John Preston Davis   (January 19, 1905 - September 11, 1973) was 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. 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.

The Early Years
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 debating team and was nominated for the Rhodes scholarship.  While he was an undergraduate at Bates College, Davis 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).

Harvard University
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 an itinerant Congregationalist minister from Upstate New York. The Congregationalist Church assigned Reverend DeMond, to pastorates in New Orleans, Louisiana, Charles­ton, South Carolina, Memphis, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama. DeMond's mother, Lula Patterson Watkins DeMond , was  Montgom­ery, Alabama music teacher.  

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. Her older sister Ruth DeMond, also a Syra­cuse University graduate, taught at Cardoza High School. She had recently married Rev. Robert W. Brooks, pastor of Lincoln Congre­gational Temple, one of Washington's most prominent church­es that like Berean Baptist Church filled its pews with educat­ed, upwardly mobile black professionals.

 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, who met in Woodson's office when Davis went there to enlist his support for the Joint Committee on National Recovery, were married by Reverend Brooks..

The Joint Committe on National Recovery
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.

The main thrust of the work of the National Negro Congress lay in support for black participation in organized labor, resistance to the rise of fascism abroad, and the use of mass-protest tactics to challenge racial discrimination. For example, in Washington, D.C., the National Negro Congress was involved in campaigns for equal recreational facilities, for abolition of the color line in trade unions, for the organization of domestic workers, and for the boycotting of department stores that engaged in racial segregation. In Chicago the National Negro Congress led protests against police brutality and the invasion of civil liberties, as well as campaigns for black employment opportunities in public utilities.

In addition, the National Negro Congress was a major force behind vigorous voter registration drives in Baltimore, job campaigns in Harlem, efforts to secure positions for black teachers in Pittsburgh schools, and many similar activities. On the national level, the National Negro Congress encouraged federal investigations of both the Black Legion and the KKK, advocated anti-lynching legislation, and protested State Department policies regarding Italian aggression in Ethiopia. 

The National Negro Congress had relationships with virtually every civil rights, labor, and radical group active in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the those groups included the CIO, the NAACP, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, Labor’s Non-Partisan League, the American Youth Congress, the International Labor Defense, the Urban League, the International Workers’ Order, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Southern Conference on Human Welfare.

In 1943 Davis left the NNC to become Chief of the Washington Bureau of the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1944, the Democratic National Committee appointed Davis as Assistant Director of Publicity in 1944. In this capacity, Davis covered the 1944, 1948 and 1952 presidential campaigns. 

During President Truman's election year the Republicans spent a lot more in advertising in the African American press, and they had a sizable amount of the African American publishers for Dewey. But there was a strong African American vote for Mr. Truman in Harlem. The African American vote was probably less of a bloc vote then than it has been subsequently. John Preston Davis not by title, but by operation was concerned with the African American vote.

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. 

As AfricanAmerican baseball players broke the major league color bar, in the late 1940's, Brooklyn Dodgers baseball players, Jackie Robinson’s and Roy Campaniles faces smiled from Our World’s covers.  Important black political figures like New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Chicago Congressman William Dawson and United Nations Under Secretary Ralph Johnson Bunche, who won the 1950 Noble Peace Prize, were covered in the magazine.

By June 1950 the Carna­tion and Pet Milk companies, the American Tobacco Company and Schenley Dis­tillers were also Our World advertisers, along with the Philco and Admiral television corpo­ra­tions. Corporate America was begin­ning to recog­nize African Americans’ growing annual $15-million-dollar purchas­ing power and their increasing disposable income. ­ African American workers were earning four times as much as they earned in 1940, though the median $1,828 annual wage of black men was only 61 percent of the $2,982 annual median income white men earned.

By 1951 Our World magazine had 38 full-time employees working in three stories of a midtown Manhattan office building and revenues in the millions.

During the McCarthy Era and the Cold War struggle between East and West, the search for Communists in high places led to accusations against many black intellectuals including John Preston Davis, Ralph Bunche, and Paul Robeson.  Davis ‘international renown did not insulate him from becoming ensnared in U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's obsession with communists. 

Davis, whose views on race and class and anti-segregation activities in the thirties were considered radical and "Marxist", was accused of associating with known communists and belonging to communist dominated organizations, such as the National Negro Congress. Three hundred ninety five Americans were interrogated in secret hearings, facing accusations from McCarthy and his staff about their alleged involvement in communist activities.

Ralph Bunche was summoned to appear before the International Employees Loyalty Board, Bunche was finally cleared when John P. Davis, testified against the most damaging charges against Bunche at the threat of his own livelihood. 

Afterwards, Davis was faced with a life and death struggle of running Our World Magazine.  Rapid decrease in advertising caused Our World Magazine to fold after eleven years of serving the African American Community.

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 bring together 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.

 John Preston Davis died on September 11, 1973. 

Bibliography
The largest collection of Davis's paper is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Insight into Davis 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.

Beginning with papers from 1933 that predate the formation of the National Negro Congress, the wide-ranging collection documents Davis’s involvement in the Negro Industrial League and includes the "Report Files" of Davis’s preoccupative interest and absorption with the "Negro problem." The most extensive overview of Davis' life is the entry by Hilmar Jenson in John Preston Davis, The Forgotten Civil Rights (1996). Much of the scholarly writing about Davis focuses on his experiences in the National Negro Congress.