John Preston Davis, FIRE!!'s business manager, contributed short stories to OPPORTUNITY while he was an undergraduate at Bates college. After graduation from Harvard Law School, he entered politics and stumped for La Guardia's Fusion Party in 1933. From 1936 to 1940, as Executive Secretary of the National Negro Congress, an association of more than forty civil rights organizations, he was a leading critic of the New Deal from the perspective of the radical left. Later he became publicity director at Fisk and was editor and publisher of OUR WORLD, a competitor of EBONY in the early fifties. In 1966 he edited THE AMERICAN NEGRO REFERENCE BOOK for the Phelps-Stokes Fund.
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John Preston Davis, the Forgotten Civil Rights Leader