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Chicago
Frank Marshall Davis, poet, journalist, and educator, lived in Chicago from 1924-1928 and again from 1934-1948. He served as Executive Editor of Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press from 1935-1947. A prolific journalist and arts critic, Davis was also the author of three major volumes of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), and 47th Street (1948).

Active in all arenas of Chicago’s bourgeoning Black cultural scene, Davis was one of the founding members of the late-1930s South Side Writers’ Group associated with Richard Wright, as well as a prominent participant in events organized by the South Side Community Art Center and the Abraham Lincoln School throughout the 1940s. Davis frequently gave public lectures on subjects ranging from the political and social status of African Americans to the history of jazz[2].

American Youth for Democracy
In the late 1940s, American Youth for Democracy was the youth wing of Communist Party USA.

In 1944 Frank Marshall Davis was a national sponsor of American Youth for Democracy.[3]

Communist Party activism, Chicago
Information from Davis’ 601 page FBI file reveals that Davis (born 1905) became interested in the Communist Party USA as far back as 1931.

In June of 1950, a person Frank Marshall Davis was trying to recruit into the Communist Party revealed to the FBI, that his interest in the Party went back to 1931 with the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon cases.

Certainly from the mid/late ‘30s to the early ‘40s Davis was involved in several Communist Party fronts including the the National Negro Congress, the League of American Writers, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties and the Civil Rights Congress.

The FBI first began tracking Davis in 1944 when they identified him as member of the Communist Party’s Dorie Miller Club in Chicago-card number 47544.

As he was elected to the Communist Party convention that year and had to be a member for at least one year prior to that to be elected, he had been a member at least since 1943. The May 1944 convention changed the name of the Communist Party to Communist Political Association. Earl Browder, the Party leader, would later be accused of “dissolving” the Communist Party by changing its name. In June 1945, another convention was held, Browder was removed from leadership and the Communist Party USA name was restored. In early 1945. Davis was reported by the FBI to be a member of the Carver Second Ward West of the Communist Political Association, and by 1946 a member of the Carver Club of the Communist Party.

Davis’ wife, Helen Canfield Davis, was a member of the Paul Robeson Club of the Communist Party of Chicago and her 1947 Communist Party card number was 62109.

Davis taught courses at the party controlled Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago and attended meetings of the party’s Cultural Club until he left for Hawaii in 1948.

One of Frank Marshall Davis’s last public acts[4]in Chicago, before leaving for Hawaii, was to MC a symposium “Problems of the progressive writer” October 27 1948 at the Ingleside Inferno, 6346 South Ingleside, for Students for Wallace-the University of Chicago youth wing of the communist dominated Progressive Party.

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