John P. Davis: “A Black Inventory of the New Deal”

About the Author

John Preston Davis was born on January 19, 1905, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked in the office of the secretary of war during the administration of the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, who served as chief executive from 1913 to 1921. Young Davis attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, a prestigious school for blacks, and graduated from Bates College in Maine in 1926, where he was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship. Davis participated in the artistic and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, replacing W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of The Crisis magazine. Along with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, the leading black authors living in New York City at the time, he produced Fire!!, a publication dedicated to showcasing the works of young African American writers. Davis received a master’s degree in journalism from Harvard University in 1927 and served as Fisk University’s director of publicity until 1928. He went on to earn a law degree from Harvard in 1933.

Davis and several of his peers at Harvard, including Robert Weaver, grew increasingly concerned with the U.S. government’s response to the deepening economic crisis that was the Great Depression. In the summer of 1933 Davis and Weaver traveled back to their hometown of Washington, D.C., in order to give voice to the plight of African Americans. The two men created the Negro Industrial League to call attention to the need for equitable treatment of black Americans in New Deal programs. Davis and Weaver’s example led many civil rights organizations to form the Joint Committee on National Recovery, an organization dedicated to exposing racial injustice in the implementation of federal programs. In 1934 the NAACP sent Davis to the South to interview black farmers, an experience that exposed Davis to the inequalities of the New Deal program that resulted from the AAA.

In 1935, Davis became executive secretary of the National Negro Congress, which he had helped found. The organization sought to unite African Americans across class lines and involved the support of the Communist Party. This affiliation became a political liability following the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, and more conservative organizations withdrew from the National Negro Congress. Davis remained its executive secretary until 1942. The next year he filed the first lawsuit in Washington, D.C., to challenge the district’s segregated school system. Davis sued on behalf of his five year-old son, Michael, who was refused admittance by Noyes Elementary School. In response to the suit, Congress appropriated funds to build a new black school across the street from Davis’s house. Later in life, Davis turned to the literary world once again, founding Our World—a magazine dedicated to the African American community—in 1946, and publishing The American Negro Reference Book in 1964. He died on September 11, 1973.