a game out of misleading them, and when asked about specific individuals whom he considered conservative, Davis would tell the agents that they were “dangerous” and a “rotten security risk.” On the other hand, if the subject were militant, Davis would again mislead the agent as much as possible, labeling the individual in “glowing terms.” The FBI continued to keep an eye on Davis and to monitor his activities even after the “Red scare” and his move to Hawaii.36
Moreover, the Office of Censorship kept an eye on African American newspapers across the nation and scrutinized Davis’s editorials, especially during the war years, since he regularly reported on discrimination, race riots, inequality of promotions, inferior training, and disproportionate casualties in the armed forces. However, with the death of Roosevelt in 1945, the progressive coalition of liberals, leftists, and African Americans broke up.
By 1946, the FBI tried to curb Davis’s controversial editorials about racism and violence in the armed forces, alleging that his stories eroded national unity and gave the enemy propaganda to be used against the United States. They regularly questioned Davis’s friends, producing a “dossier” on him and alleging activities that Davis was to have attended in an attempt to frighten or intimidate him. Davis says he was quick to respond, “Stop the prejudice and the stories will stop themselves.” He exposed the inefficiency of the FBI agents in his writing. Davis was not easily intimidated; however, most people cowered in fear for their families and careers and, if they found themselves on the blacklist, they sometimes sacrificed others for their own freedom. Davis stood up, condemned HUAC and called their intimidation fascist. However, his irreverence and hard-hitting racial candor marked him for the HUAC and the FBI, influenced his subsequent career choices, and eventually evoked in him a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the world of politics.
With the rise of African American nationalism and growing race pride, instability between African Americans and whites became increasingly evident, except in a few liberal and radical integrated circles. Even labor unions split under the pressure, as anti-Communist pressure started to build. Before long, Republicans regained control of Congress and national policy.
The rapid deterioration of relations between the United States and Russia and the increased Red-baiting again created tension and suspicion between former allies. Davis appealed to Ben Davis Jr. of the Communist Party, encouraging his efforts to maintain a connection with the African American press since both opposed racism and supported civil rights, equal opportunities, antilynching legislation, and abolition of the poll tax. The idea was apparently not accepted and soon the African American press was almost as violently anti-Communist as the general press.37
One bright spot amid this oppressive atmosphere was the creation and promotion of The Chicago Star in 1946, a citywide labor weekly, financed by various labor unions, progressives, liberals, and ghetto dwellers. Davis was the editor until 1948, while maintaining his editorial position at the Associated Negro Press. The editorial column “Frankly Speaking” began at The Chicago Star. The aim of this publication was to heal the rift between the various groups and promote a policy of cooperation and unity between Russia and the United States. The paper backed Henry Wallace, whose platform included full employment for all citizens in peacetime, as an independent candidate for president in 1948. However, when it seemed that too many Democrats would desert the Party and vote on the Independent ticket, Truman spoke out for an innovative Civil Rights program, and many African Americans turned back to the Democratic Party, affording Truman a victory. Unfortunately, under Truman, old antagonisms at home and abroad flared and the Cold War began. Conservative forces of the “industrial-military complex,” a term coined by Eisenhower in his Inaugural Address (“Military-Industrial Complex”), regained control, and thus support for Civil Rights subsided.38
Because it had been common for almost everyone with a conscience to associate with the Civil Rights struggle, labor, and or leftist intellectual thought, the HUAC felt compelled to censor anything or anyone they could not control. In 1947, Davis again began to receive pressure from Rankin’s House Un-American Activities Committee. He writes: “With the rapidly deteriorating political situation and the growth of the witch hunts during the Joe McCarthy period, a number of libraries removed my books from their shelves and stored them in the basement along with other controversial literature until the nation began returning to sanity.”
When Davis decided to move to Honolulu in December 1948, he escaped the open antagonism—hostile stares, jeers, and insults—toward his interracial marriage. Several articles in Hawaii’s newspapers, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser announced the imminent arrival of Frank Marshall Davis and his wife, Helen Canfield. He was tired of being hounded for his association with radicals and the discrimination of white supremacists. He was tired of African American Nationalists, the Hearst press, and racist propaganda. Perhaps more importantly he fled the unbearable insularity in his desire to evolve toward a more collective, objective human communication. He moved to a place where he did not have to always be on guard or feel impotent in his repudiations of injustice. In Hawaii, Davis found dignity, a sense of belonging and acceptance, and a new dimension of freedom, which permitted him to experiment further in the realm of a multicultural, seemingly more democratic, environment.39
In December 1948, several articles in Hawaii’s newspapers, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, announced the imminent arrival of Frank Marshall Davis and his wife Helen Canfield. Upon his arrival to the islands, Davis had at last found dignity and respect as a man and as a human being. Although Davis realized that race relations in Hawaii were not perfect, he enjoyed “the shifting kaleidoscope” of people. He became familiar with the subtle forms of discrimination and, on occasion, the more blatant ones as well, like the segregated housing facilities at Pearl Harbor, particularly with Civilian Housing Areas 2 and 3.40 Davis also became familiar with the hostilities between Okinawans and Japanese, and various other inter- and intraethnic group prejudices and discrimination. That year he also sent a series of Associated Negro Press articles from Hawaii.
