Frank Marshall Davis (December 31, 1905 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman.
Davis began his career writing for African-American newspapers in Chicago. He moved to Atlanta, where he became the editor of the paper he turned into the Atlanta Daily World, then moved back to Chicago. During this time, he was outspoken about political and social issues, while also covering topics that ranged from sports to music. His poetry work was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
In the late 1940s, Davis moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he ran a small business. He also became involved in local labor issues, where his actions were tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Davis died in 1987 in Hawaii.
Read more about Frank Marshall Davis: Personal Life, Analysis of Literary Work, Legacy and Impact, Works
Famous quotes containing the words frank, marshall and/or davis:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“Slowly the night blooms, unfurling
Flowers of darkness, covering
The trellised sky, becoming
A bouquet of blackness”
—Frank Marshall Davis (b. 1905)
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)