The John Preston Davis Collection is a repository for Brazilian, African and African-American studies documentation. Founded in September 2004 with the support of his granddaughter, Michelle Davis, the Collection seeks to collect, preserve, and promote the use of materials bearing on the history of Africa and people of African descent.
The John P. Davis Collection is committed to preserving and making available pertinent printed and manuscript materials for the use of scholars, academic researchers, and others. The Collection embraces the additional charge of working to make primary source materials an exciting and integral part of instruction and discovery at the secondary and collegiate levels.
The John Preston Davis Collection for Brazilian, African and African American Documentation celebrated John P. Davis's centenary in 2005
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In the spirit of John Preston Davis, the Collection seeks to highlight the importance of research methods and scholarly objectivity to the development of a robust citizenry and a thoughtful public policy.
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Excerpts from articles, books, and films about John Preston Davis
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Robert C. Weaver
Dr. Robert C. Weaver was the first black presidential cabinet member, serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. 1966–68). He was successively adviser to the Secretary of the Interior (1933–37), special assistant with the Housing Authority (1937–40), and an administrative assistant with the National Defense Advisory Commission (1940). During World War II he held several offices concerned with mobilizing black labor.
Excerpts from Days of Hope - Race and Democracry in the New Deal Era by Patricia Sullivan
Weaver recalled "a remarkable nucleus of black students at Harvard in the late 1920s, mostly in the graduate and professional schools. There were occasional gatherings that included most of these students, among them Rayford Logan, William Dean, and Percy Julian. But Weaver, Davis, Hastie, and Ralph Bunche, who was a graduate student in political science, got together more frequently for poker games and "bull sessions."
"All of us were completely disgusted with and critical of the so-called Republican Negro leaders," Weaver recalled. The leaders' primary function was to make speeches for the Republican Party and provide jobs for their friends and relatives while "not doing anything for the mass of black people." Black Republicans, with their ties to the fraternal organizations and churches, were "a great impediment" for those "interested in public service."
With the depression, the abysmal social conditions of black Americans emerged in sharp relief and completely engaged the intellectual ferment of the young men in Cambridge. "The impact of unemployment and dislocation . . . especially in the South" was "unbelievable," Weaver recalled. The depression had exposed "just how tenuous the economic base of blacks in America was. In fact, it wasn't even a base. It was a moving target down." The men sought out social science literature that might shed some light on this vast problem, finding little available. Discussions on how to meet the emergency and the deep structural problems it exposed dominated mealtime conversations and frequent discussion sessions in Cambridge and sometimes at Howard Law School with Charles Houston. "As we tried to look at what could be done," said Weaver, "it became crystal clear to Bill [Hastie], John Davis, Ralph [Bunche] and myself that the precedents were in the Reconstruction period and that you had to look to the federal government. This was the only way you were going to get meaningful activity because, of course, by this time all the states in the South had completely disfranchised blacks." The New Deal provided a new opportunity to get federal action that could counter the dual system that had brutally proscribed the opportunities of black Americans.
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Excerpts from the Documentary Film:"Lift Every Voice. John Preston Davis and the National Negro Congress" 1990.
During the summer of 1933, Weaver and Davis established themselves as the Negro Industrial League (NIL). They monitored the daily flow of National Recovery Administration announcements, wrote testimonies, and became regular attendees at code hearings, where they lobbied for fair treatment of black workers and testified on the adverse effects of specific codes. They were, Weaver later recalled, "something of an oddity." He added, "No one expected us, we were literate and we were contentious."
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Kenneth W. Mack
Kenneth W. Mack is Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is currently working on a book entitled, Representing the Race: the Transformation of Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics 1920-1955 which will be published by Harvard University Press.
Excerpt from The Myth of Brown November 2005 published by The Pocket Part a Companion to the Yale law Review.
