The John P. Davis Collection

The John P. Davis Collection for Brazilian, African and African American Studies

The John P. Davis Collection is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to John P. Davis and his work as a civil rights attorney and founding publisher of the first African American national magazine Our World. It also documents his involvement with the National Negro Congress, the NAACP, the Negro Industrial League, and Joint Committee on National Recovery, the Pittsburgh Courier, The Crisis, Our World Magazine, and the American Negro Reference Book.

Currently the John P. Davis Collection includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, manuscripts, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and journals. Michelle DeMond Davis sponsors the John P. Davis Collection and the texts and materials come primarily from her family holdings. The John P. Davis Collection is committed to the long-term availability of these collections and their online records. A Board of Advisors guides the development of this digital library.

Recent Acquisitions
The John P. Davis Collection is engaged in an ongoing process of collecting African and African-American studies materials.

The largest collection of Davis’s papers is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Insight into Davis's political and social views can best be found in his own writings. The Papers of the National Negro Congress reproduces all of the organization's records that are housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, including the voluminous working files of John P. Davis and successive executive secretaries of the National Negro Congress.

The most extensive overview of Davis's life is presented by Hilmar Jenson in The Rise of an African-American Left: John P. Davis and the National Negro Congress (Ph.D. Cornell University 1997))and a documentary entitled Lift Every Voice: John Preston Davis and the National Negro Congress by the late Robert Branham and Melissa Friedling.

Much of the scholarly writing about Davis focuses on his experiences in the National Negro Congress.

Michelle DeMond Davis

Chairman, The John P. Davis Collection

The John P. Davis Collection of Brazilian, African and African American Documentation is pleased to announce its most recent acquisition, the Michael DeMond Davis Papers. A Pulitzer-prize nominated journalist and a pioneer in African American journalism, opening the doors for many African-American writers. Davis authored Black American Women in Olympic Track and Field and co-authored the Thurgood Marshall biography.

In 1943 the first lawsuit challenging segregated schools in the Washington, D.C was brought in Michael D. Davis's name by his father, John P. Davis. The Washington Star was sharply critical of an African American lawyer legally challenging the District's Dual school system when the principal of Noyes School refused to admit Mike Davis at the age of 5-years old. The Washington Star paper said the District citizens had long accepted separate schools for blacks and whites and that the suit brought by John P. Davis would cause even deeper divisions in the nation's capital.

The U.S. Congress in response to John P. Davis's suit appropriated federal funds to construct the Lucy D. Slowe elementary school directly across the street from his Brookland home in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Davis attended the Fieldston school in New York, New York.

As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia and a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,and was a leader of the student sit-in movement. He was arrested many times in Atlanta's bus stations and department stores. Michael Davis married Dollie "Troy" Smith and had four children, Michelle DeMond Davis, Derwin Andrea Davis, Rebecca Hope Davis and Rochelle Harmony Davis.

Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution hired Davis as the paper's first African American reporter. Ralph McGill became his mentor and his friend. Davis went on to Vietnam as the Afro-American Newspapers war correspondent. During the 18 months in Vietnam, he reported on combat activities of black service people in the Afro's 13-state circulation area. When he returned home he joined the Baltimore Sun Papers. He was a staff member of the San Diego Union, where he covered Governor Jerry Brown, the now-defunct Washington Star, and was an editor of NBC television news in Washington, D.C.

His work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and he received several Front Page Awards from the American Newspaper Guild. The NAACP gave him an award for his coverage of Vietnam. Davis authored Black American Women in Olympic Track and Field.

Michelle DeMond Davis is Managing Director of Global Latitudes, Inc. a 5-year-old Global Business Advisory Firm, among many other efforts. She chairs several organizations including the John P. Davis Collection in Washington D.C. and Global Riskers.