After a few months’ stay, Davis and his wife decided to settle permanently in Hawaii, and they bought a house on Mt. Tantalus overlooking Honolulu. Davis had already contacted labor leaders Harry Bridges and Koji Ariyoshi. He felt welcome and assumed that finding a job would not be difficult, especially with all of his experience and expertise in journalism. Shortly thereafter, Davis tried to get a salaried job with the large local daily, but when word got around that Davis was prolabor, the paper, controlled by the big Five quietly ignored him; the huge International Longshoreman’s Workers Union (ILWU) strike was imminent, pitting labor against the Big Five.41
Economically, this did not bode well for Davis because he was soon to have five children to support and Helen’s inheritance was at risk if her mother were to discover she had married an African American. However, because he felt that, since his arrival in the islands, he had at last found dignity and respect as a human being, Davis was slow to complain. He had resolved that even politics was never to take his dignity away from him again. Fortunately, he was soon offered a weekly column, his reprised “Frankly Speaking,” in the Honolulu Record, the local labor newspaper affiliated with the International Longshoremen’s Ware-housemen’s Union edited by Ariyoshi, and he continued to write until 1958.42
When Davis became a columnist for the Honolulu Record, the newspaper was just beginning to document the imminent strike of the ILWU and the subsequent breaking up of the monopolistic power of the Big Five over the various immigrant labor groups, including the Japanese—the most powerful and radical—Chinese, Filipino, and Portuguese. For Davis, this was the kind of political ferment and struggle between the powerful and powerless that he thrived upon and enjoyed writing about. He commentated on the impact of the union movement on the plantation economy in the postwar Honolulu scene.43
His eye for class analysis led him to discern quickly the exploitative role of big business and landowners in the lives of the ethnic nonwhite minorities, and Davis wrote several strong poems expressing his observations and analyses. While living in Chicago, he had already written an editorial on the infamous Massie case, where a white wife of a military officer stationed on Oahu falsely accused local men of rape, so Davis knew that Hawaii residents experienced virulent episodes of racism. He observed the discrimination in certain bars and restaurants and the reluctance of the legislature to pass a Civil Rights law with the excuse that by passing such a law, it would admit to having a problem.44
Because his job as a columnist at the Honolulu Record did not include salary and benefits, Davis started a paper supply business, Oahu Papers, on Sand Island, in 1959, which sold advertising items (calendars, novelties, gifts) to local business firms. But when the warehouse mysteriously burned in 1961, he lost his assets. Davis experienced the forced sale of his property on Tantalus to cover the losses. This coincided with the labeling of Davis as a labor sympathizer and Communist. He wrote a formal response to the increased pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
After the fire and the Tantalus fiasco, and to escape the negative forces pressing upon him in Honolulu, the Davises invested in property on the Windward side of Oahu, first in Kahaluu, then in Hauula where the family remained for seven years, during which time the couple had several children. Davis seemed to feel welcome in Hauula, and only moved to the leeward Kalihi valley in 1956 for its convenience and proximity to hospitals, schools, and work in Honolulu. Ironically, even within the relative freedom of Hawaii, a world away from Chicago, there were still racial tensions, again within the islands’ peculiar mixture of race and class origins, and continued pressure on Davis from the HUAC on Communism charges. Davis and Helen struggled to survive in the cosmopolitan lifestyle they preferred. In 1963, he announced to ANP owner, Claude Barnett, that he had begun working on his autobiography, Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, which was published posthumously in 1992.
Since his job prospects grew no brighter and his wife’s inheritance dwindled, Davis finally decided to write a sex novel, Sex Rebel: Black, to earn extra money. Helen went to work part-time between pregnancies creating illustrations for an advertising agency. Davis worked as a correspondent for the ANP, wrote and published a few poems, and tried to complete his explicit manuscript, all the while wrestling with alcoholism.
