The Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (review)

In the introduction to his thoughtfully edited collection of Frank Marshall Davis's columns, essays, and reviews for the Associated Negro Press, John Edgar Tidwell focuses on the "subversive vision" of a mid-twentieth-century black journalist, poet, labor and civil rights activist, literary critic, and music historian (xi). He celebrates Davis's genius for employing both journalistic objectivity and poetic subjectivity in his crusade against white supremacy, red baiting, racial stereotyping, imperialism, colonialism, "home-grown fascism," and the internecine wars of the black community.

Why subversive? Because Davis bluntly confronted white privilege in a voice Tidwell calls "arguably the most vituperative hypercritical tone to come from the traditional black press" (xxiii). Davis challenged white America to judge itself by the criteria it imposed on other societies. In columns written between 1935 and 1947, Davis chronicled contradictions between the nation's cherished democratic ideals and its less than democratic social practices. Through the ANP syndication of his columns Davis reached a wide audience.

Tidwell organizes Davis's work thematically rather than chronologically, dividing it into four sections. "A History of the Blues and All That Jazz" is a selection of essays (1936–1955) treating jazz as social protest music. "African American Literature at Mid Century" presents book reviews (1938–1946) which argue for more elasticity between the boundaries of art and social protest (44). "Passing Parade, A Political Critique" offers what Tidwell calls Davis's "most unsubtle writing." Written between September 15, 1943 and July 19, 1944, these columns challenged "the very assumptions of patriotism and reset the public conversation of the meaning of democracy" (85). The last section, "Democracy Hawaiian Style," resurrects Davis's 1955 ANP series about Hawaii, which his black friends considered "the best place under the American flag." Davis argued, however, that even multicultural Hawaiian democracy was "still far short of what democracy is supposed to be." "What our nation so glowingly sells to the world," he maintained, "is considerably different from the product as it really is" (157).

Each section is preceded by excellent commentary establishing the historical context and providing biographical background. These commentaries build on Tidwell's concise, well-argued introduction and advance his case that Davis "helped to reframe [American] political and cultural issues into an analytical critique for black social and political change" (xiii).

While dividing up Davis's work permits a focus on each subject area, it also precludes appreciating his uncompromising voice simultaneously breaking out in poetry, journalism, criticism, history, and political activism. There is no question that Tidwell succeeds in documenting Davis's resourcefulness and intellectual breadth, but one wonders if chronological ordering might not have shown Davis's versatility in all its angry glory.

Davis was fixated on democracy—homegrown and exported—and deeply influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois's classic metaphor of the "double consciousness." Articulating this split between the black sense of self and the identity imposed by white culture, he declared, "[ . . . ] I am an American, I do not consider myself a member of an internal Negro nation waging constant war with the rest of America for that would make me one with the fascist foe abroad and would lessen my chance of getting full equality" (125).

"I don't like what is happening in America today," he wrote in 1944 (108); "It is one of the innumerable paradoxes of the war that as fascism is being crushed abroad in Europe it is flowering in America" (119). The following year, in a review of Richard Wright's novel Black Boy, Davis took Wright to task for failing to clearly articulate "the strong connection between Southern racism and Hitler's race theories" (54–55). The paradox of American forces fighting fascism in Europe while tolerating racism at home deeply troubled him. Davis believed that works of social realism, fiction included, required a full frontal confrontation with injustice. By 1955, in his capacity as music critic, Davis was describing even jazz as "radical, revolutionary and...