John P. Davis

John Preston Davis (January 19, 1905 - September 11, 1973) a Harvard-trained lawyer and activist intellectual became prominent for his work with the Joint Committee on National Recovery and the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1935. He went on to found Our World magazine in 1946, a full-size, nationally-distributed magazine edited for African American readers. He also published the American Negro Reference book covering virtually every aspect of African-American life, present and past.

John P. Davis born in Washington, D.C., the son of Dr. William Henry Davis and Julia Davis. Davis grew up in the bosom of the small dignified black middle class of Washington D.C. His father, Dr. William H. Davis was a graduate of Howard University. During World War I, Dr. Davis served as Secretary to Dr. Emmett Scott, Special Assistant to the United States Secretary of War. In the 1920's, Dr. Davis served as Secretary to the Presidential Commission investigating the economic conditions in the Virgin Islands.

John Preston Davis attended segregated schools in Washington, D.C, graduating from the elite Dunbar High School. In (1922) he enrolled in Bates College in Lewiston Maine. He graduated in 1926, earning an A.B. and double honors in English and Psychology. At Bates, Davis was president of Delta Sigma Rho, honorary debating fraternity, and editor of the student publication, "The Bobcat."

He toured Europe representing the Bates College debating team. He was the first among African American men to be sent overseas under the auspices of the American University Union to engage in international debate when his team met and defeated Cambridge University. While he was an undergraduate at Bates College, he was nominated for the Rhodes scholarship and contributed short stories to the Crisis and Opportunity Magazine.

His literary proclivity drew him into Harlem Renaissance. For a time, he replaced the celebrated scholar W. E. B. Du Bois as literary editor of Crisis. During the Harlem Renaissance, Davis joined with some of the finest young black writers of the period - Zora Neal Hurston,Langston Hughes,Gwendolyn Bennett,Wallace Thurman,Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce to produce Fire!! Press. Fire!! Press was a magazine devoted to young African American Artist.

Davis had a fellowship to Harvard University from 1926 to 1927, where he received his Masters Degree in Journalism. He left Harvard to join the staff of Fisk University where he served as Director of Publicity from (1927 to 1928). He later returned to Harvard University in (1933) and earned an LLB degree from Harvard Law School in (1933).

At Harvard, Davis cemented lifelong friendships with a small core of black students, including fellow Dunbar High School Alumni Robert C. Weaver later appointed the first black member of a Presidential Cabinet, William Hastie, who would become the first black federal judge, and Ralph Bunche who was destined to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace.

These friends remained important throughout his career. During their student years they discussed race and politics, especially the inadequacy of the black Republican leadership. When the Great Depression intensified the social and economic problems confronting black America, Davis and his colleagues looked to the example of Reconstruction, the use of federal power to redress the plight of the slaves. They called on the federal government to ensure black civil and political rights. The New Deal seemed to offer the possibility of similar federal intervention for economic justice.

Davis married Marguerite DeMond the daughter of Reverend Abraham Lincoln DeMond and Lula Watkins Patterson DeMond. Marguerite DeMond attended Avery Normal Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, operated by the American Missionary Association and the Congregationalist Church. Even before the Civil War, Avery Normal Institute's racially integrated faculty was providing quality educations for African Americans.

She graduated from Syracuse University in 1931 and came to Washington, D.C. with her mother in 1932, after the death of her father. Marguerite DeMond went to work as a researcher for African American historian Carter G. Woodson's Association for the Study of Negro Life. After a one-year courtship Marguerite DeMond and John P Davis were married. They had four children, Michael DeMond Davis, Miriam Judith Davis Nason, Marguerite Davis, and John Preston Davis, Jr.

In 1943 the first lawsuit challenging segregated schools in the Washington, D.C was brought in Michael D. Davis's name by 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.

In the summer of 1933 John P. Davis, a new graduate of Harvard Law School and Robert C. Weaver, a doctoral student at Harvard, acted to ensure that African American interests were represented. The two men returned to their hometown of Washington, D.C. and established an office on Capitol Hill, where they fought successfully against the racial wage differential and the integration of Negro families into the program of the Homestead Subsistence Division in the first recovery program.

Davis and Weaver organized the Negro Industrial League to pressure New Deal agencies to address the needs of blacks. They monitored the hearings of the National Recovery Administration to insure that blacks benefited from the program.

Their efforts led to the establishment of the Joint Committee on Economic Recovery, a group of twenty-six national groups including the Young Woman Christian Association, National Urban League (NUL), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored (NAACP). Davis became Executive Secretary of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, a position he held until 1936, where he functioned as legislative lobbyist.

The committee lobbied for fair inclusion of African Americans in government-sponsored programs and publicized incidents and patterns of racial discrimination. The implementation of a National Recovery Program, however, promised to have immediate and long-term consequences for African Americans. As more established African American leaders deliberated about how to respond to the flurry of New Deal legislation.

National Negro Congress

In May 1935 a conference on the economic status of the Negro was held at Howard University in Washington, D.C., out of which emerged a major civil rights coalition that was active in the late 1930s and 1940s. The National Negro Congress—whose sponsors included John P. Davis of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, Ralph J. Bunche and Alain Locke of Howard University,A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Ford of the Communist Party, Lester Granger and Elmer Carter of the Urban League, and Charles Houston of the NAACP—was truly significant in two respects. Davis was one of the original founders of the National Negro Congress (NNC) and remained Executive Secretary and guiding spirit from the NNC's inception in 1935 until 1942.

The NNC represented one of the first sincere efforts of the 20th century to bring together under one umbrella black secular leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, radicals, and professional politicians, with the assumption that the common denominator of race was enough to weld together such divergent segments of black society. It also signaled the Communist Party’s movement into the mainstream of black protest activity. In particular, the evolution of the National Negro Congress dramatized the growing convergence of outlook between Communists and activist black intellectuals that had taken shape in the protests of the early Depression years and reached full fruition during the years of the Popular Front.

Our World Magazine

John Preston Davis was founding publisher of Our World Magazine, a full-size, nationally-distributed magazine edited for African American readers. Its first issue, with singer-actress Lena Horne on the cover, arrived on the nation’s newsstands in April 1946. Our World was a premier publication for African American men and women covering contemporary topics from black history to sports & entertainment with regular articles on health, fashion, politics & social awareness, was headquartered out of New York City.

Our World portrayed black America as no other national publication had ever done. Its covers featured entertainers’ Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole.

The American Negro Reference Book

In 1964 Davis's position as editor of special publications for the Phelps-Stokes fund, he used his resources and talents to create a single volume a reliable summary on the main aspects of Negro life in America and to present [it] in sufficient historical depth to provide the reader with a true perspective. The American Negro Reference Book was the result covering virtually every aspect of African American life, present and past.