Consequently, when Davis decided to stay permanently in Hawaii, he concomitantly chose a life of isolation from the continent and much he had previously considered valuable: his illustrious career and the African American struggle for freedom and equality. Nevertheless, he did not stop writing. Blacks living in Hawaii at this time had a certain fluidity between several ethnic groups that afforded Davis a unique platform from which to observe and discuss the consequences of the post–WWII Hawaiian economy. He wrote of the parallels of laws and influences between the southern plantation system and plantations in Hawaii, as well as parallels between Blacks and Hawaiians. His writing provided insight into colonial techniques and strategies for dividing minority groups, and on discrimination and racism in Hawaii. Davis provided a significant voice in the historical process of Hawaii’s economic development, intergroup relationships, and changing social consciousness.45
In 1973, he returned to visit the mainland United States for the first time in twenty-five years and read poetry at Howard University; Atlanta University; Chicago’s DuSable Museum, sponsored by his old friend, Margaret Burroughs; the University of California at Berkeley; and San Francisco’s African American Historical Society. The following year, he returned again to read poetry in Southern California’s Orange County. In 1976, Margaret Burroughs produced a small chapbook of Davis’s jazz poems, Jazz Interludes: Seven Musical Poems, and in 1978 another chapbook, Awakening and Other Poems appeared.46
Davis moved to Waikiki in 1969. Between 1979 and 1987 when he died, Davis was a largely ignored figure in the Hawaiian Islands, except for his family (five grown children and his ex-wife Helen) and a few friends. He continued to write, working on his autobiography, Livin’ the Blues, published posthumously; an unpublished manuscript that he called That Incredible Waikiki Jungle; and his mostly unpublished collection of poems on “working women” called Horizontal Cameos. He kept up with the world and local news by keeping his TV constantly on, and finally moved to a small cramped apartment on Kapiolani Boulevard, where he received a few favored friends and for whom he occasionally cooked. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack one bright July night, and his ashes were scattered from a familiar mountain near the University of Hawaii.
Davis is a representative of the African American intellectual of his time. He was informed by and spoke to the concrete human issues of his immediate ethnic community and of the larger world. He also was concerned with the search for identity and his place in the world. His works have included a significant political discourse similar to the multimedia responses of most African American artists; indeed, many great artists have made political statements. As a mentor to the young Barack Obama in the 1970s, as described in Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Davis posthumously entered the media debates surrounding Obama’s social and political backgrounds during the 2008 presidential campaign. In most of his works, Davis speaks out against racism and discrimination, and his readers have been multiethnic, multicultural, and multinational.
His world view remained leftist in intention and execution. Davis was antibourgeois, anticapitalist, anti-imperialistic, and revolutionary—not only in language, style, and form, but in his presentation of capitalism, communism, fascism, and sexism in a poetic genre. He was a militant poet whose sociopolitical work anticipated that of many contemporary young rap singers and jazz musicians.
The quest for physical independence, spiritual wholeness, economic power, and equality were predominant themes in the life and writings of Frank Marshall Davis. He refused to conform to reified roles of class behavior. He felt no obligation to illustrate the race’s potential in his every move. He did not fear and avoid gaucheries, vulgarities, and other behavior patterns typically associated with “black behavior.” The act of writing for many African American writers is still a political action, a protest, and condemnation (“writing is fighting”) of Eurocentric domination.
The African American writers of the 1930s and 1940s have served as models for those to come. Davis’s vision has lasted because he was neither imitator, nor eunuch, nor Lazarus. His irreverent humor, vituperative tongue, stark pictures, occasional disillusionment, and distilling interpretations did not hide the optimist he was until the time of his death in July 1987. His broad thoughts and primordial connections will survive his reputation as a gruff cynic. In his death, Davis left a secret for those who remain: rhythm, movement, and creative acts. His spirit in living has transcended the anger and bitterness of his past. He has become the embodiment of a transformative experience. African Americans like Frank Marshall Davis have sought to affirm their own humanity through writing and to provide new themes of equality, pluralism, reconciliation, humanity, and healing to literature, at the same time striving to maintain ethnic integrity and to preserve positive cultural differences.
1. Davis, Frank Marshall. Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, edited by John Edgar Tidwell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, 79.