Realist-influenced ideas also led civil rights bar leaders to critique race discrimination by private employers. Harvard law graduate John P. Davis, for instance, criticized New Deal labor market regulations as validating race discrimination by private employers and giving it the sanction of positive law. Daviss critiques grew out of his exposure to Felix Frankfurter's ideas at Harvard and his friendship with fellow Frankfurter student William Hastie. Davis's arguments would soon be taken up by the other civil rights bar leaders, and by the mid-1930s they would become mainstream within civil rights politics. Raymond Alexander and other black bar leaders would later expand on these ideas, arguing that all private employers who relied on significant amounts of direct or indirect state aid should be made subject to nondiscrimination mandates.
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John Hope Franklin
Dr.John Hope Franklin is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History, and for seven years was Professor of Legal History in the Law School at Duke University. He is a native of Oklahoma and a graduate of Fisk University. He received the A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Harvard University. He has taught at a number of institutions, including Fisk University, Brooklyn College, the University of Chicago, St. Augustine's College, North Carolina Central University, and Howard University.
In 1964 John P Davis who became prominent as executive director of the National Negro Congress began to feel that an effort to educate all Americans about African Americans would be in the long run accomplish more than his National Negro Congress, the Joint Committee on National Recovery, or the Southern Negro Youth Congress. In his 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.
It included Horace Mann Bond on"The Negro Scholar and Professional in America, " Arna Bontemps in"The Negro Contribution to American Letters, " Gordon Allport on "Prejudice and the Individual," and James Q. Wilson in" The Negro in America Politics: The Present." With subjects as disparate as jazz and agriculture and industrial employment covered by leading authorities, it can be said that Davis succeeded in bringing together a reliable summary of most Negro live in America. I was privileged to write A Brief History of the Negro in the United States, the opening piece.
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Hilmer Jensen
Hilmar L. Jensen III, is associate professor of history with tenure at Bates College. He is the author of the article, "The Rise of an African American Left: John P. Davis and the National Negro Congress" and the article "Roots of a Pan-African Weltanschauung: W.E.B. DuBois, Western history and the Theory of Imperialism in Africa." Jensen, who specializes in 20th-century American history and Africana and African-American studies, has been a research fellow and associate at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and has received an Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Research Grant from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
Excerpt from comments in the Documentary Film: Lift Every Voice. John Preston Davis and the National Negro Congress 1990
"John P. Davis along with A. Philip Randolph was quite clearly the most important black leader and civil-rights leader in the thirties and the forties........There could not have been a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Robert Moses or a Martin Luther King organizing in the south if there had not been a John P. Davis training a whole generation of young people in the NNC and its youth arm, the Southern Negro Youth Council in the 1930s and the 1940s. A lot of those young people became activist in the 1950s and the 1960s and marched with Martin Luther King and organized in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Many went to Washington, D.C and lobbied in the great tradition of John P. Davis. Although they may not have known his name, his spirit is very much apart of what the civil-rights movement accomplished. "
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Maximillien De Lafayette
Dr. Maximllien De Lafayette practiced law in Europe and the Middle East in the seventieis and the eighties. He is an international journalist, columnist, and past Editor-in-Chief of the London Monthly Herald and the International Herald Daily News.
Excerpt from Remembering John P. Davis: The Forgotten Civil Rights Leader November 2005 published by International News Agency.
He fought for African-American rights, seeing them as universal human rights. He firmly believed that what he did for his race served America, and that his service to America was good for his race.
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John H. Johnson
John H. Johnson was the founder of the Johnson Publishing Company, an international media and cosmetics empire headquartered in Chicago, Illinois that includes Ebony, and Jet magazines, Fashion Fair Cosmetics and EBONY Fashion Fair. Johnson was the first African-american person to appear on the Forbes 400 Rich list.
 Excerpt from Succeeding Against the Odds by John H.Johnson
Ebony, was locked in a life-and-death struggle with another black magazine, Our World. There were other competitors, but Our World kept me up more nights than any other publication. It was owned by a brilliant guy named John P. Davis, a Harvard law school graduate who’d been a debater at Oxford.
The struggle between us was the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. Davis was colorful and flamboyant, I was quiet and steady. The tortoise won. Somebody had to win, for there were not enough advertisers or readers for the both us.
