On Cassette: Frank Marshall Davis 3

Davis reads his poem "Louis Armstrong."

Davis is asked about the allusions to black history in his poems.  He replies that he learned little of black history in high school. "It was immediately assumed that all that had happened was caucasian."

He also had little exposure to the black press although he talks about the Topeka Plain Dealer and it's editor, Nick Childs.  Childs had a running battle with Ernest Lindley, Chancellor of the University of Kansas, over Lindley's views on the primacy of whites and the intellectual aptitude of blacks.

Davis' exposure to the African-American press came when he arrived in Chicago.  He recalls that in those days the biggest papers where the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American.

In 1930, while he was working at the Gary Indiana American, W.A. Scott hired Davis to be editor of the Atlanta Daily World.