Davis, John P.

DAVIS, JOHN P. (1905 – 1973). A prolific author, noted journalist, lawyer and Communist. Davis is best known for his leadership of the two most successful interracial coalitions of the Popular Front Era, the Joint Committee on National Recovery (l934-1935) (JCNR) and the National Negro Congress (1935-1942).

Davis graduated from the elite Dunbar High School in D.C. in 1922, and Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1926, with double honors in English and Psychology. While at Bates, he was among the first African-American men to be sent by the American University Union to engage in international debate, where his Bates team defeated Cambridge University. Davis initially pursued a literary career in Harlem, published several short-stories, replaced the celebrated scholar W. E. B. Du Bois as literary editor of The Crisis and joined with Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce to produce Fire!, a magazine devoted to young African-American artists.

Davis earned an LLB from Harvard Law School in l933, where he formed career shaping friendships with fellow black students Robert C. Weaver, later appointed as the first black member of a Presidential cabinet; William Hastie, later appointed as the first black federal judge; and Ralph Bunche, later a statesman and diplomat who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace.

A shared student interest in federal leadership during Reconstruction to redress the plight of former slaves prompted Davis and Weaver to establish the Negro Industrial League (NIL) to pressure New Deal agencies to address the needs of blacks in the workplace. The NIL only lasted the summer of l933. When Roosevelt ‘coopted’ Weaver to work under Clark Foreman in his administration, Davis moved to Washington D.C. where he created the most successful interracial watchdog organization of the Popular Front period, the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR), consisting of 26 national groups, including the YWCA, National Urban League (NUL), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As Executive Secretary of JCNR and later, as a legislative lobbyist on Capitol Hill, Davis and Weaver fought successfully for protection of sharecroppers, against the racial wage differential and for the integration of Negro families into the program of the Homestead Subsistence Division in the first recovery program. The JCNR was dissolved because of what the CP viewed as a takeover attempt by the NAACP.

In May 1935, at a Conference on the Economic Status of the Negro held at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Davis, Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, James Ford of the Communist Party and several others called for a new civil rights coalition. In response, in February 1936, the National Negro Congress (NNC) convened in Chicago with 816 delegates and thousands of observers, elected A. Philip Randolph as President and Davis, as Executive Secretary, a position he would occupy until 1942. Davis also worked locally with the DC chapter of NNC to fight police brutality, organize and support labor unions, demand black hiring by Capital Transit and other private employers, and persuade the federal government to desegregate recreation sites in the District.

Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.