What is the political history of Frank Marshall Davis?

Answer 1

What was Frank Marshall Davis's significance in the 1920s

1930s and 1940s?

1920s

In 1927, Davis moved to Chicago, where he worked variously for the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip and the Gary American, all African-American newspapers.[2][3] He also wrote free-lance articles and short stories for African-American magazines. It was also during this time that Davis began a serious effort to write poetry, including his first long poem, entitled Chicago's Congo, Sonata for an Orchestra.

1930sIn 1931, he moved to Atlanta to become an editor of a semiweekly paper. Davis transformed the Atlanta Daily World[4] into a daily newspaper within two years of taking the job as the paper's managing editor in 1931. Under Davis's leadership the Atlanta Daily World became the nation's first successful black daily.

In the pages of the paper, Davis articulated an agenda of social realism (social justice), which included appeals for racial justice in politics and economics, as well as legal justice. Davis became interested in the Communist party in 1931 during the famous Scottsboro boys and Angelo Herndon cases[5] and championed black activism to compensate for social ills not remedied by the larger white society. In the early 1930s, he warned against blacks accepting the Depression-era remedies being pushed by communists[6] but by 1936 Davis was listed as a contributing editor to the Spokesman, the official organ of the Youth Section of the National Negro Congress, which the government had declared a Communist front organization.[7]

He continued to write and publish poems, which came to the attention of Frances Norton Manning, who introduced Davis to Norman Forge. Forge's Black Cat Press brought out Davis's first book, Black Man's Verse, in the summer of 1935.

In 1935, Davis moved back to Chicago to take the position of managing editor of the Associated Negro Press,[8] a news service for black newspapers, which had begun in 1919. Eventually, Davis was named executive editor for the ANP. He held the position until 1947.

During the Depression, Davis participated in the federal Works Progress Administration Writers' Project. In 1937, he received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship.[9]

While in Chicago, Davis also started a Photography club, worked for numerous political parties, and participated in the League of American Writers. With the encouragement of authors such as Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, Davis published in 1948 his most ambitious collection of poems, entitled 47th Street: Poems, which chronicles the varied life on Chicago's South Side.

1940sDavis used his newspaper platform to call for integration of the sports world, and he began to engage himself with community organizing efforts, starting a Chicago labor newspaper, The Star, toward the end of World War II. In 1945, he taught one of the first jazz history courses in the United States, at the Abraham Lincoln School[10] in Chicago.