Davis’s problem was his brilliance. He was such a multi-talented guy, and he was involved in so many different things, that he didn’t concentrate completely on Our World. While he was off dealing in the law and other things, I was in the trenches, digging, fighting, worrying and even crying. In the end persistence and doggedness won out. Ebony was not that much better than Our World - I simply tried harder.
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In the Collection
Our World Magazine
New! Michael DeMond Davis Paper
Baltimore Afro Coverage of Mike Davis' Departure to Vietnam
Let Us Build A National Negro Congress
Washington Post Article : NNC Split on the Red Issue
Washington Star Article about Davis's Lawsuit against the District of Columbia's dual school system
Michael DeMond Davis featured in the Washingtonian in the seventies
John P. Davis Obituary
Washington Post Article: John P. Davis and the Poll Tax Letter
Washington Post Article: John P. Davis and the Anti-Lynching Bill
Washington Post Article: John P. Davis on tour in the British Isles
John P Davis Collection Documents
Joint Committe on National Recovery
John Preston Davis Papers
Lift Every Voice. John Preston Davis and The National Negro Congress Documentary Film
The Rise of the African American Left: John P. Davis and The National Negro Congress
The Davis Family at the Truman Inaugural Ball
Our World Coverage of African-Americans in attendance of the Truman's Presidential Inaugural Ball
John P. Davis at President Truman's Inaugural Ball
Letter to John P. Davis from President Dwight Eisenhower
Letter to John P. Davis from President Dwight D. Eisenhower
John P. Davis with Ethiopian Emperor Haille Selassi in London
John P. Davis with Langston Hughes in Montmarte
John P. Davis in Spain during the Spanish Civil War for the Pittsburgh Courier
John P. Davis in Venice
John P. Davis in Paris in the 1930(s)
John P. Davis in Russia in 1930(s)
John P. Davis with Congressman Dawson
John P. Davis on tour at Cambridge, Oxford and Heidelberg Universities
Davis' short stories published in The Crisis and The Opportunity in the 1920s
The American Negro Reference Book
Article : John P. Davis: The Forgotten Civil-Rights Leader
John P. Davis with Joe Louis
John P. Davis at the Joe Louis Training Camp
John P. Davis's Bon Voyage Party to France at Waldorf Astoria
Our World Photographers, Writers, and Publisher Covering and OW Story
Let Us Build a National Negro Congress by John P. Davis (1935) Pamphlet
John P. Davis articles in the Crisis Magazine
Washington, D.C. City Council: The John P. Davis Memorial Recognition Resolution of 2005 Click Here
John P. Davis with Charles Houston
John P. Davis Scurlock Portrait
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Important Links
Miriam Davis Nason and Marguerite Davis
Rachel Davis Harris
The Golden Fourteen- Sara Davis Taylor one of the First African American Women in the Navy
Ralph Bunche Report Denying Communist Party Affiliation
Let Us Build A National Negro Congress
The National Negro Congress
Ralph Bunche
Robert Weaver
The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawaii
The Crisis
Fire Press
Testimony of John P. Davis, National Negro Congress, in U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor; House. Committee on Labor. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937. Joint Hearings, 75th Cong.
Protesting Lynching :A National Crime
Capitalism and Its Culture
Booknotes
The Status of the Negro Under the New Deal
"What the 'New Deal' means for the Negro." 1935- From John P. Davis."A Black Inventory of the New Deal." The Crisis 42 ( may 1935) 141-142.154.
The History of Minimum Wage
The Truman Library and Museum
African American Lives
Excerpt about John P. Davis in The Myth of Brown by Kenneth Clark in the Yale Law Journal
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Links
Speech Delivered by Rev A.L. DeMond
on January 1, 1900 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev DeMond Was Davis's father-in-law. Full text
Warrior at the Bar Rebel at the Bench: The Thurgood Marshall Story
Black American Women in Olympic Track and Field
Dr. William H Davis
Days of Hope
Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era
Civilzing Capitalism
The National Consumer's Leaque, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era
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