Benjamin J. Davis

Activist, lawyer, and politician

• Born: September 8, 1903
• Birthplace: Dawson, Georgia
• Died: August 22, 1964
• Place of death: New York, New York

Davis led the successful defense of Angelo Herndon, a black political prisoner in Depression-era Georgia. He later joined the Communist Party and moved to New York City, where he won a landslide election to the city council and initiated New York’s official recognition and annual celebration of Negro History Week. He was the first African American Communist to win political office in the nation.

Early Life

Benjamin Jefferson Davis, Jr., was born in Dawson, Georgia, to Jimmie Porter Davis and Benjamin Davis, Sr. The family moved to Atlanta, where Davis’s father began a weekly newspaper, The Atlanta Independent. The senior Davis was a Prince Hall Mason and a Republican liberal.

To his father’s embarrassment, Davis began to militantly oppose segregation while a youth. Following his father’s plan for success, however, Davis attended the high school at Morehouse College, Amherst College, and then Harvard University Law School, from which he graduated in 1932. He returned to Atlanta and studied law with Austin Thomas “A. T.” Walden. Davis and John Geer established a law practice in 1931 in Atlanta, a practice notable only in that they had no clients and no experience.

In 1932, Davis read about Angelo Herndon, a young African American communist who had been charged with “attempting to incite insurrection” for leading an interracial demonstration for unemployment relief at Atlanta’s City Hall. Davis decided that he had a winning defense plan: Instead of attempting to defend the accused man, he would put the state law on trial as unconstitutional. Herndon and his backers, the International Labor Defense, approved.

Beginning in January, 1933, Davis and his client faced down Judge Lee Wyatt, an outspoken racist who frequently addressed bigoted comments to the all-white jury. Davis needed a guard of deacons from a local African American church to safely leave the courtroom. Within three weeks, the jury found Herndon guilty of a capital crime and sentenced him to “death with mercy.” Davis coordinated an aggressive appeals campaign that resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of Herndon’s conviction in 1937. Then, Judge Hugh Dorsey ruled in Georgia that the sedition law was unconstitutional. Davis joined the Communist Party, which asked him to move to Harlem, New York.

Life’s Work

Davis made his public debut in New York in 1935 on a picket line at The New York Amsterdam News, where he was arrested. He became Harlem’s executive secretary for the Communist Party and was acquainted with countless people from all walks of life; he and Paul Robeson were particularly close. Davis sold, wrote, and helped to edit The Daily Worker, the party’s newspaper. He valued The Daily Worker as an organizing tool. However, the goodwill of Harlem dwindled when the party reorganized as a liberal political association, reversed itself, then returned to its original path.

Davis revived Harlem’s sympathies with a spirited campaign for public office. His strategy was to run a “people’s campaign,” relying on volunteers for election. In 1943, Davis won a city council seat in a landslide vote and, not coincidentally, reconciled with his astounded father. He won a second term in 1945. Davis ran an open-door office that provided a lesson in the limits of electoral power, for Harlem’s problems were not easily solved. He and Councilman Pete Cacchione, also a Communist Party member, did push desegregation of public housing through the city council. Davis was particularly proud that he persuaded the city council to mandate annual celebrations of Negro History Week.

In 1949, the federal government indicted Davis under the 1940 antisedition Smith Act for “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence” because of his communist affiliation. He was convicted in 1950 and served three years, often in solitary confinement, in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Upon his release, Davis undertook a national speaking campaign and wrote several boilerplate pamphlets for the Communist Party. In his posthumously published autobiography, Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary (1969), Davis apologized for his role in the Communist Party’s flirtation with liberalism. He also wrote with respect about his father’s life and beliefs.

Davis died in 1964. He was survived by his wife of eight years, Nina Stamler Davis, and their daughter, Emily.

Significance

Davis’s success in defending Herndon launched a career in activism that led him into the national spotlight. His legacy was his election plan for “outsider” candidates. He ran as a “black red” when his only chance of success was to draw votes from nonpartisan whites as well as African Americans. His honesty and reputation for militancy garnered forty-three thousand votes in 1943.

Bibliography

Davis, Benjamin, Jr. Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary. New York: International Publishers, 1969. Davis reflects on his achievements and failures. Chapter 12 is a moving indictment of the federal penitentiary system.

Gilliam, Dorothy B. Paul Robeson, All-American. Washington, D.C.: New Republic Book Company, 1976. Covers Davis’s friendship with the popular entertainer who fell from grace. Robeson fans blamed communists such as Davis for sullying their hero’s reputation, but Robeson never blinked at Davis’s activities.

Horne, Gerald. Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Describes Davis as a power broker in the Communist Party and links anticommunist hysteria to racism.

Lorence, James J. The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929-1941. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Insightful account of the interracial nature of the Angelo Herndon defense, which Davis managed. Lorence brings white mill workers who were Herndon supporters to the forefront of the story.