2. Ibid., xx.
3. Ibid., 57, 174–75.
4. Ibid., 180.
5. Ibid., 235.
6. Davis, Frank Marshall. Black Man’s Verse. Chicago: Black Cat, 1935, 34–34.
7. Davis, 1992, 228.
8. Ibid., 238.
9. Davis, I Am The American Negro. Chicago: Black Cat, 1937, 28–29.
10. Davis, 1992, 239.
11. Davis, 2002, 57.
12. Davis, 47th Street: Poems. Prairie City, Ill.: Decker Press, 1948, 15.
13. Davis, 1992, 260.
14. Ibid., 259.
15. Bardolph, Richard, The Negro Vanguard. New York: Vintage, 1959, 62.
16. Davis, 1992, 255.
17. Ibid., 231–33.
18. Ibid., 229.
19. Ibid., 250, 267.
20. Ibid., 270.
21. Ibid., 231.
22. Ibid., 231.
23. Davis, 2002, 171–72.
24. Davis, 1992, 277.
25. Ibid., 278.
26. Ibid., 230–31.
27. Ibid., 290.
28. Ibid., 287–89.
29. Ibid., 288.
30. Ibid., 286.
31. Ibid., 284.
32. Ibid., 199–200.
33. Davis, 2002, 137.
34. Davis 1992, 34.
35. Ibid., 279, 283.
36. Ibid., 323–26.
37. Ibid., 282.
38. Ibid., 298.
39. Ibid., 312.
40. Ibid., 314.
41. Ibid., 323–24.
42. Ibid. 313.
43. Ibid., 312–13.
44. Ibid., 313.
45. Ibid., 320.
46. Davis, 2002, xix.
Bardolph, Richard. The Negro Vanguard. New York: Vintage, 1959.
“Betty,” “Arline,” Frances,” “Louise,” “Olive,” “Rita.” Ramrod 7, edited by Joe Balaz. Honolulu: Iron Bench Press, 1986, 16–21.
Davis, Angela. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Davis, Frank Marshall. Black Man’s Verse. Chicago: Black Cat, 1935.
———. I Am The American Negro. Chicago: Black Cat, 1937.
———. Through Sepia Eyes. Chicago: Black Cat, 1938.
———. 47th Street: Poems. Prairie City, Ill.: Decker Press, 1948.
———. Sex Rebel: Black Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet. Published as Bob Greene. San Diego: Greenleaf Classics, 1968.
———. Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, edited by John Edgar Tidwell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
———. Black Moods: Collected Poems, edited by John Edgar Tidwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet, 1968.
Duffy, Bernard I. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964.
“Duke Ellington,” “Louis Armstrong,” “Billie Holiday.” Black World (February 1974): 22–25.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.
Foner, Eric. America’s Black Past. New York: Harper, 1970.
“Frank Marshall Davis.” Interviews with Davis and others. Rice and Roses. Audiotapes and transcripts prior to edited version, 1986 [completed in 1987] Honolulu: PBS.
“Frankly speaking.” Honolulu Record, 1949–52.
Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class. New York: Free Press, 1957.
Gennari, John. “‘A Weapon of Integration’: Frank Marshall Davis and the Politics of Jazz.” The Langston Hughes Review 14: 1,2 (1996): 16–33.
Hellman, Lillian. Scoundrel Time. Boston: Bantam, 1983.
Herskovits, Melville Jean. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper, 1941.
Horizontal Cameos. Unpublished typescript. n.p., 1970s.
Killens, John O. Black Man’s Burden. New York: Trident, 1965.
Lemelle, Anthony J. “Beyond Black Power: The Contradiction between Capital and Liberty.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 10: 2 (1986): 70–76.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995.
Record, Wilson. Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964.
Redding, Jay Saunders. On Being Negro in America. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.
———. The Lonesome Road. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Rodgers, Lawrence R. “Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and the Chicago Renaissance.” The Langston Hughes Review 14: 1, 2 (1996): 4–12.
———. Personal interviews with Kathryn Waddell Takara. 1983–87.
This Is Paradise. Comp. by Kathryn Waddell Takara. Unpublished poems, 1986. Tidwell, John Edgar. “Ad Astra Per Aspera Frank Marshall Davis.” Kansas History 18: 4 (1995–96): 270–83.
Tidwell, John Edgar, ed. Black Moods. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
———. “I Was a Weaver of Jagged Words”: Social Function in the Poetry of Frank Marshall Davis.” The Langston Hughes Review 14: 1,2 (1996): 65–78.
“To a Young Man” and “Black American.” Black World (May 1975): 46–48.
“To a Young Man,” “Moonlight at Kahana Bay,” “Tale of Two Dogs.” Ramrod 8, edited by Joe Balaz. Honolulu: Iron Bench Press, 1987, 2–5.
“Touring the World.” Atlanta World. Editorial column. Atlanta Daily World. His other columns included “Speakin’ bout Sports” and “Jazzin’ the News,” 1931–33.
Werner, Craig Hansen. Playing the Changes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance! Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982.
West, Stan. “Tip-Toeing on the Tightrope: A Personal Essay on Black Writer Ambivalence.” African American Review 32: 2 (1998): 285–91.
See also the Davis entry in DLB 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940.