Frank Marshall Davis Collection

Biographical Note

Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), poet, journalist, and educator, was born December 31, 1905 in Arkansas City, Kansas. He graduated from high school in 1923; the following year he took courses at Friend's University in Wichita. In 1924, he enrolled in the Journalism School at Kansas State University, but, after two and a half years, finances forced him to leave school, and he moved to Chicago. He returned to Kansas State for one more year in 1928 with a Sigma Delta Chi Perpetual Scholarship, but in 1930 he left again, relocating to Atlanta. Davis became Managing Editor of the Atlanta Daily World in 1931. In 1934, he again moved to Chicago, where he served as Executive Editor of Claude Barnett's Associated Negro Press from 1935-1947. A prolific journalist and arts critic, Davis published articles in the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip, the Gary (Ind.) American, the Atlanta World, the Chicago Star, and the Honolulu Record. Writings for the Associated Negro Press included two weekly features, "Rating the Records" and "Things Theatrical."

The author of three major volumes of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), and 47th Street (1948), Davis also published the illustrated volume Through Sepia Eyes (1938), and, when he was "rediscovered" in the 1970s, Awakening, and Other Poems (1978) and Jazz Interlude (1984). Davis's first book, Black Man’s Verse, won praise from Poetry magazine's Harriet Monroe when it was first published in 1935, and he received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for poetry in 1937. According to John Edgar Tidwell, Davis's poetry "is characterized by robust statements of urban themes, a fierce social consciousness, a strong declamatory voice, and an almost rabid race pride" (203).

Active in all arenas of Chicago's bourgeoning Black cultural scene, Davis was one of the founding members of the late 1930s South Side Writers' Group associated with Richard Wright, as well as a prominent participant in events organized by the South Side Community Art Center and the Abraham Lincoln Center throughout the 1940s. Davis frequently gave public lectures on subjects ranging from the political and social status of African Americans to the history of jazz. He also participated in several grass-roots political groups, including the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, and was a sponsor of the Southside chapter of American Youth for Democracy. An aficionado of jazz music, Davis taught a full ten-lecture course on the history of jazz at the Southside Abraham Lincoln School and was "Jazz Disc Jockey" on Chicago's WJJD in the 1940s.

In 1948, Davis moved with his wife Helen Canfield Davis to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he would live the rest of his life and raise five children- four daughters, Lynn, Beth, Jeanne, and Jill, and one son, Mark. Though he continued to publish articles in Negro Digest, Davis's move to Hawaii removed him from Chicago's literary scene, and he all but disappeared from notice. With the advent of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, however, Davis's poetry enjoyed a renaissance thanks to the attention of poet and Broadside Press editor Dudley Randall, critic Stephen Henderson, and DuSable Museum Founder and Director Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs. Randall named him the "father of modern Black poetry" and organized a college lecture tour in 1973. A volume of poetry, Awakening, and Other Poems, followed in 1978. In 1985, Burroughs published a volume of Davis's poetry entitled Jazz Interlude with the DuSable Museum's press.

In the early 1960s, Davis began shopping a manuscript, Livin' the Blues: Inhibited Memoirs of a Black Poet Journalist, to publishers. He also wrote and published Sex Rebel: Black (1968), a fictional autobiography that he described as an "erotographic" novel, under the pseudonym Bob Greene. Though Davis would try throughout the sixties and with renewed effort in the eighties to publish Livin' the Blues, he would not succeed in placing the memoir in his lifetime. Davis died in Honolulu in 1987. In 1992, Davis scholar John Edgar Tidwell worked with Margaret Taylor Burroughs to publish Livin' the Blues using manuscripts held by the DuSable Museum.