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  • Arts and Leisure x
  • 1941–1954: WWII and Postwar Desegregation x
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Article

Davis, Frank Marshall  

John Edgar Tidwell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

During the Depression and World War II, Frank Marshall Davis was arguably one of the most distinctive poetic voices confronting W. E. B Du Bois's profound metaphor of African American double consciousness. Complementing a career that produced four collections of poetry was one as a foremost journalist, from 1930 to 1955. Through the “objective” view of a newspaperman and the “subjective” vision of a poet, Davis struggled valiantly to harmonize Du Bois's dilemma of the color line.

Frank Marshall Davis was born on 31 December 1905 in Arkansas City, Kansas,“ … a yawn town fifty miles south of Wichita, five miles north of Oklahoma, and east and west of nowhere worth remembering” (Livin’ the Blues His mention of interracial schools suggested a harmonious small town life the reality however barely concealed deeper racial tensions Housing jobs movie theaters and all facets of life were tacitly divided ...

Article

Denby, Charles  

Jeff Shantz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer and union activist, was born in rural Alabama. As a youth Denby endured the hardships of farm labor. During the 1920s he joined the Great Migration of African American workers who migrated to the northern industrial centers in search of employment. Denby ended up in Detroit, where he found work as an auto assembler on the production lines.

The 1930s were a period of militant mobilization and organization among workers in the auto industry and Denby became a leading participant in the wildcat strikes that swept through the industry in the 1930s and 1940s crucial struggles in the development of the United Auto Workers UAW His involvement in these organizing campaigns both reinforced his view that struggles over race and class were intricately enmeshed and convinced him that working class gains could not be made unless unions were prepared to attack systemic racism a perspective that was not ...

Article

Dennis, Lawrence  

Steven Leikin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

diplomat, preacher, and author, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Sallie Montgomery. Nothing is known of his biological father. His mother, however, was an African American, and Dennis was of mixed race parentage. In 1897 he was adopted by Green Dennis, a contractor, and Cornelia Walker. During his youth Dennis was known as the “mulatto child evangelist,” and he preached to church congregations in the African American community of Atlanta before he was five years old. By the age of fifteen he had toured churches throughout the United States and England and addressed hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite his success as an evangelist Dennis had ambitions to move beyond this evangelical milieu. In 1913, unschooled but unquestionably bright, he applied to Phillips Exeter Academy and gained admission. He graduated within two years and in 1915 entered Harvard.

Dennis s decisions to ...

Article

Sampson, Anthony  

Shane Graham

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

British journalist, editor, broadcaster, human rights activist, and author of numerous books on South Africa, Europe, and other subjects, was born on 3 August 1926 in Billingham, England. Born to Michael Sampson, chief scientist for Imperial Chemical Industries, and his wife Phyllis, his full name was Anthony Terrell Seward Sampson. He won a scholarship to attend Westminster School beginning in 1941. After graduating in 1944 he joined the Royal Navy, where he was briefly stationed in war-torn occupied Germany. In 1947 Sampson returned to Britain to attend Christ Church, Oxford University, where he studied Elizabethan drama.

After graduating in 1950 Sampson worked a number of jobs but struggled to discover the next step in his life’s path. Then in 1951 he was invited by the South African publisher Jim Bailey to move to Johannesburg and take over the editorship of the struggling new magazine Drum Under Sampson s ...

Article

Watkins, Mel  

Ann Hostetler

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

author and editor, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Pittman Watkins, a laborer, and Katie Watkins, a homemaker. When he was a young child the family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, following the second wave of the Great Migration. Watkins called it “that second large wave of Southern black emigrants” (Dancing with Strangers, 23). He chronicled much of this youthful journey in Dancing with Strangers: A Memoir (1998), in which he describes his family as “a Rainbow Coalition” (60).

His dark-skinned father had African and Native American ancestry; his mother, whose father was Irish could have passed for white Because of the variety of skin tones in his own family Watkins didn t pay much attention to racial differences until he began school when he first experienced racial discrimination from other students After a rocky start in elementary school in which ...