This collection is also available in Archives & Manuscripts
View In Archives »
Collection Data
- Description
- Divided into four series, Correspondence, the Smith Act Trial, Writings and Printed matter, the Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. Papers document Davis's life and political career from 1949 to the time of his death. The Correspondence series is grouped into general correspondence and condolence letters. Correspondents include William Z. Foster, fellow Smith Act defendants Eugene Dennis and Claudia Jones, Harvard Law School Dean Erwin N. Griswold, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, William Patterson, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., author Walter Lowenfels, Herbert Aptheker, Cyril Briggs, Eslanda Robeson, Communist Party members Sid Resnick and Esther Jackson, and several supporters and friends.
- Names
- Davis, Benjamin J. (Benjamin Jefferson), 1903-1964 (Creator)
- Aptheker, Herbert, 1915-2003 (Correspondent)
- Briggs, Cyril V. (Cyril Valentine), 1888-1966 (Correspondent)
- Dennis, Eugene, 1905-1961 (Correspondent)
- Foster, William Z., 1881-1961 (Correspondent)
- Griswold, Erwin N. (Erwin Nathaniel), 1904-1994 (Correspondent)
- Jackson, Esther Cooper (Correspondent)
- Jones, Claudia, 1915-1964 (Correspondent)
- King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968 (Correspondent)
- Lowenfels, Walter, 1897-1976 (Correspondent)
- Patterson, William L. (William Lorenzo), 1890-1980 (Correspondent)
- Resnick, Sidney I. (Correspondent)
- Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 1896-1965 (Correspondent)
- Robeson, Paul, 1898-1976 (Correspondent)
- Wilkins, Roy, 1901-1981 (Correspondent)
- Benjamin Davis Defense Committee (Contributor)
- United States (Author)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 1949 - 1964
- Library locations
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
- Shelf locator: Sc MG 304
- Topics
- African American communists
- African American communists -- Biography
- African American lawyers
- African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc
- African Americans -- Politics and government
- African Americans -- Segregation
- City council members -- New York (State) -- New York
- Civil rights and socialism
- Communism -- United States
- Communism -- United States -- History -- Sources
- Communist parties -- United States
- Communist trials
- Communists -- United States -- Biography
- Conspiracies -- United States
- Local elections -- New York (State) -- New York
- Municipal government -- New York (State) -- New York
- Police -- Complaints against
- Political crimes and offenses -- United States
- Political prisoners -- United States
- Prisoners' writings, American
- Prisons -- United States
- Race discrimination -- United States
- Radicals -- United States
- Trials (Political crimes and offenses) -- United States
- New York (N.Y.) -- Politics and government -- 1898-1951
- United States -- Politics and government -- 1945-1953
- United States -- Politics and government -- 1953-1961
- United States. Alien Registration Act, 1940
- Communist Party of the United States of America
- Communist Party of the United States of America. Harlem Section
- Communist Party of the United States of America. National Committee
- New York (N.Y.). City Council
- Genres
- Autobiographies
- Correspondence
- Documents
- Ephemera
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: Born in Dawson, Ga. in 1903, Benjamin Jefferson Davis, Jr. was a civil rights lawyer, a former New York City councilman, an author and editor, a Marxist theoretician and a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. His father was a National Republican Committeeman and a prominent newspaper publisher in the South. Davis graduated from Amherst College in 1929 and the Harvard Law School in 1932. He joined the Communist Party in 1933 during his court defense of Angelo Herndon, a young African American Communist organizer who faced the death penalty in Georgia for leading a protest march of white and black unemployed workers.
Davis moved to New York in 1935, and became the editor of The Negro Liberatoras well as a regular contributor to various Communist Party publications. He later served as the editor and publisher of the Daily Workerand its successor, the weekly The Worker,and as a member of the editorial board of Political Affairs,the theoretical journal of the Communist Party. He is also the author of an extensive autobiography and of several pamphlets on Communism and blacks.
Elected to the New York City Council as a Harlem representative in 1943, Davis was one of two Communist Party candidates to have ever been elected to office in the United States. He was reelected in 1945 but was defeated in 1949 by a coalition candidate of the Democratic, Republican and Liberal parties. He was expelled from his seat in the City Council, however, before the end of his second term, after his indictment and arrest under the Smith Act for alleged subversive activities. As an elected official, Davis organized several mass campaigns against police brutality and against segregation in education, housing and sports.
In 1949, Davis was one of eleven communist leaders convicted of conspiring to overthrow the United States government. He went to jail in 1951 and spent three years and four months at the Federal Prison at Terre-Haute, Indiana. He continued to fight against racial discrimination during his incarceration, and filed two suits in the U.S. District Court to stop the segregation of African American inmates in federal penitentiaries. At the end of his sentence, he served an additional two months at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pa. for having refused, in 1953, to reveal the names of people belonging to the Communist Party's Commission on Negro Work. Two weeks after his release, Davis married Nina Stamler, his fiancee before he went to jail and the daughter of a Bronx dentist. A daughter, Emily, was born of this union. At the time of his death, Davis was again under indictment, under the McCarran Act, for his refusal to register as an agent of the Soviet Union.
Davis was a prominent Communist Party leader and an internationally known theoretician on the status and struggles of blacks in the United Status. He led the Party's New York State district and was the chairman of its Commission on Negro Work.
Elected to the National Committee in 1959, he also served as the Party's National Secretary. Following Stalin's death in 1953, he sided with William Z. Foster, then National Chairman of the Communist Party, in defeating a revisionist tendency within the party, on the so-called “American road to socialism.” Benjamin Davis was a well-known and honored figure in the Harlem community at the time of his death.
- Content: Divided into four series, CORRESPONDENCE, the SMITH ACT TRIAL, WRITINGS, and PRINTED MATTER, the Benjamin Davis Papers document Davis's life and political career from 1949 to the time of his death. Some personal items are filed at the beginning of the collection.
- Content: Photographs transferred to the Photographs and Prints Division
- Acquisition: Gift of Nina D. Goodman, 1989.
- Content: Processing information: Processed by Andre Elizee; Machine-readable finding aid created by Apex Data Services; revised by Terry Catapano.
- Content: Donor/sponsor: Schomburg NEH Automated Access to Special Collections Project
- Biographical/historical: Alternative title for "United States. Alien Registration Act, 1940" is "Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940)"
- Type of Resource
- Text
- Identifiers
- Other local Identifier: Sc Micro R-6129
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b11613585
- MSS Unit ID: 20651
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): dbc093c0-3e71-013a-7ae1-0242ac110003
