July 25, 2002

Contact: Ranjit Arab, University Relations, (785) 864-8855.

KU professor edits new poetry book by black journalist

LAWRENCE -- A new collection of poems by Frank Marshall Davis, a native black Kansan recognized by journalism historians for his work in Chicago, Atlanta and Honolulu, has been published this summer.

John Edgar Tidwell, associate professor of English at the University of Kansas, edited the new book, "Black Moods: Collected Poems," which has been published by the University of Illinois Press. It collects for the first time Davis' three earlier volumes of poetry as well as his previously unpublished poems.

This is the second book Tidwell has edited on Davis, who was born in 1905 in Arkansas City, near the Oklahoma border about 100 miles west of Tidwell's hometown, Independence, Kan. Davis died in 1987 in Hawaii, where he had worked as a columnist and lived for 39 years after an exemplary career as a journalist and poet in Atlanta and Chicago.

Tidwell said that until now Davis' poetry had been virtually out of print. Davis' first collection of poems, titled "Black Man's Verse," appeared in 1935. It was followed by "I Am the American Negro" in 1937 and "47th Street: Poems" in 1948.

Shortly before Davis died, the Black Arts Movement recognized him for his poetry and efforts to promote Chicago as part of the New Negro Renaissance in the 1930s.

Tidwell said he knew little of Davis' life and work until 1981, when he undertook an assignment to profile Davis for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He learned Davis was living in Honolulu. They never met face-to-face but corresponded frequently and spoke occasionally by telephone.

When Tidwell learned that Davis had a manuscript of his memoirs as a black journalist, the young professor set out to find a publisher. "Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet" was published in 1992. Davis titled both books, Tidwell said.

"Journalism was his vocation and poetry an avocation," Tidwell said. "Poetry was an alternative way of responding to the horrific treatment of blacks he observed and experienced from the 1920s through the 1980s."

Tidwell said he respected Davis' devotion to self-empowerment through the written and spoken word and his vigorous promotion of the black American experience through art and activism.

Davis was well known for making the twice-weekly Atlanta World into a daily newspaper within two years of assuming the paper's managing editorship in 1931. Historians of journalism acknowledge that under Davis' leadership the Atlanta Daily World became the nation's first successful black daily. In 1935, Davis became managing editor of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago. Eventually Davis was named executive editor for the ANP, a news service for black newspapers, started in 1919 by Claude Barnett.

"He thrived in Chicago's community of black writers, musicians and artists," Tidwell said. In 1948, Davis moved to Hawaii to escape political pressures caused by his activism and the racial slurs and indignities he and his second wife, Helen Canfield Davis, who was white, had suffered on the mainland, Tidwell said.

When he moved, Davis lost the support he had known in the community of black activists, writers and artists in Chicago, Tidwell noted. As a result, Davis seemed to disappear from the struggle for civil and labor rights.

Davis wrote a weekly column for a labor union paper, the Honolulu Record, published by the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. His early columns covered labor issues, but he broadened his scope to write about cultural and political issues, especially the absurdities of racism, Tidwell said. Eventually Davis included the history of blues and jazz in his columns.

Tidwell said that Davis later divorced and moved into a hippie area in Waikiki, where he wrote his memoirs and was living when Tidwell began a correspondence that has resulted in two books to shed more light on his life and work.

In Kansas, Davis lived in Wichita for a brief time after leaving Arkansas City. He studied industrial journalism at Kansas State University for two and a half years before striking out for Chicago in 1927. He worked for a few years as a journalist before returning to Kansas State. Davis left college one semester short of completing a degree.